| |
"Do or do not,
there is no try."
-Yoda |
|
|
|
Intrinsic Motivation – Drive
Posted:Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:59:03 -1000
I talk quite a bit about the concept of intrinsic motivation in my presentations and workshops. Intrinsic motivation describes our satisfaction in doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Think of playing an instrument, solving a puzzle or painting a picture. The activity is a reward in itself. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” is great book that discusses this concept. If you haven’t read it yet, checkout the video below. (Hat tip Aaron Bjork) ...
Read more...
Simple Scrum Diagram
Posted:Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:11:14 -1000
Over the last few years I have found myself drawing the same Scrum diagram on the whiteboard over and over again. A simple, no-frills, diagram that shows the basic ideas of Scrum. This is that diagram. ...
Read more...
Software Safety Myths
Posted:Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:56:58 -1000
In some research I’m doing for a new course, I ran into Nancy Leveson’s list of myths regarding software safety. She presented this list in her 1995 book Safeware: System Safety and Computers. The list of myths are as follows: The cost of computers is lower than that of analog or electromechanical devices. Software is easy to change. Computers provide greater reliability than the devices they replace. Increasing software reliability will increase safety. Testing software and formal verification of software can remove all the errors. Reusing software increases safety. Computer reduce risk over mechanical systems. We will do well to remember this list as we design comple...
Read more...
Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio
Posted:Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:56:23 -1000
I just finished reading Sam Guckenheimer and Neno Loje’s new book “Agile Software Engineering with Visual Studio.” Great job guys! Some observations: They appear to provide a fairly clear picture of Sc...
Read more...
New TFS 2010 Power Tools Released
Posted:Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:25:00 -1000
See Brian Harry’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/08/08/aug-11-tfs-power-tools-coming-soon.aspx and Ed Blankenship’s blog: http://www.edsquared.com/2011/08/19/August+2011+New+TFS+2010+Power+Tools+Released.aspx...
Read more...
Professional Team Foundation Server 2010
Posted:Fri, 27 May 2011 09:30:00 -1000
I just received by new Wrox book “Professional Team Foundation Server 2010” by Ed Blankenship, Martin Woodward, Grant Holliday and Brian Keller. After paging through the book I think it is a great primer for people getting started with TFS 2010. They cover everything from deployment planning to lab management. Great job guys! ...
Read more...
Branching and Merging–Proceed with Caution!
Posted:Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:59:00 -1000
Over the last few years I have worked with teams that feel a need to using Branching as part of their “best practices” tool set. The ALM Rangers were even nice enough to show teams how to build a mature branching scenario in their Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010. PROCEED WITH CAUTION! There is a large overhead in using branching and merging. The branching part is easy, it’s the merging part that will kill you. Done infrequently, the merge process can be a huge undertaking in many cases taking days to complete. Here is a quote from the original VS 2005 Branching and Merging Primer: A branching and merging strategy involves a tradeoff between risk and productivity. You trade the safety of working in isolat...
Read more...
Pex and Moles - Isolation and White box Unit Testing for .NET
Posted:Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:21:00 -1000
Microsoft Research has a great tool for automatic unit test generation (Pex) and delegate method replacement (Moles). These tools can be a great way to get unit testing up and running on your brownfield project. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/...
Read more...
Unshippable bugs?
Posted:Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:15:00 -1000
In a recent discussion with a team, the topic of “unshippable bugs” was brought up. The team explained to me that there are cases when there are bugs found during a Sprint that cause the software to become unshippable. Their fix was to extend the Sprint and fix the bugs. For many of us this probably does not seem all that crazy of an idea. In general, there is a big problem with this idea if you are using Scrum to build software. Let me explain. In Scrum we are always shooting to complete PBIs in the order of importance. We don’t want to “divide and conquer” all of the PBIs in a Sprint but rather work on one at a time, in order of importance. (as much as possible) There are numerous reasons for this including the fact that we want to always deliver some “done” value at the end of the Sprint. If we split up the work we run the risk of not delivering any of them and thus creating no value. Additionally, if we want to deliver ...
Read more...
Agile Bugs & Risk
Posted:Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:46:00 -1000
I think we are all well aware that bugs cost more money to fix the longer they live. What are the reasons for this? As some of you have heard me discuss in various presentations, a lot of it has to do with context. As developers move on to new areas of code, they loose context for previous areas that may contain bugs. Specifically, they loose the fine details on how that area of the code works, thus preventing a quick fix of the bug. I’ve done some analysis of some of the teams I’ve worked with and have found the time to fix a bug varies with time as shown in Figure 1. ...
Read more...
|
|
|
|
|