Blogs
Active Resource Spy
Posted by: David Bock on 02/09/2012
I'm doing a lot of work lately using ActiveResource. I wanted to get 'down to the wire' and see the traffic flowing over http... so a quick google search, and I found an entry I had written in 2008. I love it when that happens! So I'm reblogging it with a slight change to make it work in Ruby 1.9. If you're using rails, create an initializer name active_resource_spy.rb and drop in this content: class ActiveResource::Connection # Creates new...more »
Webinar for Geographically Distributed Agile Teams on Feb 15, Noon Eastern
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/07/2012
Please join Shane Hastie and me for a webinar about our Geographically Distributed Teams workshop on Feb 15, at noon Eastern. Want to make your geographically distributed agile projects more effective? Join Johanna Rothman and Shane Hastie for this webinar where they will discuss their workshop, Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams. We’ll address a few of the common problems of geographically distributed agile teams, and then open it up for your...more »
Geographically Distributed Agile Teams Have Choices for Their Lifecycles
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/06/2012
I hope that by now you see that you have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are geographically distributed team and you are transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager, for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project, which leads to more risk. Scrum is often not the best approach to geographically distributed agile. That does not mean the distributed team should not go agile. It...more »
Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 3
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/03/2012
Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations, so they used timeboxes. Senior management had made the decision to fire all the local testers and buy cheaper tester time over the...more »
Why an Agile Project Manager is Not a Scrum Master
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 02/01/2012
A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning itself. In Scrum, the team is supposed to generate all of the planning itself. The checkin is different from the Scrum standup and the objectives of the checkin are...more »
LinkedIn Etiquette
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 01/27/2012
I've used LinkedIn for many years now, long before I joined Facebook ... I liked the concept of never losing contact information with business contacts and technologist. It just seemed like a good idea (though I do sometimes wonder if LinkedIn has any particular purpose). I tend to only connect with people I've met in person, or at least talked to on the phone. One thing that drives me crazy about LinkedIn is that you aren't forced to customize the message. As far as I'm concerned, the default...more »
Tapestry Advantages
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 01/26/2012
A summary of a discussion about the advantages of Tapestry over Struts: Exceptional exception reporting Significantly less code Live class reloading Sensible defaults, especially for SEO-friendly URLs Great community Flexibility and customizability Interestingly, the quality of Tapestry's documentation was mentioned ... favorably! Between the revised home page, and Tapestry JumpStart (and Igor's coming book), I think we're headed in the right direction in terms of documentation going from a...more »
Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 2
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/25/2012
Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were too large. Normally I suggest smaller iterations, but one of the developers suggested they move to kanban. The New York developers had a problem...more »
Tapestry 5.4: Focus on JavaScript
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 01/25/2012
Tapestry 5.3.1 is out in the wild ... and if Tapestry is to stay relevant, Tapestry 5.4 is going to need to be something quite (r)evolutionary. There was some confusion on the Tapestry developer mailing list in advance of this blog post; I'd alluded that it was coming, and some objected to such pronouncements coming out fully formed, without discussion. In reality, this is just a distillation of ideas, a starting point, and not a complete, finalized...more »
Tapestry 5.4: Focus on JavaScript
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 01/24/2012
Tapestry 5.3.1 is out in the wild ... and if Tapestry is to stay relevant, Tapestry 5.4 is going to need to be something quite (r)evolutionary. There was some confusion on the Tapestry developer mailing list in advance of this blog post; I'd alluded that it was coming, and some objected to such pronouncements coming out fully formed, without discussion. In reality, this is just a distillation of ideas, a starting point, and not a complete, finalized...more »
Review: Gradle Class with Luke Daley
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 01/24/2012
Last week, Luke Daly arrived in Portland to teach a three day Gradle class; the folks at Gradleware were nice enough let me audit the class (so it only cost me a couple of thousand dollars of lost billing revenue to attend). My goals for the class was to gain a deeper understanding of how Gradle works, so that I could write more efficient builds, diagnose problems, and write my own plugins. The class scored very high on all of those counts! Much of the first day was spent on basics, including...more »
Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/24/2012
I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile. Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all excited. This is good. Then reality hits. Scrum is meant for collocated geographically cross-functional teams. Uh oh. Almost all of these teams are separated by function: the...more »
Drum Roll: Public Workshop April 17-18, 2012
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/20/2012
I’m so pleased to announce that Shane Hastie and I are leading a workshop on Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams, April 17-18, 2012 in Pleasanton, CA. Yes, that is Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Agilistry Studio. Shane and I first delivered this workshop last year in Australia, when I was there for Software Education‘s SDC. We had a great time, and so did many of the participants. We have since evolved the workshop, to address the needs of the...more »
Pragmatic Manager and InfoQ Video Posted
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/19/2012
I have posted last week’s Pragmatic Manager, Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More?. At Agile 2011, I had a great video conversation with Shane Hastie about agile project portfolio management. The chair is big, I’m not so short. The chair is big, I’m not so short. How many times do you think I have to say that to make it true? The chair is big, I’m not so short. That ought to do it. more »
Hackergarten in PDX - Friday January 20th
Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 01/13/2012
Merlyn Albery-Speyer is organizing a Hackergarten while Luke Daley (creator of Geb, and Gradle committer) is in town to run an in-depth Gradle training. I'll be there, working on Tapestry, or Gradle, or a video game, or something. Please see Meryln's blog to RSVP. I look forward to meeting and coding with more PDX peeps! more »
Elvis carried away by spaceships
Posted by: Kenneth Kousen on 01/13/2012
I love teaching Groovy to existing Java developers, because they have such a hard time holding back Tears Of Joy when they see how much easier life can be. Today, though, I did a quick demo that resulted in a line of Groovy that was so amusing I had to post it here. Consider a trivial POGO (Plain Old Groovy Object) called Course: class Course String name int days String toString() { "($name,$days)" } } The goal was to take a collection of courses and sort it by the number...more »
Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games Posted
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/11/2012
My new Gantthead column is up, Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games? If you liked the schedule games from the more traditional projects, you’ll love the agile schedule games. Please comment over there. more »
Pragmatic Manager Posted: Are Your Shoulds Driving Your Decisions
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/10/2012
I posted my most recent Pragmatic Manager: Are Your “Shoulds” Driving Your Decisions? Yes, in case you couldn’t tell, I am doing a series on project portfolio management, so that you do take a look at my Peer Project Portfolio Coaching. Several people took advantage of the early bird pricing. We’re in the not-quite-early-bird pricing now. And, if you sign up with a buddy, you can still get early bird pricing for the two of you. It’s a steal. If you are struggling...more »
Management Myth, Myth of 100% Utilitization Posted
Posted by: Johanna Rothman on 01/03/2012
I have an article posted at Techwell, Management Myth #1: The Myth of 100% Utilization. This myth has always been a problem. It’s even more of a problem now as more organizations transition to agile. People need time to think. They need time to adapt to their current circumstances. They need time to create their teams. Some of the time, people are thinking about this iteration’s stories. Some of the time, people are thinking about the product roadmap. Some of the time, people are...more »
Groovy StubFor magic
Posted by: Kenneth Kousen on 01/02/2012
I finished revising the testing chapter in Making Java Groovy (the MEAP should be updated this week), but before I leave it entirely, I want to mention a Groovy capability that is both cool and easy to use. Cool isn’t the right word, actually. I have to say that even after years of working with Groovy, what I’m about to describe still feels like magic. Here’s the issue: I have a class that uses one of Google’s web services, and I want to test my class even when I’m...more »
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NFJS, the Magazine
BDD and REST
by Brian SlettenMocks and Stubs in Groovy Tests
by Kenneth KousenAlgorithms for Better Text Search Results
by John GriffinKnowns and Unknowns of Scrum and Agile
by Brian Tarbox