Category: Tools and Techniques

Lessons from Sailboat Racing

Recently, I was attending a sailing seminar on racing small keelboats. As the lecturer talked about the crew requirements for winning races, I noted a lot of similarities with effective software development teams. Both situations require a small group of people to work in coordinated concert to achieve a common goal. No one on the team succeeds alone–they all reach the finish line together. There is a mix of specialized skills and general work that almost anyone can do. And there is a constant need for improvement, coupled with a desire to go fast. Read More

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Running cucumber on jruby under ant

I’ve just spent more time than I expected getting this to work. It seemed like it would be easy, since running cucumber from the command line is so easy. But ant is very helpful in sanitizing the environment for subprocesses–a little too helpful, perhaps. After chasing a number of dead ends and increasingly complicated detours, I ended up with this target: Read More

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Categories: Tools and Techniques

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Safety Exercise

In my recent posting on Separate Retrospectives, I mentioned sometimes performing a Safety Exercise at the beginning of a retrospective where the situation was unknown or seemed a bit charged with emotion. I was asked about that exercise.

I use a simple poll of how safe people feel. I got this from Norm Kerth’s book, Project Retrospectives (page 110). Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions Tools and Techniques

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Contemplating Given-When-Then

This week, Chris Matts tweeted, “Contemplating whether GIVEN-WHEN-THEN is back to front. The system should do <outcome> WHEN <event> PROVIDED <stimulus context>… Hmmm.” Let’s try an example. “Given I have $500 in my account, when I withdraw $50 then I have $450 in my account” becomes “The system should show $450 in my account when I withdraw $50 provided I had $500 in my account before.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Putting the result first makes the sentence both more complex and more passive. Yet I can understand the impulse that triggered this tweet. Read More

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Categories: Tools and Techniques

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Agile Planning Tools

One of the most exhilarating moments in my coaching career was when I entered the client team room one Monday morning to find they were pulling the cards and tape off of their backlog corkboard, and arranging it in a different fashion. I knew then that they had taken charge of their own process. That team became one of the best I’ve coached.

One of the low points was when several people, including a business analyst, product owner proxy, and the program manager, individually said that they couldn’t alter the “user stories” to cut across multiple components of the system because they were already in the computerized planning tool (and Word documents) and it would be too much work. That team did not appear to be getting much value from their “Agile approach” and had significant integration risk that was being studiously ignored.

One of the most frequently asked questions on public mailing lists and forums devoted to Agile development is “What Agile Planning Tool should we use?” There is always a chorus of answers touting this or that computerized tool, usually without asking any questions about the context. Is there one best tool? Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions Tools and Techniques

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I feel better, now

Oops! The whole problem started when I wanted to install a new program on the “entertainment computer” that’s connected to the TV. The existing version of Ubuntu was no longer supported, so I started what I thought would be a simple upgrade. Oops, it deleted the entire /var directory, including the contents of the second drive mounted there. That drive contained all of our photos and music. Not a problem, I thought. It’s all backed up nightly onto a USB drive. It’s just a bit of bother to copy all of that over the USB interface.

Oops! There are no photos beyond last March. I felt sick to my stomach. That’s a lot of family memories to evaporated. Whew! The program we’ve been using to download the cameras also makes a backup copy local to the machine used to download. I’ve got all the pictures back on the photo server, and now just have to sort them into directories again.

But first, I need to fix the backup script. Why didn’t it warn me when it started to fail? Read More

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Categories: Tools and Techniques Working Software

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The Code of Christmas Past

When we write code, we’re often thinking about the short term. We need this code to function correctly so we can deliver within our immediate deadlines. I’ve found it important to also think of the long term. Sooner or later, we might encounter our own code, again.

I spent a chunk of my career where I often worked solo on projects that might get enhanced every year or two. This taught me a lot about the importance of code readability and what sort of things helped me quickly understand and avoid overlooking important considerations. I’ve also worked on a lot of legacy code bases, so I’m well aware of the pain and problems created by code that’s not readable, or is not organized in a helpful manner. Read More

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A Virtue of Imprecise Measurements

I’ve talked about The Importance of Precise Estimates. In that post, I said,

My advice is to

  • measure your progress
  • watch the trends
  • project the trends tentatively into the future

and relax.  It’ll work out the best it can.  False precision won’t make it any better.

Now I just read The Virtues of the Imprecisely Measured Self by Alex Knapp at Forbes. He tells the tale of a study in the journal Psychological Science April 2011 that indicates that precision, whether false or not, inhibits success.  Alex summarizes,

Precision can actually be the enemy of performance goals. To be sure, feedback is definitely a positive thing. But it appears that if you want to keep yourself motivated, it’s best to get a more generalized, imprecise feedback that lets you know you’re heading in the right direction, rather than the precise coordinates of where you are on the path.

It’s something to think about.

 

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