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• With a small development team, how do you organize second-level support?

  - by Lenny222

  Say, you have a team of 5 developers and your inhouse customers demand a reasonable support availability of say 5 days a week, 9am-6pm. I can imagine the following scenarios: the customers approach the same guy, every time. Downside: single point of failure, if the guy is unavailable. each developer is assigned one week of support duty. Downside: how to you distribute the work evenly in times of planned (vacation) and unplanned (sickness) unavailability? each developer is assigned one day of support duty. Downside: similar to above, but not as bad. a randomly picked developer handles the support request. Downside: maybe not fair, see above. What is your experience?

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• Is there value in having technical authors in a software team?

  - by Desolate Planet

  During my 5 years in IT as a software developer, I've noticed that developers have a strong distaste towards doing any documentation. The act of taking screenshots and creating documentation seems to be a painful and time consuming experience. In one company I worked for, we had a technical documentation team with two technical authors and they developed all the user guides for our customers. In other companies where I've suggested hiring a technical author, I've been told they are not worth the money, but I'm a little unsure if that rings true. Is it better to have developers stop coding and take half a day to do screenshots and create the various guides or is it worth hiring someone who handles such tasks?

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• How to handle estimates for programmers joining the team?

  - by Jordan

  Iteration has already started, new programmer joins the team, task X has already been estimated to be 30 hours by a different developer. What is the best practice in this situation? new developer runs with the given estimate (the idea being that any discrepancy will be corrected for when velocity is calculated?) new developer re-estimates task? (if so, what if it's significantly higher and no longer fits in the iteration?) throw our hands up and go back to waterfall? something else entirely?

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• Which features of user story management should an agile team look for?

  - by Sonja Dimitrijevic

  In my research study, I need to identify the key features of user story management tools that can be used to support agile development. So far, I identified the following general groups of features: User role modeling and personas support, User stories and epics management, Acceptance testing support, High-level release planning, Low-level iteration planning, and Progress tracking. Each group contains some specific features, e.g., support for story points, writing of acceptance tests, etc. Which features of user story management should an agile team look for especially when switching from tangible tools (index cards, pin boards and big visible charts) to a software tool? Are some features more important than the others? Many thanks in advance!

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• What caused you to stop using UML tools on your team?

  - by jamie

  There seems to be plenty of good, free UML tools. I hear about UML tools being used by large organizations, and they seem to have plenty of advocates. However, in my career I have never seen them used beyond "dabbling". Now, I have seen many UML diagrams drawn on whiteboards, and I use them myself all the time, on paper, to think about problems. I've also seen articles such as this one claiming why developers don't use UML, but the arguments just don't land with me. Frankly, this seems like an opportunity for a start-up if one can figure out why developers really don't use them, and solve those problems. So I'm asking anyone here who has attempted to use UML tools in a team, and stopped, this question: "why did you stop?" I'm especially interested in experience from agile teams. I am looking for concrete experience, not hypothetical opinion. Thanks.

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• How do I avoid the complexity concerns of frameworks while keeping my team marketable?

  - by Desolate Planet

  When deciding upon how to design a software project with my colleagues, most suggestions tend to be for using specific frameworks "because it's popular in the job market" or "that's the framework that gets recruiters on the phone," and never what I'm looking for which is, "because it's a good fit for the project as it makes the system more adaptive to future changes and makes life easier for developers." I didn't start looking at projects in this way until I started reading up on domain-driven design. I've found that the actual domain is hidden deep under the frameworks used and it's hard to learn the business processes that have been implemented by the software product. Is there a way to marry the two competing goals: getting exposure as a development team while still being able to avoid complexity? Are frameworks that compromise, or are there other solutions out there?

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• How can one get involved in the Ubuntu Brainstorm team?

  - by Jay

  I've heard it thrown around on a lot of blogs that Ubuntu Brainstorm is the "graveyard of good ideas". I have a bit of a passion for average end-users suggesting the kinds of software they want and they way they think their applications and computers could work. I'm interested in joining the Ubuntu Brainstorm team, maybe to facilitate ideas not getting buried and making it not seem like a dead platform. Unfortunately I'm not very plugged into the "community" so I'm not sure how to go about it. I was hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction. Thanks.

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• Team Foundation Server– Debug symbols(pdb files) generated in Release build? Fix it.

  - by Gopinath

  Yesterday I setup TFS for my .NET playground website to implement continuous integration and deployments. After a successful build I noticed that debug symbols(pdb files) were generated even though TFS is configured to build in Release mode.  After a bit of analysis its turned out to be the behavior of TFS to generate debug symbols (pdb files) until we pass the attribute DebugType = None. Here are the steps to pass DebugType parameter to MSBuild of TFS Go to Team Explorer Select Build Defintion >> Edit Build Definition Switch to Process tab Navigate to Advanced Section and locate MSBuild Arguments Add the following: /p:Configuration=Release /p:DebugType=none

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• Is there ongoing work in the kernel team to improve battery life under linux?

  - by leousa

  I have read in some forums that the kernel team is working on improving battery life and energy efficiency in linux. Unfortunately our community really lags behind windows and mac in that regard. I would like to read about the reasons why this difference exists with other platforms. Is it purely due to closed hardware specs from vendors or does it has to be with kernel design issues? Apple devices with unix cores have amazing battery times, but they also design their own hardware...just want to understand this issues in a less technical way I know that recent kernel updates in Ubuntu have improved the battery life in most computers, but I was wondering if there is still development going on and where can I read more about it. Thanks in advance

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• Network(ing) to the Limit

  - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team

   By Karen Shamban While Oracle OpenWorld attendees are networking, there's an Oracle Global IT team that builds and maintains the massive networks that help run the show. The objective? To keep things running as seamlessly and smoothly as possible, constantly evaluate priorities, mitigate risk, and be ready for whatever might happen -- because things do happen when there are 50,000 plus attendees, tens of thousands of devices, unexpected requirements, and a constant flow of up-to-the-minute information. Here's just some of what it takes to keep the conference going, network style: 100 Oracle network, voice, and desktop engineers; security, risk management, and other IT experts, who come in from 17 countries  1000+ network switches 300+ miles of copper and fiber 485 wireless access points 2,500 wired laptops 300 VoIP phones And just where are all these networks and devices deployed? This is what the team had to build and manage: Moscone North, South, and West, including: The keynote hall Oracle DEMOgrounds in the Exhibition Halls Hundreds of session rooms Connection Centers, Social Avenue, Lounges Registration The Howard Street Tent and Taylor Street Cafe tented venues Oracle Square (Union Square) Yerba Buena Gardens Masonic Auditorium Sessions and demos at 8 hotel venues That's a whole lot of networking going on. And here's the kicker: the team has only 4 days to bring get it all up and running across these many venues, and exactly 12 hours to take it all down once the show ends. The Global IT team puts in the equivalent of 152 24-hour days for set-up, 227 24-hour days of support during the conferences, and then tears it all down in about 20 24-hour days. And in case you were wondering, the planning for next year's Oracle OpenWorld starts ... next week. No rest for the weary.  Now THAT's networking!  So hats off to the Global IT team -- the job ain't easy, but somebody's got to do it, and they do it remarkably well.

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• Is there value in unit testing auto implemented properties

  - by ahsteele

  It seems exceptionally heavy handed but going by the rule anything publicly available should be tested should auto-implemented properties be tested? Customer Class public class Customer { public string EmailAddr { get; set; } } Tested by [TestClass] public class CustomerTests : TestClassBase { [TestMethod] public void CanSetCustomerEmailAddress() { //Arrange Customer customer = new Customer(); //Act customer.EmailAddr = "[email protected]"; //Assert Assert.AreEqual("[email protected]", customer.EmailAddr); } }

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• Dynamic swappable Data Access Layer

  - by Andy

  I'm writing a data driven WPF client. The client will typically pull data from a WCF service, which queries a SQL db, but I'd like the option to pull the data directly from SQL or other arbitrary data sources. I've come up with this design and would like to hear your opinion on whether it is the best design. First, we have some data object we'd like to extract from SQL. // The Data Object with a single property public class Customer { private string m_Name = string.Empty; public string Name { get { return m_Name; } set { m_Name = value;} } } Then I plan on using an interface which all data access layers should implement. Suppose one could also use an abstract class. Thoughts? // The interface with a single method interface ICustomerFacade { List<Customer> GetAll(); } One can create a SQL implementation. // Sql Implementation public class SqlCustomrFacade : ICustomerFacade { public List<Customer> GetAll() { // Query SQL db and return something useful // ... return new List<Customer>(); } } We can also create a WCF implementation. The problem with WCF is is that it doesn't use the same data object. It creates its own local version, so we would have to copy the details over somehow. I suppose one could use reflection to copy the values of similar fields across. Thoughts? // Wcf Implementation public class WcfCustomrFacade : ICustomerFacade { public List<Customer> GetAll() { // Get date from the Wcf Service (not defined here) List<WcfService.Customer> wcfCustomers = wcfService.GetAllCustomers(); // The list we're going to return List<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>(); // This is horrible foreach(WcfService.Customer wcfCustomer in wcfCustomers) { Customer customer = new Customer(); customer.Name = wcfCustomer.Name; customers.Add(customer); } return customers; } } I also plan on using a factory to decide which facade to use. // Factory pattern public class FacadeFactory() { public static ICustomerFacade CreateCustomerFacade() { // Determine the facade to use if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DAL"] == "Sql") return new SqlCustomrFacade(); else return new WcfCustomrFacade(); } } This is how the DAL would typically be used. // Test application public class MyApp { public static void Main() { ICustomerFacade cf = FacadeFactory.CreateCustomerFacade(); cf.GetAll(); } } I appreciate your thoughts and time.

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• WCF + json. WCF response invalid not expected string.

  - by Evgeny

  I have configured wcf service and method which return some structure. The problem that all symbols in response '\' begins with '/' Example: [ { "rel":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order", "uri":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order\/3" }, { "rel":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order", "uri":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order\/5" }, { "rel":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order", "uri":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order\/8" } ] And i return only http:\localhost:3354\customer\1\order ! Why that symbols added and how can i remove them?

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• Update single field

  - by 47

  I have a Customer class which has a representative field....this field is initially blank but when the user opens up the details page of the chosen customer, they'll be given the open of representing this customer by clicking on a link. The template layout I was thinking of is this: <strong>Representative: </strong> {% if customer.representative %} {{ customer.representative }} {% else %} <a href="{% url representCustomer customer.id %}">Represent this customer.</a> {% endif %} All that remains is the view to effect this...this is where I'm stuck.

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• Updating a sql server table with data from another table

  - by David G

  I have two basic SQL Server tables: Customer (ID [pk], AddressLine1, AddressLine2, AddressCity, AddressDistrict, AddressPostalCode) CustomerAddress(ID [pk], CustomerID [fk], Line1, Line2, City, District, PostalCode) CustomerAddress contains multiple addresses for the Customer record. For each Customer record I want to merge the most recent CustomerAddress record where most recent is determined by the highest CustomerAddress ID value. I've currently got the following: UPDATE Customer SET AddressLine1 = CustomerAddress.Line1, AddressPostalCode = CustomerAddress.PostalCode FROM Customer, CustomerAddress WHERE Customer.ID = CustomerAddress.CustomerID which works but how can I ensure that the most recent (highest ID) CustomerAddress record is selected to update the Customer table?

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• "Has Oracle written the script for CRM success?" - Anthony Lye on Customer Experience at BAFTA

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Anthony Lye showcased Oracle Fusion CRM at a BAFTA gathering, and MyCustomer.com covered the story under the title of "Has Oracle written the script for CRM success?' According to MyCustomer.com, "Oracle's SVP of CRM Anthony Lye set the scene for the event, suggesting products are becoming commoditized, so that the only way to differentiate is through the relationship with the customer. But he warned that "customers are more and more in control of that relationship, so you have to provide great experiences for them." "The quickest win within your organization to create a single view is to connect your marketing organization with your selling organization, align goals, processes, people and technology," Anthony explained.   "And this is a transition that is already happening - "VPs of marketing have started turning up in the same meetings as VPs of sales, we have started to see that they want to work together" - but this convergence needs nurturing." "In Fusion there are capabilities to align the organisation - we enable marketing on the same platform to build campaigns connected to sales stages. It can affect leads and opportunities at the top end of the funnel. And the selling organisation can take advantage of marketing content - the materials that are exclusively within marketing can now be used by sales. Your sales teams have been campaigning forever, but it's usually by email, it isn't aligned with the corporate message and it's being sent to people it shouldn't. By aligning them we can increase output and the quality of that output." Anthony concluded: "Operating in a disconnected fashion having two distinct systems will cost you time and money. So we feel there's a material advantage in a solution like this." Enjoy the full story at http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/marketing/has-oracle-written-script-crm-success/139958

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• Null Values And The T-SQL IN Operator

  - by Jesse

  I came across some unexpected behavior while troubleshooting a failing test the other day that took me long enough to figure out that I thought it was worth sharing here. I finally traced the failing test back to a SELECT statement in a stored procedure that was using the IN t-sql operator to exclude a certain set of values. Here’s a very simple example table to illustrate the issue: Customers CustomerId INT, NOT NULL, Primary Key CustomerName nvarchar(100) NOT NULL SalesRegionId INT NULL   The ‘SalesRegionId’ column contains a number representing the sales region that the customer belongs to. This column is nullable because new customers get created all the time but assigning them to sales regions is a process that is handled by a regional manager on a periodic basis. For the purposes of this example, the Customers table currently has the following rows: CustomerId CustomerName SalesRegionId 1 Customer A 1 2 Customer B NULL 3 Customer C 4 4 Customer D 2 5 Customer E 3   How could we write a query against this table for all customers that are NOT in sales regions 2 or 4? You might try something like this: 1: SELECT 2: CustomerId, 3: CustomerName, 4: SalesRegionId 5: FROM Customers 6: WHERE SalesRegionId NOT IN (2,4)   Will this work? In short, no; at least not in the way that you might expect. Here’s what this query will return given the example data we’re working with: CustomerId CustomerName SalesRegionId 1 Customer A 1 5 Customer E 5   I was expecting that this query would also return ‘Customer B’, since that customer has a NULL SalesRegionId. In my mind, having a customer with no sales region should be included in a set of customers that are not in sales regions 2 or 4.When I first started troubleshooting my issue I made note of the fact that this query should probably be re-written without the NOT IN clause, but I didn’t suspect that the NOT IN clause was actually the source of the issue. This particular query was only one minor piece in a much larger process that was being exercised via an automated integration test and I simply made a poor assumption that the NOT IN would work the way that I thought it should. So why doesn’t this work the way that I thought it should? From the MSDN documentation on the t-sql IN operator: If the value of test_expression is equal to any value returned by subquery or is equal to any expression from the comma-separated list, the result value is TRUE; otherwise, the result value is FALSE. Using NOT IN negates the subquery value or expression. The key phrase out of that quote is, “… is equal to any expression from the comma-separated list…”. The NULL SalesRegionId isn’t included in the NOT IN because of how NULL values are handled in equality comparisons. From the MSDN documentation on ANSI_NULLS: The SQL-92 standard requires that an equals (=) or not equal to (<>) comparison against a null value evaluates to FALSE. When SET ANSI_NULLS is ON, a SELECT statement using WHERE column_name = NULL returns zero rows even if there are null values in column_name. A SELECT statement using WHERE column_name <> NULL returns zero rows even if there are nonnull values in column_name. In fact, the MSDN documentation on the IN operator includes the following blurb about using NULL values in IN sub-queries or expressions that are used with the IN operator: Any null values returned by subquery or expression that are compared to test_expression using IN or NOT IN return UNKNOWN. Using null values in together with IN or NOT IN can produce unexpected results. If I were to include a ‘SET ANSI_NULLS OFF’ command right above my SELECT statement I would get ‘Customer B’ returned in the results, but that’s definitely not the right way to deal with this. We could re-write the query to explicitly include the NULL value in the WHERE clause: 1: SELECT 2: CustomerId, 3: CustomerName, 4: SalesRegionId 5: FROM Customers 6: WHERE (SalesRegionId NOT IN (2,4) OR SalesRegionId IS NULL)   This query works and properly includes ‘Customer B’ in the results, but I ultimately opted to re-write the query using a LEFT OUTER JOIN against a table variable containing all of the values that I wanted to exclude because, in my case, there could potentially be several hundred values to be excluded. If we were to apply the same refactoring to our simple sales region example we’d end up with: 1: DECLARE @regionsToIgnore TABLE (IgnoredRegionId INT) 2: INSERT @regionsToIgnore values (2),(4) 3:  4: SELECT 5: c.CustomerId, 6: c.CustomerName, 7: c.SalesRegionId 8: FROM Customers c 9: LEFT OUTER JOIN @regionsToIgnore r ON r.IgnoredRegionId = c.SalesRegionId 10: WHERE r.IgnoredRegionId IS NULL By performing a LEFT OUTER JOIN from Customers to the @regionsToIgnore table variable we can simply exclude any rows where the IgnoredRegionId is null, as those represent customers that DO NOT appear in the ignored regions list. This approach will likely perform better if the number of sales regions to ignore gets very large and it also will correctly include any customers that do not yet have a sales region.

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• NINTENDO, EDCON and ALLEGIS GROUP @ Oracle Open World 2012 Conference Session (CON9418): The Business Case for Oracle Exalogic: A Customer Perspective

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

   Are you looking to deliver breakthrough performance for packaged and custom  applications? For many front-office applications such as Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle Transportation Management, and Oracle’s ATG and Siebel product families,  improved  performance leads directly to greater revenue or cost savings from the business - a  compelling  proposition. For back-office applications, improved performance has tangible benefits  in terms of  footprint reductions. For all applications, Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata provide an engineered solution that provides shorter time to value and lower operational costs.  Edcon is a leading clothing, footwear and textiles (CFT) retailing group in southern Africa trading through a range of retail formats. The Company has grown from opening it's first store in 1929, to ten retail brands trading in over 1000 stores in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho. Edcon's retail business has, through recent acquisitions, added top stationery and houseware brands as well as general merchandise to its CFT portfolio. Edcon was looking to consolidate their existing middleware components (Weblogic and Oracle SOA) and retail applications (Retek, Siebel and E-Business Suite) on a common platform and turned to Oracle Exalogic. With Oracle Exalogic, Edcon is able to derive significant HW CAPEX savings, improve response-time of core business applications and mitigate operating risk. Hear senior business leaders from Nintendo, Edcon and Allegis Group discuss how the business value of  leveraging Oracle Exalogic at the following conference session at Oracle Open World 2012: Session:  CON9418 - The Business Case for Oracle Exalogic: A Customer PerspectiveDate: Monday, 1 Oct, 2012Time: 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm (PST)Venue: Moscone South (306)

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• TFS Solution build cascading to several other builds even when common components were not modified

  - by Bob Palmer

  Hey all, here is the issue I am currently trying to work through. We are using Team Foundation Server 2008, and utilizing the automated build support out of the box. We have one very large project that encompasses a number of interrelated components and web sites, each of which is set up as a Visual Studio solution file. Many of these solutions are highly interrelated since they may contain applications, or contain common libraries or shared components. We have roughly 20 or so applications, three large web sites, and about 20 components. Each solution may include projects from other solutions. For example, a solution for a console app would also include the project files for all of the components it utilizes, since we need to ensure that when someone changes a component and rebuilds it, it is reflected in all of the projects that consume that component, and we can make sure nothing was broken. We have build projects for each solution, whether that's an application, component, or web site. For this example, we will call them solutions 01, 02, and 03. These reference multiple projects (both their own core project and test projects, plus the projects relating to various components). Solution 01 has projects A, B, and C. Solution 02 has projects C, D, and E. Solution 03 has projects E, F, and G. Now, for the problem. If I modify project A, the system will end up rebuilding all three solutions. Worse, all thirty solutions reference common projects used for data access (let's call it project H). Because they all share one project in common, if I modify any solution in my stack, even if it does not touch project H, I still end up kicking off every single build script. Any thoughts on how to address this? Ideally I would only want to kick off builds where their constituant projects were directly modified - i.e in the example below, if I modified project C, I would only rebuild solutions 01 and 02. Thanks!

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• How/when to hire new programmers, and how to integrate them?

  - by Shaul

  Hiring new programmers, especially in a small company, can often present a Catch-22 situation. We have too much work to do, so we need to hire new programmers. But we can't hire new programmers now, because they will need mentoring and several months of learning curve in your industry/product/environment before they're useful, and none of the programmers has time to be a mentor to a new programmer, because they're all completely swamped with the current work load. That may be a slightly frivolous way of describing the situation, but nevertheless, it's difficult for a small company on a tight budget to justify hiring someone who is not only going to be unproductive for a long time, but will also take away from the performance of the current programmers. How have you dealt with this kind of situation? When is the best time to hire someone? What are the best tasks to assign to a new team member so that they can learn their way around your code base and start getting their hands dirty as quickly as possible? How do you get the new guy useful without bogging your existing programmers down in too much mentoring? Any comments & suggestions you have are much appreciated!

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• TFS Folders - Getting them to work like Subversion "Trunk/Tags/Branches"

  - by Sam Schutte

  I recently started using Team Foundation Server, and am having some trouble getting it to work the way I want it to. I've used Subversion for a couple years now, and love the way it works. I always set up three folders under each project, Trunk, Tags, and Branches. When I'm working on a project, all my code lives under a folder called "C:\dev\projectname". This "projectname" folder can be made to point to either trunk, or any of the branches or tags using Subversion (with the switch command). Now that I'm using TFS (my client's system), I'd like things to work the same way. I created a "Trunk" folder with my project in it, and mapped "Project/Trunk/Website" to "c:\dev\Website". Now, I want to make a release under the "tags" folder (located in "Project/Tags/Version 1.0/Website", and TFS is giving me the following error when I execute the branch command: "No appropriate mapping exists for $Project/tags/Version 1.0/Website" From what I can find on the internet, TFS expects you to have a mapping to your hard drive at the root of the project (the "Project" folder in my case), and then have all the source code that lives in trunk, tags and branches all pulled down to your hard drive. This sucks because it requires way too much stuff on your hard drive, and even worse, when you are working in a solution in Visual Studio, you won't be able to pull down "Version 2.0" and have all your project references to other projects work, because they'll all be pointing to "trunk" folders under the main folder, not just the main folder itself. What I want to do is have the root "Project/Website" folder on my hard drive, and be able to have it point to (mapped to) either tags, branches, or trunk, depending on what i'm doing, without having to screw around with fixing Visual Studio project references. Ideas?

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• Should I use MEF or Prism for my Silverlight project?

  - by Daniel

  Hi! My team(3 developers) will be building a Silverlight LOB application. This is the first Silverlight project for us. We've been doing mostly Winforms. We'll be using Silverlight4 / VS2010 / possibly WCF RIA Services, and ASP.NET Web application to handle authentication and host the silverlight pages. We need a way to.. Modularize the silverlight project so we can work in different parts of the application, then integrate them. Dynamically load different parts of the application, so the initial download size of the xap file wouldn't be too large. After some research, I found out that Prism and MEF are possible solutions to these goals. Can you give me advice on which framework to use? or possibly another solution? We don't have much experience on Silverlight and the project needs to be finished in 3 months, so the learning curves for frameworks should be considered. Thank you for reading! Any inputs will be much appreciated.

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• What are some commonly used source code check-in policies?

  - by rwmnau

  I'm curious what code review policies other development shops apply to their source code when it's checked into the source control repository. I'm setting up a TFS (Team Foundation) server, and I'd like to apply some check-in policies to start to stamp out bad practices. For example, I was thinking of starting with the following couple, so this is the kind of stuff I'm looking for: Prohibit empty "Catch" blocks. This would prevent applications from swallowing any exceptions without at least requiring a comment explaining why it's not necessary to do anything with the exception. Prohibit "Catch ex as Exception" generic exception handling. Instead, require code to catch specific types of exceptions and deal with them appropriately, instead of just building catch-all handling. Require a check-in comment. This one should be self-explanatory, though it seems that TFS (and most other source-control systems) don't require a comment by default. While these are just examples, they're where I'm thinking of starting, and while I'd like some additional examples of what's popular, I'm open to feedback on these. Also, though we're a mostly .NET shop, I imagine the popular policies are universal across languages and IDEs (we have some Java development and a few people who will use the repository develop with Eclipse).

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• Using git (or some other VCS) at your company

  - by supercheetah

  Some friends of mine and I were talking recently about version control, and how they were using VSS at their jobs, and were probably going to be moving off of that soon. One of them said that his company will likely be going with Team Foundation Server. Eventually, the conversation did get around to talking about some of the open source VCSes out there, including git and SVN. None of us really knew about any companies that use either of these internally, although we imagined that a number of them did so for SVN, but we weren't too sure about git. I brought up Google and Android using it, but my friend figured that's only for the public facing source code, and that they may use something different for internal projects. Apparently it's more than just SCM that makes TFS so intriguing: Microsoft Sales people and support (although my friend did point out somethings to his managers that he thought might be misleading on MS' part) Integration of things beyond SCM, including project management (I'm just finding out that there are geared towards the same things for git) Again, it's Microsoft, and the transition from VSS to TFS seems logical (or does it?) I'm not much of a fan of SVN, so I didn't really bring it up much, but I am curious about whether or not git is used at your company for internal projects. Have you thought about it, and decided against it? Any reason why?

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• Lessons learnt in implementing Scrum in a Large Organization that has traditional values

  - by MarkPearl

  I recently had the experience of being involved in a “test” scrum implementation in a large organization that was used to a traditional project management approach. Here are some lessons that I learnt from it. Don’t let the Project Manager be the Product Owner First lesson learnt is to identify the correct product owner – in this instance the product manager assumed the role of the product owner which was a mistake. The product owner is the one who has the most to loose if the project fails. With a methodology that advocates removing the role of the project manager from the process then it is not in the interests of the person who is employed as a project manager to be the product owner – in fact they have the most to gain should the project fail. Know the time commitments of team members to the Project Second lesson learnt is to get a firm time commitment of the members on a team for the sprint and to hold them to it. In this project instance many of the issues we faced were with team members having to double up on supporting existing projects/systems and the scrum project. In many situations they just didn’t get round to doing any work on the scrum project for several days while they tried to meet other commitments. Initially this was not made transparent to the team – in stand up team members would say that had done some work but would be very vague on how much time they had actually spent using the blackhole of their other legacy projects as an excuse – putting up a time burn down chart made time allocations transparent and easy to hold the team to. In addition, how can you plan for a sprint without knowing the actual time available of the members – when I mean actual time, the exercise of getting them to go through all their appointments and lunch times and breaks and removing them from their time commitment helps get you to a realistic time that they can dedicate. Make sure you meet your minimum team sizes In a recent post I wrote about the difference between a partnership and a team. If you are going to do scrum in a large organization make sure you have a minimum team size of at least 3 developers. My experience with larger organizations is that people have a tendency to be sick more, take more leave and generally not be around – if you have a team size of two it is so easy to loose momentum on the project – the more people you have in the team (up to about 9) the more the momentum the project will have when people are not around. Swapping from one methodology to another can seem as waste to the customer It sounds bad, but most customers don’t care what methodology you use. Often they have bought into the “big plan upfront”. If you can, avoid taking a project on midstream from a traditional approach unless the customer has not bought into the process – with this particular project they had a detailed upfront planning breakaway with the customer using the traditional approach and then before the project started we moved onto a scrum implementation – this seemed as waste to the customer. We should have managed the customers expectation properly. Don’t play the role of the scrum master if you can’t be the scrum master With this particular implementation I was the “scrum master”. But all I did was go through the process of the formal meetings of scrum – I attended stand up, retrospectives and planning – but I was not hands on the ground. I was not performing the most important role of removing blockages – and by the end of the project there were a number of blockages “cropping up”. What could have been a better approach was to take someone on the team and train them to be the scrum master and be present to coach them. Alternatively actually be on the team on a fulltime basis and be the scrum master. By just going through the meetings of scrum didn’t mean we were doing scrum. So we failed with this one, if you fail look at it from an agile perspective As this particular project drew to a close and it became more and more apparent that it was not going to succeed the failure of it became depressing. Emotions were expressed by various people on the team that we not encouraging and enforced the failure. Embracing the failure and looking at it for what it is instead of taking it as the end of the world can change how you grow from the experience. Acknowledging that it failed and then focussing on learning from why and how to avoid the failure in the future can change how you feel emotionally about the team, the project and the organization.

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