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  • Agilist, Heal Thyself!

    - by Dylan Smith
    I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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  • Senior Developers vs. Junior

    - by huwyss
    I like the following quote which I found on codinghorror:[As Steve points out this is one key difference between junior and senior developers:] In the old days, seeing too much code at once quite frankly exceeded my complexity threshold, and when I had to work with it I'd typically try to rewrite it or at least comment it heavily. Today, however, I just slog through it without complaining (much). When I have a specific goal in mind and a complicated piece of code to write, I spend my time making it happen rather than telling myself stories about it [in comments].

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  • SQL Server Central Webinar Series #8: Creating smaller and comprehensively verified backups

    The next webinar from SQLServerCentral will look at backups and how you can create faster, smaller, and verified backups. Join Steve Jones and Rodney Landrum for this presentation on SQL Backup Pro and SQL Virtual Restore The Future of SQL Server Monitoring "Being web-based, SQL Monitor 2.0 enables you to check on your servers from almost any location" Jonathan Allen.Try SQL Monitor now.

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  • YouTube Developers Live: Magnify.net

    YouTube Developers Live: Magnify.net Questions? Please use Google Moderator rather than commenting on this video: goo.gl Join us in a discussion with Steve Rosenbaum (author of _Curation Nation_) and Kimberly Peterson from Magnify.net. We'll discuss content curation and how developers can use the YouTube API to power their own creation applications. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 3 ratings Time: 00:00 More in Science & Technology

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  • Why Animated Banners Are So Special?

    Online advertising always bring thrill and zeal among marketers. And when it comes to banner advertising, advertisers get opportunity to experiment with the type of banner. If you want to use banner ... [Author: Steve Saha - Web Design and Development - April 07, 2010]

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  • OpenWorld in Small Bites

    - by Kathryn Perry
    Fifty thousand attendees -- that's bigger than the cities some of us live in. Monday morning it took 20 minutes to get from Hall D in Moscone North to a conference room in Moscone South -- the crowds were crushing! A great start to a great week! Larry is as big a name as ever on the program schedule and on the Moscone stage. People were packed in Hall D and clustered around every big screen TV. He stayed on script as he laid out Oracle's SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS strategies. Every seat in Chris Leone's Fusion Apps Cloud Overview was filled on Monday morning. Oracle employees who wanted to get in were turned away. And the same thing happened in the repeat session on Wednesday. Our newest suite of apps is hot! Speaking of hot, the weather was made to order. Then it turned very San Francisco-like on Wednesday afternoon. Downright cold for those who trusted SF temps to hold in the 80's. Who did you follow on Twitter during the conference? So many voices, opinions, and convos! Great combo of social media and sharp minds. Be sure to follow @larryellison, @stevenrmiranda, and @Oracle for updates and MyPOVs. Keywords for the Apps customers at the conference were cloud, mobile, and social. Every day, every session, every speaker. Wednesday afternoon, 4 pm at the Four Seasons hotel. A large roomful of analysts and influencers firing questions at a panel of eight Fusion customers. Steve Miranda moderating. Good energy and a great exchange of information and confidence. Word on the street is that OpenWorld has outgrown San Francisco -- but moving it seems unthinkable. The city isn't just a backdrop for an industry conference - it's a headliner right up there with Larry Ellison and Pearl Jam. As you can imagine, electrical outlets were in high demand at every venue. The most popular hotels and bars near Moscone designed their interiors around accessible electrical power strips. People are plenty willing to buy a drink while they grab a charge. Wednesday afternoon, 4 pm at the Four Seasons hotel. A large roomful of analysts and influencers firing questions at a panel of eight Fusion customers. Steve Miranda moderating. Good energy and a great exchange of information and confidence. Treasure Island in the dark. Eddy Vedder has an amazing voice! And Kings of Leon over delivered on people's expectations. It was cold. It was windy. It was very fun. One analyst said it's the best customer appreciation party in the industry. 

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  • Registration Open for 2015 Oracle Value Chain Summit

    - by Terri Hiskey
    Registration has opened for the Oracle Value Chain Summit, taking place January 26-28 in San Jose, California. Register now and take advantage of the Super Saver rate of only $495 (a $400 savings from the regular registration rate), good through September 26. Click here to register today, or to check out further information about the Summit. Keynote speakers to the 2015 event include former 49ers quarterback Steve Young and leading green business expert and author of the best-selling Green to Gold, Andrew Winston.

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  • MSDN Radio: SharePoint 2010 for Developers

    When Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is released, it will offer new tools that make customizing and extending your applications much easier. Join us as we talk with Steve Fox, a Senior Evangelism Manager with the Developer and Platform Evangelism team. We'll explore the tools, what's possible, and take your questions....Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Windows Server 2012 sera disponible en septembre, la bêta téléchargée plus de 500 000 fois

    Windows Server 2012 sera disponible en septembre la bêta téléchargée plus de 500 000 fois Mise à jour du 11/07/2012 Après l'annonce de la date de sortie de la version finale de Windows 8 prévue pour fin octobre, Microsoft a également dévoilé la période pendant laquelle sera disponible la version serveur du système d'exploitation. Pendant sa Keynote lors de l'événement WPC de Toronto, Steve Ballmer, PDG de Microsoft, a déclaré que Windows Server 2012 serait disponible sur le marché dès septembre. La version RTM (Release To Manufacturing) sera mise à la disposition des constructeurs la première semaine d'août.

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  • Oracle Forms and Java JRE Auto-Update Problems

    - by Grant Ronald
    There have been a few threads regarding problems with the auto update of the JRE and Oracle Forms applications.  See this entry from Steve Chan and this entry on the error FRM-92095: Oracle Jnitiator version too low - please install version 1.1.8.2 or higher.  There are a few points to be aware of so Support have written up a note to hopefully make things clearer.  Log onto your Oracle support account and search for Note: 1470123.1.

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  • Delight and Excite

    - by Applications User Experience
    Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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  • iPad : Apple lance un service d'abonnement aux contenus en ligne intégré aux applications de l'App Store et crée la polémique

    Apple lance un service d'abonnement aux contenus en ligne Intégré aux applications de l'App Store et crée la polémique Mise à jour du 16/02/2011 Apple vient d'annoncer le lancement de son service d'abonnement aux divers types de contenus (magazines, journaux, musiques, vidéos) sur l'App Store. Un service inauguré en avant-première avec « The Daily »,un quotidien exclusivement numérique et diffusé sur l'iPad. Les éditeurs de contenus auront la liberté de fixer les prix, la durée et les termes de l'abonnement d'après le document rédigé par un Steve Jobs convalescent mais toujours très impliqué dans ...

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  • SQL Saturday #300 - Kansas City

    SQL Saturday is coming to Kansas on September 13, 2014. Our very own Steve Jones will be presenting, alongside other big names like Glenn Berry, Kathi Kellenberger, Sean and Jen McCown, Jason Strate, and many more. Register while space is available. Get alerts within 15 seconds of SQL Server issuesSQL Monitor checks performance data every 15 seconds, so you can fix issues before your users even notice them. Start monitoring with a free trial.

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  • Apple expulse Flash, Java et .NET de l'iPhone en modifiant ses conditions d'utilisation, et provoque

    Apple expulse Flash, Java et .NET de l'iPhone en mofidiant ses conditions d'utilisation, la stratégie de Steve Jobs provoque des réactions d'une rare violence Après la sortie de l'iPad, Apple vient de dévoiler le nouvel OS de son iPhone (iPhone OS 4). Deux évènements qui ont fait grand bruit. Un troisième est en train de créer la polémique. Apple a en effet décidé de changer les condit...

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  • Updates to Stairway to Integration Services

    - by andyleonard
    The Stairway to integration Services has been updated! I added content to Step 1 to provide more detail about creating a first SSIS project and corrected a typo in Step 2 that referred to an older name for the Step 1 article. I also made the corrected Step 1 article name a link to help. Thanks to Steve Jones ( blog | @way0utwest ) for all his hard work editing and corralling trifling authors. :{>...(read more)

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  • Allianz CIO 'lost hair' over Linux upgrade

    <b>ZDNet:</b> "Allianz Australia Insurance chief information officer (CIO) Steve Cole said yesterday he had done the equivalent of losing hair while undertaking an upgrade that saw the company move from multiple Wintel servers to a Linux mainframe."

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  • Preview Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12!

    Steve Miranda, Oracle SVP of Applications Development speaks with Fred about the features and benefits of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 and how this release will streamline global operations and move customers father along the path to Oracle Fusion.

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  • Google backs open codec against patent trolls

    <b>The Register:</b> "Google is "very confident" that the newly open-sourced VP8 video codec will stand up to the sort of patent attack Steve Jobs warned of when he defended Apple's decision to shun VP8's predecessor, the open-source Ogg Theora."

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  • SQL in the City - Chicago 2012

    A free day of training in Chicago on Oct 5, 2012. Join Grant Fritchey, Steve Jones and more to discuss, debate, ask questions, and learn about how to better run your organizations SQL Servers. Are you sure you can restore your backups? Run full restore + DBCC CHECKDB quickly and easily with SQL Backup Pro's new automated verification. Check for corruption and prepare for when disaster strikes. Try it now.

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  • Patent Pool to Thwart Open Source Codecs

    <b>DaniWeb:</b> "Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse in the world of software patents, a reliable source sent me this response from Steve Jobs about a patent pool that's forming and aiming to nail the open source codecs projects."

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  • Announcing the Fusion Applications Blog

    - by Theresa Hickman
    Want to learn more about Oracle's next generation applications, Fusion Applications, from key executives, strategy and development leaders? We have a Fusion Applications blog. Steve Miranda, Senior Vice President, Applications Development of Oracle kicks off the Fusion Applications blog series @blogs.oracle.com/applications. Content will vary; some content will be applicable to all Fusion Applications families, and some will focus on a particular family (HCM, CRM, Financials, etc.) You can also follow them on Facebook www.facebook.com/OracleApps.

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