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• Acceptance tests done first...how can this be accomplished?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such as "Sprints" in the Scrum process. A common part of Agile is also TDD, which states that tests are done first. My team works on a GUI program that does a lot of specific drawing and such. In order to provide tests, the testing team needs to be able to work with something that at least attempts to perform the things they are trying to test. We've found no way around this problem. I can very much see where they are coming from because if I was trying to write software that targeted some basically mysterious interface I'd have a very hard time. Although we have behavior fairly well specified, the exact process of interacting with various UI elements when it comes to automation seems to be too unique to a feature to allow testers to write automated scripts to drive something that does not exist. Even if we could, a lot of things end up turning up later as having been missing from the specification. One thing we considered doing was having the testers write test "scripts" that are more like a set of steps that must be performed, as described from a use-case perspective, so that they can be "automated" by a human being. This can then be performed by the developer(s) writing the feature and/or verified by someone else. When the testers later get an opportunity they automate the "script" for regression purposes mainly. This didn't end up catching on in the team though. The testing part of the team is actually falling behind us by quite a margin. This is one reason why the apparently extra time of developing a "script" for a human being to perform just did not happen....they're under a crunch to keep up with us developers. If we waited for them, we'd get nothing done. It's not their fault really, they're a bottle neck but they're doing what they should be and working as fast as possible. The process itself seems to be set up against them. Very often we end up having to go back a month or more in what we've done to fix bugs that the testers have finally gotten to checking. It's an ugly truth that I'd like to do something about. So what do other teams do to solve this fail cascade? How can we get testers ahead of us and how can we make it so that there's actually time for them to write tests for the features we do in a sprint without making us sit and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime? As it's currently going, in order to get a feature "done", using agile definitions, would be to have developers work for 1 week, then testers work the second week, and developers hopefully being able to fix all the bugs they come up with in the last couple days. That's just not going to happen, even if I agreed it was a reasonable solution. I need better ideas...

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• Using Scrum on small projects where Owner doesn't want to be involved

  - by Andrej Mohar

  Recently I've been reading and learning quite a lot about scrum and I like it a lot. However, I do have a couple of likely scenarios in my head to which I don't know the solution. So let's say that I might want to organize an agile team of (for instance) four web developers (one of them UI/UX designer). This team would operate on scrum principles. Initially we would probably be working on projects like landing pages for ordinary people's small businesses, like renting apartments, selling cookies... Such customers simply can't be set with Product Owner role (IMHO), because they usually expect to hire a company, give them the overall project goal with some details, and then expect the job to be done (including a lot of decision making) with as little of their involvement as possible (in their opinion, they have more important things to do). Let's say I'd like to engage myself in a developer/scrum master role (I know that even that is debatable, being a team member and scrum master at once), so I simply shouldn't take the role of the product owner as well. So as for my questions: If I'm my company's business owner, do I simply need to be a product owner as well (do these roles include each other)? Can I employ a sales person which might have the product owner role? Would it be better if it is an experienced developer instead of a sales person? Is this even a smart move? Lastly, is there another agile approach that might better suit my position? EDIT: Thank you everyone for good inputs. I added some comments, any aditional info will be greatly appreciated.

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• Dealing with selfish team member(s)

  - by thegreendroid

  My team is facing a difficult quandary, a couple of team members are essentially selfish (not to be confused with dominant!) and are cherry-picking stories/tasks that will give them the most recognition within the company (at sprint reviews etc. when all the stakeholders are present). These team members are very good at what they do and are fully aware of what they are doing. When we first started using agile about a year ago, I can say I was quite selfish too (coming from a very individual-focused past). I took ownership of certain stories and didn't involve anyone else in it, which in hindsight wasn't the right thing to do and I learnt from that experience almost immediately. We are a young team of very ambitious twenty somethings so I can understand the selfishness to some extent (after all everyone should be ambitious!). But the level to which this selfishness has reached of late has started to bother me and a few others within my team. The way I see it, agile/scrum is all about the team and not individuals. We should be looking out for each other and helping each other improve. I made this quite clear during our last retrospective, that we should be fair and give everyone a chance. I'll wait and see what comes out of it in the next few sprints. In the meantime, what are some of the troubles that you have faced with selfish members and how did you overcome them?

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• SQL Rally Pre-Con: Data Warehouse Modeling – Making the Right Choices

  - by Davide Mauri

  As you may have already learned from my old post or Adam’s or Kalen’s posts, there will be two SQL Rally in North Europe. In the Stockholm SQL Rally, with my friend Thomas Kejser, I’ll be delivering a pre-con on Data Warehouse Modeling: Data warehouses play a central role in any BI solution. It's the back end upon which everything in years to come will be created. For this reason, it must be rock solid and yet flexible at the same time. To develop such a data warehouse, you must have a clear idea of its architecture, a thorough understanding of the concepts of Measures and Dimensions, and a proven engineered way to build it so that quality and stability can go hand-in-hand with cost reduction and scalability. In this workshop, Thomas Kejser and Davide Mauri will share all the information they learned since they started working with data warehouses, giving you the guidance and tips you need to start your BI project in the best way possible?avoiding errors, making implementation effective and efficient, paving the way for a winning Agile approach, and helping you define how your team should work so that your BI solution will stand the test of time. You'll learn: Data warehouse architecture and justification Agile methodology Dimensional modeling, including Kimball vs. Inmon, SCD1/SCD2/SCD3, Junk and Degenerate Dimensions, and Huge Dimensions Best practices, naming conventions, and lessons learned Loading the data warehouse, including loading Dimensions, loading Facts (Full Load, Incremental Load, Partitioned Load) Data warehouses and Big Data (Hadoop) Unit testing Tracking historical changes and managing large sizes With all the Self-Service BI hype, Data Warehouse is become more and more central every day, since if everyone will be able to analyze data using self-service tools, it’s better for him/her to rely on correct, uniform and coherent data. Already 50 people registered from the workshop and seats are limited so don’t miss this unique opportunity to attend to this workshop that is really a unique combination of years and years of experience! http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2013/nordic/Agenda/PreconferenceSeminars.aspx See you there!

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• What are the common mistakes in 'tailored Scrum approaches'?

  - by Clark Gable

  I have seen this before. Management wants to be agile and be scrummified, but does not want to step out of the status quo. My latest observation is no different; here, the Scrum is 'tailored' to the organization; specifically into a weird many-people-process. The diagram showing the different participants. I am putting together a document listing why this will not work. Here are the obvious ones: 1. There are product owner agents (an obvious WTF), who report to the product owner: causing dilution of decision making capability 2. There is a role that looks similar to a manager in the traditional approach - development manager: an obvious attempt at command-and-control model 3. The ScrumMaster's role includes collecting timesheets, which are used to track progress instead of burndown charts: detrimental to agile's efforts to build teams with motivated individuals Leaving the question "how would you convince the management?", my question is more at, "what else do you see as failures in this/similar 'tailored Scrum approaches'? EDIT: The diagram might use a few more details 1. The development manager is not part of the development team, with not very clearly defined responsibilities, except: developer performance assessemnt, recruitment, etc., 2. There are more than two teams (with ScrumMaster+development manager+dev team) with the same product owner for all teams!

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• At what point would you drop some of your principles of software development for the sake of more money?

  - by MeshMan

  I'd like to throw this question out there to interestingly see where the medium is. I'm going to admit that in my last 12 months, I picked up TDD and a lot of the Agile values in software development. I was so overwhelmed with how much better my development of software became that I would never drop them out of principle. Until...I was offered a contracting role that doubled my take home pay for the year. The company I joined didn't follow any specific methodology, the team hadn't heard of anything like code smells, SOLID, etc., and I certainly wasn't going to get away with spending time doing TDD if the team had never even seen unit testing in practice. Am I a sell out? No, not completely... Code will always been written "cleanly" (as per Uncle Bob's teachings) and the principles of SOLID will always be applied to the code that I write as they are needed. Testing was dropped for me though, the company couldn't afford to have such a unknown handed to the team who quite frankly, even I did create test frameworks, they would never use/maintain the test framework correctly. Using that as an example, what point would you say a developer should never drop his craftsmanship principles for the sake of money/other benefits to them personally? I understand that this can be a very personal opinion on how concerned one is to their own needs, business needs, and the sake of craftsmanship etc. But one can consider that for example testing can be dropped if the company decided they would rather have a test team, than rather understand unit testing in programming, would that be something you could forgive yourself for like I did? So given that there is something you would drop, there usually should be an equal cost in the business that makes up for what you drop - hopefully, unless of course you are pretty much out for lining your own pockets and not community/social collaborating ;). Double your money, go back to RAD? Or walk on, and look for someone doing Agile, and never look back...

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• Most effective way to do daily standup meeting when a few people are remote

  - by Burhan Ali

  I am a software developer in a small team of seven. We are not an Agile (with a big 'A') team but are experimenting with some aspects of agile. One of these is the daily "standup" meeting. The difficulty here is that for two days of the week we have at least one person working from home so the full team isn't available in the same room. What is the best way to carry out a daily standup in this situation? Some facts that may be relevant: We all work in a single open plan room. We use Skype in our company. We don't have any video conferencing capability. We all work the same hours so there are no timezone complexities involved. The development manager is one of the people who works from home one day a week. Things we have tried: Conference call using Skype: This is tricky for those in the office because you can hear people speak in the room and then a split second later through the headset. This can e very distracting. Conference phone: Awful experience. Hard to get them to work and poor quality audio. Text-based updates using Skype. This is not as engaging and is no different than just firing off a status email in the morning. I have seen other questions about remote collaboration but they are mainly about completely remote teams and/or teams that span multiple time zones. We are not affected by either of these problems. What can we do to make our standup meetings better in these circumstances?

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Learning PostgreSql: First Steps

  - by Alexander Kuznetsov

  In this series of blog posts we shall migrate some functionality from SQL Server to PostgreSql 9.2. The emphasis of these blog posts will be on what PostgreSql does differently from Sql Server - I assume that the reader has considerable knowledge of Sql Server, but might know nothing of PostgreSql. Also we shall concentrate on development, not administration. In a true agile fashion, we shall learn only what we need to get this particular job done, and nothing else, but we shall strive to learn it...(read more)

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• AgileDotNet in Dallas

  - by PeterBrunone

  This conference was a big hit last time, and now it's better then ever.  If you're wondering about how Agile applies to your daily business, or if you just want to see how it looks when it's done right, you owe it to yourself to check out AgileDotNet on April 30th.

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• Link between tests and user stories

  - by Sardathrion

  I have not see these links explicitly stated in the Agile literature I have read. So, I was wondering if this approach was correct: Let a story be defined as "In order to [RESULT], [ROLE] needs to [ACTION]" then RESULT generates system tests. ROLE generates acceptance tests. ACTION generates component and unit tests. Where the definitions are the ones used in xUnit Patterns which to be fair are fairly standard. Is this a correct interpretation or did I misunderstand something?

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• How do you demo software with No UI in the Sprint Review?

  - by Jeff Martin

  We are doing agile software development, basically following Scrum. We are trying to do sprint reviews but finding it difficult. Our software is doing a lot of data processing and the stories often are about changing various rules around this. What are some options for demoing the changes that occurred in the sprint when there isn't a UI or visible workflow change, but instead the change is a subtle business rule on a processing job that can take 10s of minutes or even a couple of hours?

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• What are the alternatives to fixed-price or time-and-materials contracts for software development?

  - by Fortuity

  Where can I learn more about pros/cons of various pricing models for software development? Proponents of agile methodology suggest approaches such as multi-stage contracts, target cost contracts, target schedule contracts, shared benefit contracts, variable scope contracts (http://poppendieck.com/agilecontracts.htm). I'm looking for opinions, experience, case studies or informed discussion of these approaches.

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• What's the best explanation of what Story Points are?

  - by Cixate

  We're starting to use Story Points here for our Agile development but I find it hard to explain and also can't find any definitive answer to what they are. The best thing I can do is point to other sites (like http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/tag/story-points) and give some vague generalization of what they are. I'm looking for a good explanation with some examples of use that would be helpful for others to use. Are there any good resources for explaining story points?

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• Exchange 2003: Fresh install, couple noob questions.

  - by Eli

  Hi All, Thanks for reading! I have a small network set up for a local office here, and have a fresh install of Exchange 2003 on our sole-server PDC. The network uses one domain, call it ourdomain.net, which is DNSed locally, but not DNSed for the actual domain, so ourdomain.net works from within the network, but from outside, it's just pointed to some domain parking. I have a completely different domain, call it emaildomain.com, which is currently setup for our website and email, which is hosted with a standard hosting company. We've been using a combination of Thunderbird and Outlook (with local .pst files) for email. I've been asked to setup Exchange to work with our email, but am not familiar with it. The install seems to have gone just fine. The question is: How do I get email from a domain outside our network to work with the exchange server? Do I need to move the email for that domain to point to our local server (I so hope not!), or can I just set exchange so somehow slurp mail from the existing mailboxes on our host for that domain's mail? Or are there better ideas I don't know to ask for? Any help very appreciated - thanks!

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• Noob proftpd questions

  - by Camran

  I have setup my VPS pretty much now, and want to upload some basic files to the server. How is this done in Ubuntu 9.10? I have PuTTY and use the terminal there... Is there any ftp program, like in regular managed hostings, to just upload files with? I was thinking about proftpd, but don't have a clue how to get it to work. I am using my home-laptop with windows xp to command the VPS. Thanks

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• Noob proftpd questions

  - by Camran

  I have setup my VPS pretty much now, and want to upload some basic files to the server. How is this done in Ubuntu 9.10? I have PuTTY and use the terminal there... Is there any ftp program, like in regular managed hostings, to just upload files with? I was thinking about proftpd, but don't have a clue how to get it to work. I am using my home-laptop with windows xp to command the VPS. Thanks

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• php run function on all images from one dir in recursive mode (noob)

  - by Steve

  hey guyz i have a function $result = create_watermark( 'input_file_name' ,'output_file_name'); i have dir called /images n have 500 images in it and all images are link images_(some_unknown_numbers).png (all png) now i want run them thru function in loop and want out put like /markedimage/images_1.png images_2.png images_3.png i need help how can i run them in loop and how out put name can change want run script on Ubuntu so we can use shell too if any body want check function it is here http://paste2.org/p/789149 plz provide me code because i m newbie thanks in advance

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• Managing software projects - advice needed

  - by Callum

  I work for a large government department as part of an IT team that manages and develops websites as well as stand alone web applications. We’re running in to problems somewhere in the SDLC that don’t rear their ugly head until time and budget are starting to run out. We try to be “Agile” (software specifications are not as thorough as possible, clients have direct access to the developers any time they want) and we are also in a reasonably peculiar position in that we are not allowed to make profit from the services we provide. We only service the divisions within our government department, and can only charge for the time and effort we actually put in to a project. So if we deliver a project that we have over-quoted on, we will only invoice for the actual time spent. Our software specifications are not as thorough as they could be, but they always include at a minimum: Wireframe mockups for every form view A data dictionary of all field inputs Descriptions of any business rules that affect the system Descriptions of the outputs I’m new to software management, but I’ve overseen enough software projects now to know that as soon as users start observing demos of the system, they start making a huge amount of requests like “Can we add a few more fields to this report.. can we redesign the look of this interface.. can we send an email at this part of the workflow.. can we take this button off this view.. can we make this function redirect to a different screen.. can we change some text on this screen… can we create a special account where someone can log in and get access to X… this report takes too long to run can it be optimised.. can we remove this step in the workflow… there’s got to be a better image we can put here…” etc etc etc. Some changes are tiny and can be implemented reasonably quickly.. but there could be up to 50-100 or so of such requests during the course of the SDLC. Other change requests are what clients claim they “just assumed would be part of the system” even if not explicitly spelled out in the spec. We are having a lot of difficulty managing this process. With no experienced software project managers in our team, we need to come up with a better way to both internally identify whether work being requested is “out of spec”, and be able to communicate this to a client in such a manner that they can understand why what they are asking for is “extra” work. We need a way to track this work and be transparent with it. In the spirit of Agile development where we are not spec'ing software systems in to the ground and back again before development begins, and bearing in mind that clients have access to any developer any time they want it, I am looking for some tips and pointers from experienced software project managers on how to handle this sort of "scope creep" problem, in tracking it, being transparent with it, and communicating it to clients such that they understand it. Happy to clarify anything as needed. I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to offer some advice. Thanks.

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• write c++ in latex, noob latex question

  - by voodoomsr

  maybe is a noob question but i can't find the solution in the web, i need to write C++ in Latex. I write C$++$ but the result is like crap, the signs are too big and there is too much space between C and the first plus sign. Previously i needed to write the sharp symbol for C#....c$\sharp$ it also looks like crap but with a escape character it looks nice, for the plus sign i can't do the same.

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• C# noob - find all properties of type DateTime in an class

  - by Chin

  Got to do a quick job in C# which I am a complete noob. I need to adjust the datetime of a bunch of objects. I'd like to loop through the properties of the class and if the type is dateTime adjust accordingly. Is there any kind of 'describe type' built in goodness I can use?

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• How to do smart resource planning for short Agile/Sprint cycles?

  - by Chanakya

  We use scrum technique to plan for short development lifecycle. It is very common that sometimes tasks gets moved or reallocated or deferred from the current sprint for multiple reasons. In that case there is a chance of resources getting freed up from the planned work. It may get difficult to allocate new tasks to them during sprint as mostly all projects are tied up at that point with planned work. What is the best way to plan resources in these situations?

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• Essential management tools for a small/medium software development shop

  - by mikera

  I've recently started work with an organisation that is rapidly expanding and is recruiting or growing several development teams (including two web-based products and a data warehouse/BI team). They are basically working to agile methodologies but haven't formalised a standard way of working yet. Despite the fact that it is early days, I've been surprised by the lack of tools being used to manage the development processes (e.g. no issue tracker, no tool to manage the product backlog etc.) Although it's not my primary responsibility, I'd like to help them out with some recommendations on the most important tools they should get in place. What are the 3-5 top priority tools to establish for management of a good development shop? Why are they necessary? How do they improve the software development process, and how do I justify them to my bosses?

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• Advice on SCRUM for the solitary developer [closed]

  - by ProfK

  Possible Duplicate: Agile for the Solo Developer I am looking for advice on the SCRUM process for a solitary developer. Most SCRUM resources I see focus on its use in a team environment, hence my question here. I'd like some guidance on structuring and managing my projects for SCRUM, with me as a solitary developer and business owner, but still occasionally including my clients for input and feedback. Areas I'm not clear on include resolving my backlog into 'sprintable' project areas and stories, defining user stories properly with a view to being digested by developer level users, defining feasible sprints for a single developer etc. Essentially I'm looking for advice on moving from using scrum in a team/office environment, with colleagues and project manager, and using chaos/cowboy-coding on my own, to assuming the role of PM myself and adopting scrum for work on my own. Any advice is welcome.

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• What is your favorite Software Engineering methodology?

  - by bmdhacks

  I'm hoping the SO crowd can help me expand my definitions of methodology buzzwords such as SCRUM, Agile, XP, Waterfall, etc, and give some enlightenment as to which approach is the best. If there's some specific book or web page that really captures your philosophy on constructing software with teams of programmers, please indicate it. EDIT: Please don't say, "I use a little of everything." without any more detail. If you haven't read any books or websites that have been helpful, now's your chance to enlighten the world by describing your experience-learned methodology. I would encourage the moderators to up-vote more descriptive answers. It's OK if you haven't read any books and made up your own style from experience, but please describe that style so we can learn from you. Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

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