Monthly Archives: January 2012
Staying Focused at Stand-up
Having learned what Scrum and XP could do; I convinced the next organization I joined to try Scrum, with me as the ScrumMaster. The company built a reservation booking and payment engine called vianet.travel. Small proprietors with manual bookkeeping used it to advertise and rent out their places to people on holiday. Stand-ups Take Too Long Splitting my time as a developer and ScrumMaster, I was as likely to join in the conversation during stand-up. Stand-ups took too long, where we did more talking than we should. Sometimes it took us over an hour for everyone to answer the three … Continue reading
Creating the Motivation to Pair Program
My first immersion in to Scrum occurred at StorePerform. We produced workflow solutions for big box retail stores. The company retained an external coach on contract and we attended training, which eased and accelerated the transition. Throughout the time we practiced unit testing and had a continuous integration server running. Keeping the Build Running Code coverage for us ran at about 30-35% and we had a company policy to keep it over 80%. We used a code review system to ensure, among other things, that unit tests were created. The team agreed that fixing a broken build was highest priority. … Continue reading
Ten Tales of Positive Change – Introduction
Reading that AgileScout is looking for case studies and not just the theory of Agile, I thought I might start posting these stories from my career. These come from an IEEE paper that was first published for Agile2011. The paper is too long for one blog post. Leaving the tales as close to the original as I can, I am posting each one as a separate article. Ten Tales of Positive Change Is it possible to make a difference? Or at least enjoy the interactions more? These tales relate successful attempts at making improvements. They are my experiences working in software … Continue reading
Eliga’s Death Star Café Wins Progress Award
FOR IMMEDIATE HOLONET DISTRIBUTION ELIGA’S DEATH STAR CAFÉ WINS PROGRESS AWARD Replacing the Officers’ Mess, Organic Café Wins Cultural Award from the Coalition for Progress In the Officers’ Mess, fights were becoming commonplace. Many officers complained of the poor food quality, slow service from the slaves, and lack of credits for change. Rumors flew that the Mess had an atmosphere rivaling that of Chalmun’s Spaceport Cantina on Tatooine and Eliga Erutluc knew it wouldn’t be long before someone was killed. He quit his job as a hypermatter core specialist to serve organic meals from a pop-up kiosk outside the Mess Hall. Eliga felt that serving higher-quality meals … Continue reading