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  • Google I/O 2010 - Fireside chat with the Android team

    Google I/O 2010 - Fireside chat with the Android team Google I/O 2010 - Fireside chat with the Android team Fireside Chats The Android team with Chris DiBona moderating Pull up a chair and join the Android team at Google for a fireside chat. It's your opportunity to ask us about the platform and to tell us where you'd like to see it go in the future. For all I/O 2010 sessions, please go to code.google.com From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 303 1 ratings Time: 01:01:39 More in Science & Technology

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  • Scrum and Team Consolidation

    - by John K. Hines
    I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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  • How to recreate missing Team Foundation Server database?

    - by Amadiere
    I've been trying out TFS 2010 Beta 2 on my local machine, or at least, had installed ready to do so. I had some issues with my MSSQL2008 server so I completely uninstalled and re-installed it and that sorted it. However, I'm now in limbo with TFS. I have the software installed, but it has none of the SQL databases installed that go with it. I had no data and am not precious about how to go about it. I figure completely uninstalling and re-installing might be an idea and will most likely fix it (repair didn't work). Is there a quicker way? Is there a command line utility that I can run, or a SQL script to recreate it all?

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  • How to build a team of people not working together?

    - by Bernd
    I am in charge of a group of about 30 software development experts and architects. While these people are co-located in the companies organization chart, they do not really feel as a team. This is due to their work enviroment: 1) The people are spread over eight locations, with a max. distance of about 1000km (this is Europe). 2) The people don't work as team but instead get called as single people (and sometimes small groups into projects for as long as the projects run. 3) Travelling is somewhat limited as this requires business reasons. Lot is done via phone. Do you have ideas or suggestions on how I could make these people feeling part of a joint organization where they support others and get supported by others. So that they get to know their peers, build a network, informally exchange information? So that they generally get the feeling of having common ground and derive motivation and job satisfaction?

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  • A colourblind member of our team...

    - by dbramhall
    We rely a lot on colour within our code within our team to outline features that need working on and what needs attention, we we think can be improved (we mainly colour the line of the code) for the application we're developing, however we have a close friend that is colourblind and he wants to join our team despite our heavily reliance on colour. Do you have any other recommendations as to how a team can highlight what needs work on without the use of colour - our team is about 25 people that are all accustom to the line colouring system and we have found it be most efficient.

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  • Does your team develop their supporting tools or this should be outsourced out of it?

    - by Pierre 303
    By supporting tools, I mean: reference data manager, like virus definition for anti-virus software test data generator level builders for games simulators or advanced mocking systems Does the team building the core product (in the case above, the game or the anti-virus) should be part of the development of the supporting tools significantly, or this is a task you would outsourced out of the team to help it focus on the product? I don't have enough experience to evaluate the pros & cons of each, so I'm hopping you would come up with personal experiences to share, or even studies or papers you read on the subject.

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  • How large administrators team should be? [closed]

    - by Artyom
    I'm trying to find an answer about how many server administrators/technicians are required to run a server farm with 7/24 availability of let's 10, 100, 1000 Linux servers? Are there any studies for this? Edit I was not expected this question to be closed. There are lots of studies about for example software development where from "lines of code" you can approximate the software development cost (COCOMO), so I was searching for something similar in administration. Note, I'm 100% understand that it is not a straightforward or easy to answer question, but it is a real question...

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  • How (and where) to organize a team to make a website?

    - by yes123
    Please take this question seriously. I have some moneys and ideas and I would like to hire developers/graphics to write down my ideas into a website. I could do it all myself, I have the right knowledge but I don't have time. Now the problem is: If i hire some good developers and tell him my ideas who assures me he will not steal my idea and build the website on his own? (take the social network film) The best thing to do would be to create a team with firends and make it, But sincerly in my city and in my country my friends maximum are able to do is start pc - open facebook.com What would be your moves? Other than the "steal part" I would like to know tips for the team-management too

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  • Uninstalling demo/trial of Visual Studio 2008 Team System

    - by Ian Ringrose
    I wish to uninstall the trail copy of VS 2008 Team System, as the trial is coming to its end. I had VS 2008 Professional Edition installed on the machine to start with and it still shows up in Add/Remove Problems. I am hoping that when I uninstall VS 2008 Team System I will be left with a working VS 2008 Professional Edition. When I try to uninstall VS 2008 Team System, I very quickly get an error dialog that says: A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup. Help! Progress or lack there of so fare I have done dir %temp%*.log in a command prompt and can see any log files that are recent I am going to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer#Diagnostic_logging to see if I can get any logging Aaron Stebner's WebLog has a post on where VS put's is log files, he also has a post on were some other products put there log files gives some info about where VS setup puts it's logs etc Aaron Ruckman provided me with the solution after I sent him the log files.

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  • Unit testing newbie team needs to unit test

    - by Walter
    I'm working with a new team that has historically not done ANY unit testing. My goal is for the team to eventually employ TDD (Test Driven Development) as their natural process. But since TDD is such a radical mind shift for a non-unit testing team I thought I would just start off with writing unit tests after coding. Has anyone been in a similar situation? What's an effective way to get a team to be comfortable with TDD when they've not done any unit testing? Does it make sense to do this in a couple of steps? Or should we dive right in and face all the growing pains at once?? EDIT Just for clarification, there is no one on the team (other than myself) who has ANY unit testing exposure/experience. And we are planning on using the unit testing functionality built into Visual Studio.

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  • Scrum in 5 Minutes

    - by Stephen.Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to explain the basic concepts of Scrum in less than five minutes. You learn how Scrum can help a team of developers to successfully complete a complex software project. Product Backlog and the Product Owner Imagine that you are part of a team which needs to create a new website – for example, an e-commerce website. You have an overwhelming amount of work to do. You need to build (or possibly buy) a shopping cart, install an SSL certificate, create a product catalog, create a Facebook page, and at least a hundred other things that you have not thought of yet. According to Scrum, the first thing you should do is create a list. Place the highest priority items at the top of the list and the lower priority items lower in the list. For example, creating the shopping cart and buying the domain name might be high priority items and creating a Facebook page might be a lower priority item. In Scrum, this list is called the Product Backlog. How do you prioritize the items in the Product Backlog? Different stakeholders in the project might have different priorities. Gary, your division VP, thinks that it is crucial that the e-commerce site has a mobile app. Sally, your direct manager, thinks taking advantage of new HTML5 features is much more important. Multiple people are pulling you in different directions. According to Scrum, it is important that you always designate one person, and only one person, as the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the person who decides what items should be added to the Product Backlog and the priority of the items in the Product Backlog. The Product Owner could be the customer who is paying the bills, the project manager who is responsible for delivering the project, or a customer representative. The critical point is that the Product Owner must always be a single person and that single person has absolute authority over the Product Backlog. Sprints and the Sprint Backlog So now the developer team has a prioritized list of items and they can start work. The team starts implementing the first item in the Backlog — the shopping cart — and the team is making good progress. Unfortunately, however, half-way through the work of implementing the shopping cart, the Product Owner changes his mind. The Product Owner decides that it is much more important to create the product catalog before the shopping cart. With some frustration, the team switches their developmental efforts to focus on implementing the product catalog. However, part way through completing this work, once again the Product Owner changes his mind about the highest priority item. Getting work done when priorities are constantly shifting is frustrating for the developer team and it results in lower productivity. At the same time, however, the Product Owner needs to have absolute authority over the priority of the items which need to get done. Scrum solves this conflict with the concept of Sprints. In Scrum, a developer team works in Sprints. At the beginning of a Sprint the developers and the Product Owner agree on the items from the backlog which they will complete during the Sprint. This subset of items from the Product Backlog becomes the Sprint Backlog. During the Sprint, the Product Owner is not allowed to change the items in the Sprint Backlog. In other words, the Product Owner cannot shift priorities on the developer team during the Sprint. Different teams use Sprints of different lengths such as one month Sprints, two-week Sprints, and one week Sprints. For high-stress, time critical projects, teams typically choose shorter sprints such as one week sprints. For more mature projects, longer one month sprints might be more appropriate. A team can pick whatever Sprint length makes sense for them just as long as the team is consistent. You should pick a Sprint length and stick with it. Daily Scrum During a Sprint, the developer team needs to have meetings to coordinate their work on completing the items in the Sprint Backlog. For example, the team needs to discuss who is working on what and whether any blocking issues have been discovered. Developers hate meetings (well, sane developers hate meetings). Meetings take developers away from their work of actually implementing stuff as opposed to talking about implementing stuff. However, a developer team which never has meetings and never coordinates their work also has problems. For example, Fred might get stuck on a programming problem for days and never reach out for help even though Tom (who sits in the cubicle next to him) has already solved the very same problem. Or, both Ted and Fred might have started working on the same item from the Sprint Backlog at the same time. In Scrum, these conflicting needs – limiting meetings but enabling team coordination – are resolved with the idea of the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a meeting for coordinating the work of the developer team which happens once a day. To keep the meeting short, each developer answers only the following three questions: 1. What have you done since yesterday? 2. What do you plan to do today? 3. Any impediments in your way? During the Daily Scrum, developers are not allowed to talk about issues with their cat, do demos of their latest work, or tell heroic stories of programming problems overcome. The meeting must be kept short — typically about 15 minutes. Issues which come up during the Daily Scrum should be discussed in separate meetings which do not involve the whole developer team. Stories and Tasks Items in the Product or Sprint Backlog – such as building a shopping cart or creating a Facebook page – are often referred to as User Stories or Stories. The Stories are created by the Product Owner and should represent some business need. Unlike the Product Owner, the developer team needs to think about how a Story should be implemented. At the beginning of a Sprint, the developer team takes the Stories from the Sprint Backlog and breaks the stories into tasks. For example, the developer team might take the Create a Shopping Cart story and break it into the following tasks: · Enable users to add and remote items from shopping cart · Persist the shopping cart to database between visits · Redirect user to checkout page when Checkout button is clicked During the Daily Scrum, members of the developer team volunteer to complete the tasks required to implement the next Story in the Sprint Backlog. When a developer talks about what he did yesterday or plans to do tomorrow then the developer should be referring to a task. Stories are owned by the Product Owner and a story is all about business value. In contrast, the tasks are owned by the developer team and a task is all about implementation details. A story might take several days or weeks to complete. A task is something which a developer can complete in less than a day. Some teams get lazy about breaking stories into tasks. Neglecting to break stories into tasks can lead to “Never Ending Stories” If you don’t break a story into tasks, then you can’t know how much of a story has actually been completed because you don’t have a clear idea about the implementation steps required to complete the story. Scrumboard During the Daily Scrum, the developer team uses a Scrumboard to coordinate their work. A Scrumboard contains a list of the stories for the current Sprint, the tasks associated with each Story, and the state of each task. The developer team uses the Scrumboard so everyone on the team can see, at a glance, what everyone is working on. As a developer works on a task, the task moves from state to state and the state of the task is updated on the Scrumboard. Common task states are ToDo, In Progress, and Done. Some teams include additional task states such as Needs Review or Needs Testing. Some teams use a physical Scrumboard. In that case, you use index cards to represent the stories and the tasks and you tack the index cards onto a physical board. Using a physical Scrumboard has several disadvantages. A physical Scrumboard does not work well with a distributed team – for example, it is hard to share the same physical Scrumboard between Boston and Seattle. Also, generating reports from a physical Scrumboard is more difficult than generating reports from an online Scrumboard. Estimating Stories and Tasks Stakeholders in a project, the people investing in a project, need to have an idea of how a project is progressing and when the project will be completed. For example, if you are investing in creating an e-commerce site, you need to know when the site can be launched. It is not enough to just say that “the project will be done when it is done” because the stakeholders almost certainly have a limited budget to devote to the project. The people investing in the project cannot determine the business value of the project unless they can have an estimate of how long it will take to complete the project. Developers hate to give estimates. The reason that developers hate to give estimates is that the estimates are almost always completely made up. For example, you really don’t know how long it takes to build a shopping cart until you finish building a shopping cart, and at that point, the estimate is no longer useful. The problem is that writing code is much more like Finding a Cure for Cancer than Building a Brick Wall. Building a brick wall is very straightforward. After you learn how to add one brick to a wall, you understand everything that is involved in adding a brick to a wall. There is no additional research required and no surprises. If, on the other hand, I assembled a team of scientists and asked them to find a cure for cancer, and estimate exactly how long it will take, they would have no idea. The problem is that there are too many unknowns. I don’t know how to cure cancer, I need to do a lot of research here, so I cannot even begin to estimate how long it will take. So developers hate to provide estimates, but the Product Owner and other product stakeholders, have a legitimate need for estimates. Scrum resolves this conflict by using the idea of Story Points. Different teams use different units to represent Story Points. For example, some teams use shirt sizes such as Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large. Some teams prefer to use Coffee Cup sizes such as Tall, Short, and Grande. Finally, some teams like to use numbers from the Fibonacci series. These alternative units are converted into a Story Point value. Regardless of the type of unit which you use to represent Story Points, the goal is the same. Instead of attempting to estimate a Story in hours (which is doomed to failure), you use a much less fine-grained measure of work. A developer team is much more likely to be able to estimate that a Story is Small or X-Large than the exact number of hours required to complete the story. So you can think of Story Points as a compromise between the needs of the Product Owner and the developer team. When a Sprint starts, the developer team devotes more time to thinking about the Stories in a Sprint and the developer team breaks the Stories into Tasks. In Scrum, you estimate the work required to complete a Story by using Story Points and you estimate the work required to complete a task by using hours. The difference between Stories and Tasks is that you don’t create a task until you are just about ready to start working on a task. A task is something that you should be able to create within a day, so you have a much better chance of providing an accurate estimate of the work required to complete a task than a story. Burndown Charts In Scrum, you use Burndown charts to represent the remaining work on a project. You use Release Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a project and you use Sprint Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a particular Sprint. You create a Release Burndown chart by calculating the remaining number of uncompleted Story Points for the entire Product Backlog every day. The vertical axis represents Story Points and the horizontal axis represents time. A Sprint Burndown chart is similar to a Release Burndown chart, but it focuses on the remaining work for a particular Sprint. There are two different types of Sprint Burndown charts. You can either represent the remaining work in a Sprint with Story Points or with task hours (the following image, taken from Wikipedia, uses hours). When each Product Backlog Story is completed, the Release Burndown chart slopes down. When each Story or task is completed, the Sprint Burndown chart slopes down. Burndown charts typically do not always slope down over time. As new work is added to the Product Backlog, the Release Burndown chart slopes up. If new tasks are discovered during a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart will also slope up. The purpose of a Burndown chart is to give you a way to track team progress over time. If, halfway through a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart is still climbing a hill then you know that you are in trouble. Team Velocity Stakeholders in a project always want more work done faster. For example, the Product Owner for the e-commerce site wants the website to launch before tomorrow. Developers tend to be overly optimistic. Rarely do developers acknowledge the physical limitations of reality. So Project stakeholders and the developer team often collude to delude themselves about how much work can be done and how quickly. Too many software projects begin in a state of optimism and end in frustration as deadlines zoom by. In Scrum, this problem is overcome by calculating a number called the Team Velocity. The Team Velocity is a measure of the average number of Story Points which a team has completed in previous Sprints. Knowing the Team Velocity is important during the Sprint Planning meeting when the Product Owner and the developer team work together to determine the number of stories which can be completed in the next Sprint. If you know the Team Velocity then you can avoid committing to do more work than the team has been able to accomplish in the past, and your team is much more likely to complete all of the work required for the next Sprint. Scrum Master There are three roles in Scrum: the Product Owner, the developer team, and the Scrum Master. I’v e already discussed the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the one and only person who maintains the Product Backlog and prioritizes the stories. I’ve also described the role of the developer team. The members of the developer team do the work of implementing the stories by breaking the stories into tasks. The final role, which I have not discussed, is the role of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the team is following the Scrum process. For example, the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure that there is a Daily Scrum meeting and that everyone answers the standard three questions. The Scrum Master is also responsible for removing (non-technical) impediments which the team might encounter. For example, if the team cannot start work until everyone installs the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio then the Scrum Master has the responsibility of working with management to get the latest version of Visual Studio as quickly as possible. The Scrum Master can be a member of the developer team. Furthermore, different people can take on the role of the Scrum Master over time. The Scrum Master, however, cannot be the same person as the Product Owner. Using SonicAgile SonicAgile (SonicAgile.com) is an online tool which you can use to manage your projects using Scrum. You can use the SonicAgile Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of stories. You can estimate the size of the Stories using different Story Point units such as Shirt Sizes and Coffee Cup sizes. You can use SonicAgile during the Sprint Planning meeting to select the Stories that you want to complete during a particular Sprint. You can configure Sprints to be any length of time. SonicAgile calculates Team Velocity automatically and displays a warning when you add too many stories to a Sprint. In other words, it warns you when it thinks you are overcommitting in a Sprint. SonicAgile also includes a Scrumboard which displays the list of Stories selected for a Sprint and the tasks associated with each story. You can drag tasks from one task state to another. Finally, SonicAgile enables you to generate Release Burndown and Sprint Burndown charts. You can use these charts to view the progress of your team. To learn more about SonicAgile, visit SonicAgile.com. Summary In this post, I described many of the basic concepts of Scrum. You learned how a Product Owner uses a Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of tasks. I explained why work is completed in Sprints so the developer team can be more productive. I also explained how a developer team uses the daily scrum to coordinate their work. You learned how the developer team uses a Scrumboard to see, at a glance, who is working on what and the state of each task. I also discussed Burndown charts. You learned how you can use both Release and Sprint Burndown charts to track team progress in completing a project. Finally, I described the crucial role of the Scrum Master – the person who is responsible for ensuring that the rules of Scrum are being followed. My goal was not to describe all of the concepts of Scrum. This post was intended to be an introductory overview. For a comprehensive explanation of Scrum, I recommend reading Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X/ref=la_B001H6ODMC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345224000&sr=1-1

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  • La beta du Feature Pack est disponible pour Team Foundation Server 2010 et Project Server Integration

    La beta du Feature Pack est disponible Pour Team Foundation Server 2010 et Project Server Integration Microsoft vient d'annoncer la disponibilité de la beta du Feature Pack de Team Foundation Server 2010 et Projet Server Integration ce qui marque la fin des CTP(community technical preview). La beta du Feature Pack de Team Foundation Server 2010 et Project Server (TFS-PS) est disponible uniquement pour les abonnées MSDN et sur licence « Go Live », ce qui signifie qu'elle peut déjà être utilisée dans un environnement de production. Pour mémoire, Team Foundation Server est un outil de travail collaboratif accompagnant la suite Visual Studio Team System(VSTS). Il permet la gest...

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  • Must-do activities for a team leader, and time managing them

    - by MeLight
    This is a two part question Part one: I'm leading a small team of developers of mixed skills (juniors and seniors). I'm sometimes feeling that I focus too much on my own code, instead of seeing the big the picture, and managing the team. What would you say the most crucial non-coding activities for a team leader, related to his team members? Part two:Given that I know what other (non-coding stuff) I should be doing, what is a good time division between my own code writing and managing the other team members (code reviews, whiteboarding, meetings etc).

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  • TFS vs. Star Team comparison

    - by ryanabr
    I have a sales call today in which the person that I am talking to is interested in what TFS would give them over Star Team, The first thing I believe that I can say is that TFS is cheaper! Especially if you are doing MSFT development already and your team members have MSDN subscriptions as the CALs for TFS are covered in the MSDN subscription. The other thing that I noticed about Star Team was all of the references to ‘readiness’ and ‘integration’. While that is great, that means that other tools will be needed to provide the features that are already bundled with TFS like, SharePoint integration, as well as Analysis Services and Reporting Services to provide visibility on the web with reports on project health, and team velocity. Below is a quick table that I was able to throw together to answer some high level questions: Feature TFS Star Team Work Items X X Work Item custom Queries X X Customizable Work Items X Web Portal View X X Reporting X Integration Version Control X X Build Management X Integration Integrated Test Suite X Integration Cost Free for first 5 / MSDN Sub covers others $7500 / seat

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  • What Is The Relationship Between Software Architect and Team Member

    - by Steve Peng
    I work for a small company which has less than 100 persons. Several months ago, this company offered me position of SA and I accepted. There are three teams in this company, and I work for one of them. This is the first time I work as a SA. During the past months, I find I don't have any power of management, I even can't let the team member do things (coding-related) in the way which is correct and more efficient. The team members argue with me on very very basic technical questions and I have to explain to them again and again. Though some members did take my advice, other members stubbornly program in their way which frequently proved wrong finally. Recently I feel a little tired and confused. I wonder what is correct relationship between a Software Architect and team members including the team leader? Besides, is software architect also leaded by the Team Leader?

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  • What is a "cross-functional team" actually?

    - by Idsa
    The general meaning of "cross-functional team" is a team which combines specialists in different fields that are required to reach the goal. But it looks like in Agile cross-functionality means not only combining different specialists, but making them mix. Henrik Kniberg defines cross-functional team this way: "Cross-functional just means that the team as a whole has all skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing." But where is the line drawn? Is it normal to ask developers to become testers for an iteration if it is required?

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  • How to manage a growing team?

    - by Andra
    I'm the admin assistant of the CTO and our organization has recently experienced a lot of growth. Within six months, we have merged with another organization and our Dev team has grown from 8 to 16, with another 8 people in QA. What we're dealing with now is a highly technical individual, with little patience, managing a much larger team than he's accustomed to, 40% of which is junior as well as an increase in the number of projects. Needless to say, my boss is being pulled in too many directions at once. How can I help him manage his workload and his team so that the team feels they're getting enough help and support and remain effective? Also, where can I find additional resources on managing a growing team?

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  • What is a "cross-functional team" actually?

    - by Idsa
    The general meaning of "cross-functional team" is a team which combines specialists in different fields that are required to reach the goal. But it looks like in Agile cross-functionality means not only combining different specialists, but making them mix. Henrik Kniberg defines cross-functional team this way: "Cross-functional just means that the team as a whole has all skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing." But where is the line drawn? Is it normal to ask developers to become testers for an iteration if it is required?

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  • Encouraging business and team members to write more code

    - by Aliixx
    I am really interested to hear any ideas or working practices that can be adopted to encourage our team of developers to write more code. A little background here is involves a team of varying disciplines, experience and qualities and the nature of the work has a large focus on bug fixes and business logic / data validation over writing lots of new greenfield code or even refactoring. We are attempting to move to a more Agile philosophy and really what would be great is to hear any ideas that can be sold to the team and / or the business with the aim of: Writing more new code to improve experience, abilities and increase exposure to newer and emerging patterns and practices. Energizing the effort of the team and inspire. Encouraging wider input of new ideas, patterns and practices from the team as a whole. I would be very interested (and grateful) to hear any ideas or examples of ideas that can help here. Thanks!

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  • What should I do when my team leader is unfair for no reason? [closed]

    - by crucified soul
    I'm a new software developer and this is my first job. It's a startup and the CEO and the working environment is just great. I work really hard and I believe that I also do my job well. But recently, I have felt like my team leader is being unfair to me for no reason. It appears that he is nice to my co-workers, but not me. I figure he is mad at me, but I didn't bother to find out why. I really love this company and I really love working there. But if my team leader continues to be unfair then I have no option other than leaving. How can I fix this? EDIT: The other day he called me into his office and wanted to see my work in the afternoon (Yes, in my country, at summer season after 5PM is afternoon. My office begins at 8AM. And I'm not saying I've problems to work after 5PM). At the time I was facing a weird runtime error and I was pretty tired. I explained the situation to him. Then he found a small logical error in my code and asked me why I didn't fix this. I told him I was trying to resolve this runtime error and that I was sure that this logical error had nothing to do with the runtime error. He then proceeded to yell at me. After fixing the logical error that runtime error was still there. This is not the only occasion he has been unfair to me. I'm saying is being unfair because he doesn't do this kind of thing to other developers when they do really silly mistakes.

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  • What actions to take when people leave the team?

    - by finrod
    Recently one of our key engineers resigned. This engineer has co-authored a major component of our application. We are not hitting Truck number yet though, but we're getting close :) Before the guy waltzes off, we want to take actions necessary to recover from this loss as smoothly as possible and eventually 'grow' the rest of the team to competently cover the parts he authored. More about the context: the domain the component covers and the code are no rocket science but still a lot of non-trivial stuff. Some team members can already cover a lot of this but those have a lot on their plates and we want to make sure every. (as I see it): Improve tests and test coverage - especially for the non-trivial stuff, Update high level documents, Document any 'funny stuff' the code does (we had to do some heavy duct-taping), Add / update code documentation - have everything with 'public' visibility documented. Finally the questions: What do you think are the actions to take in this situation? What have you done in such situations? What did or did not work well for you?

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  • Must read books for a programming team leader

    - by takeshin
    As a programming team leader, which books do you recommend? Books about HR, good programming practices etc. I have recently seen PHP Team Development but it is not mind blowing for experienced developers. One of the best I can recommend is Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, which helped me a lot in improving the language and practices of documenting the code.

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  • The cost of Programmer Team Clustering

    - by MarkPearl
    I recently was involved in a conversation about the productivity of programmers and the seemingly wide range in abilities that different programmers have in this industry. Some of the comments made were reiterated a few days later when I came across a chapter in Code Complete (v2) where it says "In programming specifically, many studies have shown order-of-magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of programmers". In line with this is another comment presented by Code Complete when discussing teams - "Good programmers tend to cluster, as do bad programmers". This is something I can personally relate to. I have come across some really good and bad programmers and 99% of the time it turns out the team they work in is the same - really good or really bad. When I have found a mismatch, it hasn't stayed that way for long - the person has moved on, or the team has ejected the individual. Keeping this in mind I would like to comment on the risks an organization faces when forcing teams to remain together regardless of the mix. When you have the situation where someone is not willing to be part of the team but still wants to get a pay check at the end of each month, it presents some interesting challenges and hard decisions to make. First of all, when this occurs you need to give them an opportunity to change - for someone to change, they need to know what the problem is and what is expected. It is unreasonable to expect someone to change but have not indicated what they need to change and the consequences of not changing. If after a reasonable time of an individual being aware of the problem and not making an effort to improve you need to do two things... Follow through with the consequences of not changing. Consider the impact that this behaviour will have on the rest of the team. What is the cost of not following through with the consequences? If there is no follow through, it is often an indication to the individual that they can continue their behaviour. Why should they change if you don't care enough to keep your end of the agreement? In many ways I think it is very similar to the "Broken Windows" principles – if you allow the windows to break and don’t fix them, more will get broken. What is the cost of keeping them on? When keeping a disruptive influence in a team you risk loosing the good in the team. As Code Complete says, good and bad programmers tend to cluster - they have a tendency to keep this balance - if you are not going to help keep the balance they will. The cost of not removing a disruptive influence is that the good in the team will eventually help you maintain the clustering themselves by leaving.

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  • Installing Team Explorer 2008 on Windows Server 2003

    - by BriteShiny
    I am attempting to install Team Explorer 2008 on a Windows Server 2008 box, without success, which is why I am here. The error log reveals the following: [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): d:.\wcu\ppe\vside.exe exited with return value 1 [07/02/10,10:07:03] InstallReturnValue: GFN_MID VS PPE, 0x1 [07/02/10,10:07:03] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): ERRORLOG EVENT : Error code 1 for this component means "Incorrect function. " [07/02/10,10:07:03] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): ERRORLOG EVENT : Component Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode) returned an unexpected value. [07/02/10,10:07:03] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): ERRORLOG EVENT : Return from system messaging: Incorrect function. Apparently the Team Explorer 2008 is incompatible with Windows Server 2008. If you right click on the setup.exe in the TFS Explorer ISO and run a compatibility check it fails. There is a separate installer package to install the VS2008 Shell that is compatible with Windows 2008, but it fails too. Has anyone else been able to install Team Explorer 2008 on Windows Server 2008?

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