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  • My First Iteration Zero

    - by onefloridacoder
    I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

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  • Handling "related" work within a single agile work item

    - by Tesserex
    I'm on a project team of 4 devs, myself included. We've been having a long discussion on how to handle extra work that comes up in the course of a single work item. This extra work is usually things that are slightly related to the task, but not always necessary to accomplish the goal of the item (that may be an opinion). Examples include but are not limited to: refactoring of the code changed by the work item refactoring code neighboring the code changed by the item re-architecting the larger code area around the ticket. For example if an item has you changing a single function, you realize the entire class now could be redone to better accommodate this change. improving the UI on a form you just modified When this extra work is small we don't mind. The problem is when this extra work causes a substantial extension of the item beyond the original feature point estimation. Sometimes a 5 point item will actually take 13 points of time. In one case we had a 13 point item that in retrospect could have been 80 points or more. There are two options going around in our discussion for how to handle this. We can accept the extra work in the same work item, and write it off as a mis-estimation. Arguments for this have included: We plan for "padding" at the end of the sprint to account for this sort of thing. Always leave the code in better shape than you found it. Don't check in half-assed work. If we leave refactoring for later, it's hard to schedule and may never get done. You are in the best mental "context" to handle this work now, since you're waist deep in the code already. Better to get it out of the way now and be more efficient than to lose that context when you come back later. We draw a line for the current work item, and say that the extra work goes into a separate ticket. Arguments include: Having a separate ticket allows for a new estimation, so we aren't lying to ourselves about how many points things really are, or having to admit that all of our estimations are terrible. The sprint "padding" is meant for unexpected technical challenges that are direct barriers to completing the ticket requirements. It is not intended for side items that are just "nice-to-haves". If you want to schedule refactoring, just put it at the top of the backlog. There is no way for us to properly account for this stuff in an estimation, since it seems somewhat arbitrary when it comes up. A code reviewer might say "those UI controls (which you actually didn't modify in this work item) are a bit confusing, can you fix that too?" which is like an hour, but they might say "Well if this control now inherits from the same base class as the others, why don't you move all of this (hundreds of lines of) code into the base and rewire all this stuff, the cascading changes, etc.?" And that takes a week. It "contaminates the crime scene" by adding unrelated work into the ticket, making our original feature point estimates meaningless. In some cases, the extra work postpones a check-in, causing blocking between devs. Some of us are now saying that we should decide some cut off, like if the additional stuff is less than 2 FP, it goes in the same ticket, if it's more, make it a new ticket. Since we're only a few months into using Agile, what's the opinion of all the more seasoned Agile veterans around here on how to handle this?

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  • Impressions of Pivotal Tracker

    Pivotal Tracker is a free, online agile project management system. Ive been using it recently to better communicate to customers about the current state of our project. In Pivotal Tracker, the unit of work is a story and stories are arranged into iterations or delivery cycles. Stories can be any level of granularity you want, but the idea is to use stories to communicate clearly to customers, so you dont want to write a novel. You especially dont want to write a list of detailed programming tasks. A good story for a point of sale system might be: Allow managers to override the price of an item while ringing up a customer. A less useful story: Script out the process of adding a manager flag to the user table and stage that script into the deploy directory. Stories are estimated using a point scale, by default 1, 2 or 3. Iterations are then automatically laid out by combining enough tasks to fill the point total for that period of time. You have to start with a guess on how many points your team can do in an iteration, then adjust with real data as you complete iterations. This is basic agile methodology, but where Pivotal Tracker adds value is that it automatically and graphically lays out iterations for you on your project site. This makes communication and planning easy. Compiling release notes is no longer painful as it has been clear from the outset what work is going on. While I much prefer Pivotal Trackers customer facing interface over what we used previously (TFS), I see a couple of gaps. First, I have not able to make much headway with the reporting tools. Despite my complaints about TFS, it can produce some nice reports. Second, its not clear where if at all, Id keep track of purely internal tasks. Im talking about server maintenance, cleaning up source control, checking back on some code which you never quite felt right about. Theres no purpose in cluttering up an iteration backlog with these items, but if you dont track them, you lose them. Im not sure what a good answer for that is. One gap I thought Id see, which I dont, is more granular dev tasks. If Im implementing a story, Ill write out the steps and track my progress, but really, those steps arent useful to anybody but me. The only time Ive found that level of detail really useful is when my tasks are defined at too high a level anyway or when Im working with someone who needs more coaching and might not be able to finish a story in time without some scaffolding to get them going. You can learn more about Pivotal Tracker at: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/learnmore.   --- Relevant Links --- A good intro to stories: http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/userStory.htmDid 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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  • Projet Doneness and Einstein's Razor

    - by Malcolm Anderson
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I’ve started working on a series of articles about the value of having testers involved in requirements gathering.  Today I was reminded of a useful tool that has provided value to me for at least 20 years.  To those of you who already use this tool, I’m interested in your stories where it has made a difference for you, and to those of you who have never heard of it, I hope sharing it will make a difference in your careers.   I was reminded of it because I just finished a 3 month set of personal projects and was reviewing the success of those projects while putting together my next set of 3 month projects.  During this review, I noticed that a good number of my projects did not have the level of success that I wanted.  The results were good, but they could have been better.  Then it hit me, I didn’t have clear enough doneness criteria.  As a Scrum Practitioner, I wouldn’t think of running a sprint without reviewing the backlog with Einstein's Razor, so why wouldn’t I do the same for my own projects?    I can hear a few of you asking "What's Einstein's Razor?"   I'm glad you asked.  I was once told that Einstein told an audience, "If you can't explain what you do to a relatively bright six year old, you probably don't understand it yourself."    This quote had an impact on me, especially early in my career as a solo developer.  At the time, I was mostly doing end to end software development.  I found that I saved myself a lot of pain and trouble by turning that quote around to “If you can't explain your project's doneness criteria in such a way that a relatively bright six year old can't competently determine your projects success or failure, then you have not broken it down to a fine enough level.”  There are more negatives in that quote than I’m happy with, but it still gives me tons of value to this day.     In your opinion, in your current projects, could a 6 year old competently pass or fail your next sprint?  What risks are you running if your answer is “No” ?

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  • Using WKA in Large Coherence Clusters (Disabling Multicast)

    - by jpurdy
    Disabling hardware multicast (by configuring well-known addresses aka WKA) will place significant stress on the network. For messages that must be sent to multiple servers, rather than having a server send a single packet to the switch and having the switch broadcast that packet to the rest of the cluster, the server must send a packet to each of the other servers. While hardware varies significantly, consider that a server with a single gigabit connection can send at most ~70,000 packets per second. To continue with some concrete numbers, in a cluster with 500 members, that means that each server can send at most 140 cluster-wide messages per second. And if there are 10 cluster members on each physical machine, that number shrinks to 14 cluster-wide messages per second (or with only mild hyperbole, roughly zero). It is also important to keep in mind that network I/O is not only expensive in terms of the network itself, but also the consumption of CPU required to send (or receive) a message (due to things like copying the packet bytes, processing a interrupt, etc). Fortunately, Coherence is designed to rely primarily on point-to-point messages, but there are some features that are inherently one-to-many: Announcing the arrival or departure of a member Updating partition assignment maps across the cluster Creating or destroying a NamedCache Invalidating a cache entry from a large number of client-side near caches Distributing a filter-based request across the full set of cache servers (e.g. queries, aggregators and entry processors) Invoking clear() on a NamedCache The first few of these are operations that are primarily routed through a single senior member, and also occur infrequently, so they usually are not a primary consideration. There are cases, however, where the load from introducing new members can be substantial (to the point of destabilizing the cluster). Consider the case where cluster in the first paragraph grows from 500 members to 1000 members (holding the number of physical machines constant). During this period, there will be 500 new member introductions, each of which may consist of several cluster-wide operations (for the cluster membership itself as well as the partitioned cache services, replicated cache services, invocation services, management services, etc). Note that all of these introductions will route through that one senior member, which is sharing its network bandwidth with several other members (which will be communicating to a lesser degree with other members throughout this process). While each service may have a distinct senior member, there's a good chance during initial startup that a single member will be the senior for all services (if those services start on the senior before the second member joins the cluster). It's obvious that this could cause CPU and/or network starvation. In the current release of Coherence (3.7.1.3 as of this writing), the pure unicast code path also has less sophisticated flow-control for cluster-wide messages (compared to the multicast-enabled code path), which may also result in significant heap consumption on the senior member's JVM (from the message backlog). This is almost never a problem in practice, but with sufficient CPU or network starvation, it could become critical. For the non-operational concerns (near caches, queries, etc), the application itself will determine how much load is placed on the cluster. Applications intended for deployment in a pure unicast environment should be careful to avoid excessive dependence on these features. Even in an environment with multicast support, these operations may scale poorly since even with a constant request rate, the underlying workload will increase at roughly the same rate as the underlying resources are added. Unless there is an infrastructural requirement to the contrary, multicast should be enabled. If it can't be enabled, care should be taken to ensure the added overhead doesn't lead to performance or stability issues. This is particularly crucial in large clusters.

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  • Make Python Socket Server More Efficient

    - by BenMills
    I have very little experience working with sockets and multithreaded programming so to learn more I decided to see if I could hack together a little python socket server to power a chat room. I ended up getting it working pretty well but then I noticed my server's CPU usage spiked up over 100% when I had it running in the background. Here is my code in full: http://gist.github.com/332132 I know this is a pretty open ended question so besides just helping with my code are there any good articles I could read that could help me learn more about this? My full code: import select import socket import sys import threading from daemon import Daemon class Server: def __init__(self): self.host = '' self.port = 9998 self.backlog = 5 self.size = 1024 self.server = None self.threads = [] self.send_count = 0 def open_socket(self): try: self.server = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET6, socket.SOCK_STREAM) self.server.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1) self.server.bind((self.host,self.port)) self.server.listen(5) print "Server Started..." except socket.error, (value,message): if self.server: self.server.close() print "Could not open socket: " + message sys.exit(1) def remove_thread(self, t): t.join() def send_to_children(self, msg): self.send_count = 0 for t in self.threads: t.send_msg(msg) print 'Sent to '+str(self.send_count)+" of "+str(len(self.threads)) def run(self): self.open_socket() input = [self.server,sys.stdin] running = 1 while running: inputready,outputready,exceptready = select.select(input,[],[]) for s in inputready: if s == self.server: # handle the server socket c = Client(self.server.accept(), self) c.start() self.threads.append(c) print "Num of clients: "+str(len(self.threads)) self.server.close() for c in self.threads: c.join() class Client(threading.Thread): def __init__(self,(client,address), server): threading.Thread.__init__(self) self.client = client self.address = address self.size = 1024 self.server = server self.running = True def send_msg(self, msg): if self.running: self.client.send(msg) self.server.send_count += 1 def run(self): while self.running: data = self.client.recv(self.size) if data: print data self.server.send_to_children(data) else: self.running = False self.server.threads.remove(self) self.client.close() """ Run Server """ class DaemonServer(Daemon): def run(self): s = Server() s.run() if __name__ == "__main__": d = DaemonServer('/var/servers/fserver.pid') if len(sys.argv) == 2: if 'start' == sys.argv[1]: d.start() elif 'stop' == sys.argv[1]: d.stop() elif 'restart' == sys.argv[1]: d.restart() else: print "Unknown command" sys.exit(2) sys.exit(0) else: print "usage: %s start|stop|restart" % sys.argv[0] sys.exit(2)

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  • Clojure agents consuming from a queue

    - by erikcw
    I'm trying to figure out the best way to use agents to consume items from a Message Queue (Amazon SQS). Right now I have a function (process-queue-item) that grabs an items from the queue, and processes it. I want to process these items concurrently, but I can't wrap my head around how to control the agents. Basically I want to keep all of the agents busy as much as possible without pulling to many items from the Queue and developing a backlog (I'll have this running on a couple of machines, so items need to be left in the queue until they are really needed). Can anyone give me some pointers on improving my implementation? (def active-agents (ref 0)) (defn process-queue-item [_] (dosync (alter active-agents inc)) ;retrieve item from Message Queue (Amazon SQS) and process (dosync (alter active-agents dec))) (defn -main [] (def agents (for [x (range 20)] (agent x))) (loop [loop-count 0] (if (< @active-agents 20) (doseq [agent agents] (if (agent-errors agent) (clear-agent-errors agent)) ;should skip this agent until later if it is still busy processing (not sure how) (send-off agent process-queue-item))) ;(apply await-for (* 10 1000) agents) (Thread/sleep 10000) (logging/info (str "ACTIVE AGENTS " @active-agents)) (if (> 10 loop-count) (do (logging/info (str "done, let's cleanup " count)) (doseq [agent agents] (if (agent-errors agent) (clear-agent-errors agent))) (apply await agents) (shutdown-agents)) (recur (inc count)))))

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  • Python Socket Getting Connection Reset

    - by Ian
    I created a threaded socket listener that stores newly accepted connections in a queue. The socket threads then read from the queue and respond. For some reason, when doing benchmarking with 'ab' (apache benchmark) using a concurrency of 2 or more, I always get a connection reset before it's able to complete the benchmark (this is taking place locally, so there's no external connection issue). class server: _ip = '' _port = 8888 def __init__(self, ip=None, port=None): if ip is not None: self._ip = ip if port is not None: self._port = port self.server_listener(self._ip, self._port) def now(self): return time.ctime(time.time()) def http_responder(self, conn, addr): httpobj = http_builder() httpobj.header('HTTP/1.1 200 OK') httpobj.header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8') httpobj.header('Connection: close') httpobj.body("Everything looks good") data = httpobj.generate() sent = conn.sendall(data) def http_thread(self, id): self.log("THREAD %d: Starting Up..." % id) while True: conn, addr = self.q.get() ip, port = addr self.log("THREAD %d: responding to request: %s:%s - %s" % (id, ip, port, self.now())) self.http_responder(conn, addr) self.q.task_done() conn.close() def server_listener(self, host, port): self.q = Queue.Queue(0) sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.bind( (host, port) ) sock.listen(5) for i in xrange(4): #thread count thread.start_new(self.http_thread, (i+1, )) while True: self.q.put(sock.accept()) sock.close() server('', 9999) When running the benchmark, I get totally random numbers of good requests before it errors out, usually between 4 and 500. Edit: Took me a while to figure it out, but the problem was in sock.listen(5). Because I was using apache benchmark with a higher concurrency (5 and up) it was causing the backlog of connections to pile up, at which point the connections started getting dropped by the socket.

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  • Java Stop Server Thread

    - by ikurtz
    the following code is server code in my app: private int serverPort; private Thread serverThread = null; public void networkListen(int port){ serverPort = port; if (serverThread == null){ Runnable serverRunnable = new ServerRunnable(); serverThread = new Thread(serverRunnable); serverThread.start(); } else { } } public class ServerRunnable implements Runnable { public void run(){ try { //networkConnected = false; //netMessage = "Listening for Connection"; //networkMessage = new NetworkMessage(networkConnected, netMessage); //setChanged(); //notifyObservers(networkMessage); ServerSocket serverSocket = new ServerSocket(serverPort, backlog); commSocket = serverSocket.accept(); serverSocket.close(); serverSocket = null; //networkConnected = true; //netMessage = "Connected: " + commSocket.getInetAddress().getHostAddress() + ":" + //commSocket.getPort(); //networkMessage = new NetworkMessage(networkConnected, netMessage); //setChanged(); //notifyObservers(networkMessage); } catch (IOException e){ //networkConnected = false; //netMessage = "ServerRunnable Network Unavailable"; //System.out.println(e.getMessage()); //networkMessage = new NetworkMessage(networkConnected, netMessage); //setChanged(); //notifyObservers(networkMessage); } } } The code sort of works i.e. if im attempting a straight connection both ends communicate and update. The issue is while im listening for a connection if i want to quit listening then the server thread continues running and causes problems. i know i should not use .stop() on a thread so i was wondering what the solution would look like with this in mind? EDIT: commented out unneeded code.

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  • PHP Check slave status without mysql_connect timeout issues

    - by Jonathon
    I have a web-app that has a master mysql db and four slave dbs. I want to handle all (or almost all) read-only (SELECT) queries from the slaves. Our load-balancer sends the user to one of the slave machines automatically, since they are also running Apache/PHP and serving webpages. I am using an include file to setup the connection to the databases, such as: //for master server (i.e. - UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE statements) $Host = "10.0.0.x"; $User = "xx"; $Password = "xx"; $Link = mysql_connect( $Host, $User, $Password ); if( !$Link ) ) { die( "Master database is currently unavailable. Please try again later." ); } //this connection can be used for READ-ONLY (i.e. - SELECT statements) on the localhost $Host_Local = "localhost"; $User_Local = "xx"; $Password_Local = "xx"; $Link_Local = mysql_connect( $Host_Local, $User_Local, $Password_Local ); //fail back to master if slave db is down if( !$Link_Local ) ) { $Link_Local = mysql_connect( $Host, $User, $Password ); } I then use $Link for all update queries and $Link_Local as the connection for SELECT statements. Everything works fine until the slave server database goes down. If the local db is down, the $Link_Local = mysql_connect() call takes at least 30 seconds before it gives up on trying to connect to the localhost and returns back to the script. This causes a huge backlog of page serves and basically shuts down the system (due to the extremely slow response time). Does anyone know of a better way to handle connections to slave servers via PHP? Or, is there some kind of timeout function that could be used to stop the mysql_connect call after 2-3 seconds? Thanks for the help. I searched the other mysql_connect threads, but didn't see any that addressed this issue.

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  • Django + gunicorn + virtualenv + Supervisord issue

    - by Florian Le Goff
    Dear all, I have a strange issue with my virtualenv + gunicorn setup, only when gunicorn is launched via supervisord. I do realize that it may very well be an issue with my supervisord and I would appreciate any feedback on a better place to ask for help... In a nutshell : when I run gunicorn from my user shell, inside my virtualenv, everything is working flawlessly. I'm able to access all the views of my Django project. When gunicorn is launched by supervisord at the system startup, everything is OK. But, if I have to kill the gunicorn_django processes, or if I perform a supervisord restart, once that gunicorn_django has relaunched, every request is answered with a weird Traceback : (...) File "/home/hc/prod/venv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Django-1.2.5-py2.6.egg/django/db/__init__.py", line 77, in connection = connections[DEFAULT_DB_ALIAS] File "/home/hc/prod/venv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Django-1.2.5-py2.6.egg/django/db/utils.py", line 92, in __getitem__ backend = load_backend(db['ENGINE']) File "/home/hc/prod/venv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Django-1.2.5-py2.6.egg/django/db/utils.py", line 50, in load_backend raise ImproperlyConfigured(error_msg) TemplateSyntaxError: Caught ImproperlyConfigured while rendering: 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2' isn't an available database backend. Try using django.db.backends.XXX, where XXX is one of: 'dummy', 'mysql', 'oracle', 'postgresql', 'postgresql_psycopg2', 'sqlite3' Error was: cannot import name utils Full stack available here : http://pastebin.com/BJ5tNQ2N I'm running... Ubuntu/maverick (up-to-date) Python = 2.6.6 virtualenv = 1.5.1 gunicorn = 0.12.0 Django = 1.2.5 psycopg2 = '2.4-beta2 (dt dec pq3 ext)' gunicorn configuration : backlog = 2048 bind = "127.0.0.1:8000" pidfile = "/tmp/gunicorn-hc.pid" daemon = True debug = True workers = 3 logfile = "/home/hc/prod/log/gunicorn.log" loglevel = "info" supervisord configuration : [program:gunicorn] directory=/home/hc/prod/hc command=/home/hc/prod/venv/bin/gunicorn_django -c /home/hc/prod/hc/gunicorn.conf.py user=hc umask=022 autostart=True autorestart=True redirect_stderr=True Any advice ? I've been stuck on this one for quite a while. It seems like some weird memory limit, as I'm not enforcing anything special : $ ulimit -a core file size (blocks, -c) 0 data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited scheduling priority (-e) 20 file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 16382 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 real-time priority (-r) 0 stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) unlimited virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited file locks (-x) unlimited Thank you.

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  • Proxy / Squid 2.7 / Debian Wheezy 6.7 / lots of TCP Timed-out

    - by Maroon Ibrahim
    i'm facing a lot of TCP timed-out on a busy cache server and here below my sysctl.conf configuration as well as an output of "netstat -st" Kernel 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.57-3 x86_64 GNU/Linux Any advice or help would be highly appreciated #################### Sysctl.conf cat /etc/sysctl.conf net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 1 fs.file-max = 65536 net.ipv4.tcp_low_latency = 1 net.core.wmem_max = 8388608 net.core.rmem_max = 8388608 net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000 fs.aio-max-nr = 131072 net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 10 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 60 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl = 10 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes = 3 kernel.threads-max = 131072 kernel.msgmax = 32768 kernel.msgmni = 64 kernel.msgmnb = 65536 kernel.shmmax = 68719476736 kernel.shmall = 4294967296 net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps = 0 net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0 net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 0 net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1 net.ipv4.ip_dynaddr = 1 vm.swappiness = 0 vm.drop_caches = 3 net.ipv4.tcp_moderate_rcvbuf = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_ecn = 0 net.ipv4.tcp_max_orphans = 131072 net.ipv4.tcp_orphan_retries = 1 net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 0 net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0 net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 32768 net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 131072 net.ipv4.tcp_mem = 6085248 16227328 67108864 net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 131072 33554432 net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 174760 33554432 net.core.rmem_default = 33554432 net.core.rmem_max = 33554432 net.core.wmem_default = 33554432 net.core.wmem_max = 33554432 net.core.somaxconn = 10000 # ################ Netstat results /# netstat -st IcmpMsg: InType0: 2 InType3: 233754 InType8: 56251 InType11: 23192 OutType0: 56251 OutType3: 437 OutType8: 4 Tcp: 20680741 active connections openings 63642431 passive connection openings 1126690 failed connection attempts 2093143 connection resets received 13059 connections established 2649651696 segments received 2195445642 segments send out 183401499 segments retransmited 38299 bad segments received. 14648899 resets sent UdpLite: TcpExt: 507 SYN cookies sent 178 SYN cookies received 1376771 invalid SYN cookies received 1014577 resets received for embryonic SYN_RECV sockets 4530970 packets pruned from receive queue because of socket buffer overrun 7233 packets pruned from receive queue 688 packets dropped from out-of-order queue because of socket buffer overrun 12445 ICMP packets dropped because they were out-of-window 446 ICMP packets dropped because socket was locked 33812202 TCP sockets finished time wait in fast timer 622 TCP sockets finished time wait in slow timer 573656 packets rejects in established connections because of timestamp 133357718 delayed acks sent 23593 delayed acks further delayed because of locked socket Quick ack mode was activated 21288857 times 839 times the listen queue of a socket overflowed 839 SYNs to LISTEN sockets dropped 41 packets directly queued to recvmsg prequeue. 79166 bytes directly in process context from backlog 24 bytes directly received in process context from prequeue 2713742130 packet headers predicted 84 packets header predicted and directly queued to user 1925423249 acknowledgments not containing data payload received 877898013 predicted acknowledgments 16449673 times recovered from packet loss due to fast retransmit 17687820 times recovered from packet loss by selective acknowledgements 5047 bad SACK blocks received Detected reordering 11 times using FACK Detected reordering 1778091 times using SACK Detected reordering 97955 times using reno fast retransmit Detected reordering 280414 times using time stamp 839369 congestion windows fully recovered without slow start 4173098 congestion windows partially recovered using Hoe heuristic 305254 congestion windows recovered without slow start by DSACK 933682 congestion windows recovered without slow start after partial ack 77828 TCP data loss events TCPLostRetransmit: 5066 2618430 timeouts after reno fast retransmit 2927294 timeouts after SACK recovery 3059394 timeouts in loss state 75953830 fast retransmits 11929429 forward retransmits 51963833 retransmits in slow start 19418337 other TCP timeouts 2330398 classic Reno fast retransmits failed 2177787 SACK retransmits failed 742371590 packets collapsed in receive queue due to low socket buffer 13595689 DSACKs sent for old packets 50523 DSACKs sent for out of order packets 4658236 DSACKs received 175441 DSACKs for out of order packets received 880664 connections reset due to unexpected data 346356 connections reset due to early user close 2364841 connections aborted due to timeout TCPSACKDiscard: 1590 TCPDSACKIgnoredOld: 241849 TCPDSACKIgnoredNoUndo: 1636687 TCPSpuriousRTOs: 766073 TCPSackShifted: 74562088 TCPSackMerged: 169015212 TCPSackShiftFallback: 78391303 TCPBacklogDrop: 29 TCPReqQFullDoCookies: 507 TCPChallengeACK: 424921 TCPSYNChallenge: 170388 IpExt: InBcastPkts: 351510 InOctets: -609466797 OutOctets: -1057794685 InBcastOctets: 75631402 #

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  • Php 5.3.3. Access log

    - by irolla
    Hi I'm using php-fpm. In 5.3.2 when I'm opening phpinfo page in access log I get: ip - - [26/Aug/2010:16:35:32 +0400] "GET /phpinfo.php HTTP/1.1" 200 13322 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5" But in 5.3.3 I'm getting: ip - - [26/Aug/2010:16:30:30 +0400] "GET /phpinfo.php HTTP/1.1" 200 11891 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5" ip - - [26/Aug/2010:16:30:30 +0400] "GET /phpinfo.php?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 HTTP/1.1" 200 2536 "http://site.com/phpinfo.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5" ip - - [26/Aug/2010:16:30:30 +0400] "GET /phpinfo.php?=SUHO8567F54-D428-14d2-A769-00DA302A5F18 HTTP/1.1" 200 2825 "http://site.com/phpinfo.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5" ip - - [26/Aug/2010:16:30:30 +0400] "GET /phpinfo.php?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 HTTP/1.1" 200 2158 "http://site.com/phpinfo.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5" Why there is 4 lines insted of 1? And what means "?=PHPE...". Is it PHP sessions? My php5.3.3 fpm config: [global] pid = /var/run/php5-fpm.pid error_log = /var/log/php5-fpm.log log_level = notice [pool_0] listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 listen.backlog = -1 listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1 user = www-data group = www-data pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 50 pm.min_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_spare_servers = 35 pm.max_requests = 500 pm.status_path = /pool_0/status rlimit_files = 1024 rlimit_core = 0 catch_workers_output = yes php_admin_flag[register_globals] = true php_admin_value[error_reporting] = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED php_admin_value[max_execution_time] = 15 php_admin_flag[short_open_tag] = true php_admin_flag[display_errors] = false

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  • PHP-FPM performing worse than mod_php

    - by lordstyx
    Recently the website I maintain has been growing a lot and I saw the point coming where I'd want to switch from apache to nginx, because I kept on reading that it performs way better. Now I've done the switch, and I have to say, nginx is keeping up just fine. However, php-fpm is forming a problem. Where the php pages used to take 0.1 second to generate with the same load they now take around 3 seconds! Furthermore the error.log from nginx is being spammed with errors like: upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while connecting to upstream, client: ... I also tried using unix sockets instead, but those would complain about the following: connect() to unix:/tmp/php5-fpm.sock failed (11: Resource temporarily unavailable) while connecting to upstream I've fiddled with settings here and there but nothing seems to work. Changing the amount of pm.max_children doesn't seem to help a lot either, but with it's current amount at 350 it seems to be the lesser of all evil. The server that's being used has 3 GB RAM (not all of it is free due to a MySQL server also running) along with 2 dual-core processors (4 cores in total). Am I doing something majorly wrong with the settings here, or is the server simply not capable enough? EDIT: Here is the nginx server block server { listen 80; listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; root /var/www; index index.php index.html index.htm; server_name localhost; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; } location /doc/ { alias /usr/share/doc/; autoindex on; allow 127.0.0.1; deny all; } location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/www; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini try_files $uri = 404; # With php5-cgi alone: fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # With php5-fpm: #fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; } location ~ /\.ht { deny all; } } And the php-fpm pool: [www] user = www-data group = www-data listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 ;listen = /tmp/php5-fpm.sock listen.backlog = -1 pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 350 pm.start_servers = 200 pm.min_spare_servers = 10 pm.max_spare_servers = 350 pm.max_requests = 1536 rlimit_files = 65536 rlimit_core = unlimited chdir = /

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  • Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 &ndash; The failed Sprint

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.  The standard flippant answer of all Scrum professionals, “Well that's not Scrum”, does not get you any brownie points in these situations. The response could be “Well we are not doing Scrum then” which in turn leads to “We are doing Scrum…But, we have split the scrum team into units of 2/3 so that they can concentrate on a specific area of work”. While this may work, it is not Scrum and should not be called so… It is just a form of Agile. Don’t get me wrong at this stage, there is nothing wrong with Agile, just don’t call it Scrum. The reason that the Product Owner wants to do this is that, in effect, through a number of miscommunications and failings in our implementation of Scrum, there was NO unit of potentially Shippable software at the end of the first sprint. It does not matter to them that most Scrum teams will fail the first Sprint, even those that are high performing teams. Remember it is the product owners their money! We should NOT break up scrum teams into smaller units for the purpose of having less people tied up in the Scrum Ceremonies. The amount of backlog the Team selects is solely up to the Team… Only the Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org The entire team must accept the work and in order to understand what they can accept they must be free to size it as a team. This both encourages common understanding and increases visibility on why team members think a task is of a particular size. This has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire team in the problem domain. A new Team often first realizes that it will either sink or swim as a Team, not individually, in this meeting. The Team realizes that it must rely on itself. As it realizes this, it starts to self-organize to take on the characteristics and behaviour of a real Team. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org This paragraph goes to the why of having the whole team at the meeting; The goal of Scrum it to produce a unit of potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. In order to achieve this we need high performing teams and this is what Scrum as a framework has been optimised to produce. I think that our Product Owner is understandably upset over loosing two weeks work and is losing sight the end goal of Scrum in the failures of the moment. As the man spending the money, I completely understand his perspective and I think that we should not have started Scrum on an internal project, but selected a customer  that is open to the ideas and complications of Scrum. So, what should we have NOT done on our first Scrum project: Should not have had 3 interns as the only on site resource – This lead to bad practices as the experienced guys were not there helping and correcting as they usually would. Should not have had the only experienced guys offsite – With both the experienced technical guys in completely different time zones it was difficult to get time for questions. Helping the guys on site was just plain impossible. Should not have used a part time ScrumMaster – Although the ScrumMaster attended all of the Ceremonies, because they are only in 2 full days of the week it makes it difficult for the team to raise impediments as they go. Should not have used a proxy product owner. – This was probably the worst decision that was made. Mainly because the proxy product owner did not have the same vision as the product owner. While Scrum does not explicitly reject the idea of a Proxy Product Owner, I do not think it works very well in practice. The “single wringable neck” needs to contain both the Money and the Vision as well as attending the required meetings. I will be brining all of these things up at the Sprint Retrospective and we will learn from our mistakes and move on. Do, Inspect then Adapt…   Technorati Tags: Scrum,Sprint Planing,Sprint Retrospective,Scrum.org,Scrum Guide,Scrum Ceremonies,Scrummaster,Product Owner Need Help? Professional Scrum Developer Training SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

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  • A little primer on using TFS with a small team

    - by johndoucette
    The scenario; A small team of 3 developers mostly in maintenance mode with traditional ASP.net, classic ASP, .Net integration services and utilities with the company’s third party packages, and a bunch of java-based Coldfusion web applications all under Visual Source Safe (VSS). They are about to embark on a huge SharePoint 2010 new construction project and wanted to use subversion instead VSS. TFS was a foreign word and smelled of “high cost” and of an “over complicated process”. Since they had no preconditions about the old TFS versions (‘05 & ‘08), it was fun explaining how simple it was to install a TFS server and get the ball rolling, with or without all the heavy stuff one sometimes associates with such a huge and powerful application management lifecycle product. So, how does a small team begin using TFS? 1. Start by using source control and migrate current VSS source trees into TFS. You can take the latest version or migrate the entire version history. It’s up to you on whether you want a clean start or need quick access to all the version notes and history of the bits. 2. Since most shops are mainly in maintenance mode with existing applications, begin using bug workitems for everything. When you receive an issue/bug from your current tracking system, manually enter the workitem in TFS right through Visual Studio. You can automate the integration to the current tracking system later or replace it entirely. Believe me, this thing is powerful and can handle even the largest of help desks. 3. With new construction, begin work with requirements and task workitems and follow the traditional sprint-based development lifecycle. Obviously, some minor training will be needed, but don’t fear, this is very intuitive and MSDN has a ton of lesson based labs and videos. 4. For the java developers, use the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 plugin (recently known as Teamprise). There is a seamless interface in Eclipse, but also a good command-line utility for other environments such as Dreamweaver. 5. Wait to fully integrate the whole workitem/project management/testing process until your team is familiar with the integrated workitems for bugs and code. After a while, you will see the team wanting more transparency into the work they are all doing and naturally, everyone will want workitems to help them organize the chaos! 6. Management will be limited in the value of the reports until you have a fully blown implementation of project planning, construction, build, deployment and testing. However, there are some basic “bug rate” reports and current backlog listings that can provide good information. Some notable explanations of TFS; Work Item Tracking and Project Management - A workitem represents the unit of work within the system which enables tracking of all activities produced by a user, whether it is a developer, business user, project manager or tester. The properties of a workitem such as linked changesets (checked-in code), who updated the data and when, the states and reasons for change, are all transitioned to a data warehouse within TFS for reporting purposes. A workitem can be defines as a "bug", "requirement", test case", or a "change request". They drive the work effort by the individual assigned to it and also provide a key role in defining what needs to be done. Workitems are the things the team needs to do to accomplish a goal. Test Case Management - Starting with a workitem known as a "test case", a tester (or developer) can now author and manage test cases within a formal test plan subsystem. Although TFS supports the test case workitem type, there is a new product known as the VS Test Professional 2010 which allows a tester to facilitate manual tests including fast forwarding steps in the process to arrive at the assertion point quickly. This repeatable process provides quick regression tests and can be conducted by the business user to ensure completeness during UAT. In addition, developers no longer can provide a response to a bug with the line "cannot reproduce". With every test run, attachments including the recorded session, captured environment configurations and settings, screen shots, intellitrace (debugging history), and in some cases if the lab manager is being used, a snapshot of the tested environment is available. Version Control - A modern system allowing shared check-in/check-out, excellent merge conflict resolution, Shelvesets (personal check-ins), branching/merging visualization, public workspaces, gated check-ins, security hierarchy capabilities, and changeset/workitem tracking. Knowing what was done with the code by any developer has become much easier to picture and resolve issues. Team Build - Automate the compilation process whether you need it to be whenever a developer checks-in code, periodically such as nightly builds for testers in the morning, or manual builds to be deployed into production. Each build can run through pre-determined tests, perform code analysis to see if the developer conforms to the team standards, and reject the build if either fails. Project Portal & Reporting - Provide management with a dashboard with insight into the project(s). "Where are we" in each step of the way including past iterations and the current burndown rate. Enabling this feature is easy as it seamlessly interfaces with existing SharePoint implementations.

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  • Cowboy Agile?

    - by Robert May
    In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. I’ve often heard similar phrases around Scrum that clue me in to someone who doesn’t understand Scrum.  The phrases go something like this: “We don’t do Agile because the idea of letting people just do whatever they want is wrong.  We believe in a more structured approach.” (i.e. Work is Prison, and I’m the Warden!) “I love Agile.  Agile lets us do whatever we want!” (Cowboy Agile?) “We’re Agile, but we use a process that I’ve created.” (Cowboy Agile?) All of those phrases have one thing in common:  The assumption that Agile, and I mean Scrum, lets you do whatever you want.  This is simply not true. Executing Scrum properly requires more dedication, rigor, and diligence than happens in most traditional development methods. Scrum and Waterfall Compared Since Scrum and Waterfall are two of the most commonly used methodologies, a little bit of contrasting and comparing is in order. Waterfall Scrum A project manager defines all tasks and then manages the tasks that team members are working on. The team members define the tasks and estimates of the stories for the current iteration.  Any team member may work on any task in the iteration. Usually only a few milestones that need to be met, the milestones are measured in months, and these milestones are expected to be missed.  Little work is ever done to improve estimates and poor estimators can hide behind high estimates. Stories must be delivered every iteration, milestones are measured in hours, and the team is expected to figure out why their estimates were wrong, even when they were under.  Repeated misses can get the entire team fired. Partially completed work is normal. Partially completed work doesn’t count. Nobody knows the task you’re working on. Everyone knows what you’re working on, whether or not you’re making progress and how much longer you think its going to take, in hours. Little requirement to show working code.  Prototypes are ok. Working code must be shown each iteration.  No smoke and mirrors allowed.  Testing is done in lengthy cycles at the end of development.  Developers aren’t held accountable. Testing is part of the team.  If the testers don’t accept the story as complete, the team can’t count it.  Complete means that the story’s functionality works as designed.  The team can’t have any open defects on the story. Velocity is rarely truly measured and difficult to evaluate. Velocity is integral to the process and can be seen at a glance and everyone in the company knows what it is. A business analyst writes requirements.  Designers mock up screens.  Developers hide behind “I did it just like the spec doc told me to and made the screen exactly like the picture” Developers are expected to collaborate in real time.  If a design is bad or lacks needed details, the developers are required to get it right in the iteration, because all software must be functional.  Designers and Business Analysts are part of the team and must do their work in iterations slightly ahead of the developers. Upper Management is often surprised.  “You told me things were going well two months ago!” Management receives updates at the end of every iteration showing them exactly what the team did and how that compares to what' is remaining in the backlog.  Managers know every iteration what their money is buying. Status meetings are rare or don’t occur.  Email is a primary form of communication. Teams coordinate every single day with each other and use other high bandwidth communication channels to make sure they’re making progress.  Email is used only as a last resort.  Instead, team members stand up, walk to each other, and talk, face to face.  If that’s not possible, they pick up the phone. IF someone asks what happened, its at the end of a lengthy development cycle measured in months, and nobody really knows why it happened. Someone asks what happened every iteration.  The team talks about what happened, and then adapts to make sure that what happened either never happens again or happens every time.   That’s probably enough for now.  As you can see, a lot is required of Scrum teams! One of the key differences in Scrum is that the burden for many activities is shifted to a group of people who share responsibility, instead of a single person having responsibility.  This is a very good thing, since small groups usually come up with better and more insightful work than single individuals.  This shift also results in better velocity.  Team members can take vacations and the rest of the team simply picks up the slack.  With Waterfall, if a key team member takes a vacation, delays can ensue. Scrum requires much more out of every team member and as a result, Scrum teams outperform non-Scrum teams working 60 hour weeks. Recommended Reading Everyone considering Scrum should read Mike Cohn’s excellent book, User Stories Applied. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Waterfall

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  • Using a mounted NTFS share with nginx

    - by Hoff
    I have set up a local testing VM with Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and the LEMP stack. It's kind of an unconventional setup because instead of having all my PHP scripts on the local machine, I've mounted an NTFS share as the document root because I do my development on Windows. I had everything working perfectly up until this morning, now I keep getting a dreaded 'File not found.' error. I am almost certain this must be somehow permission related, because if I copy my site over to /var/www, nginx and php-fpm have no problems serving my PHP scripts. What I can't figure out is why all of a sudden (after a reboot of the server), no PHP files will be served but instead just the 'File not found.' error. Static files work fine, so I think it's PHP that is causing the headache. Both nginx and php-fpm are configured to run as the user www-data: root@ubuntu-server:~# ps aux | grep 'nginx\|php-fpm' root 1095 0.0 0.0 5816 792 ? Ss 11:11 0:00 nginx: master process /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf www-data 1096 0.0 0.1 6016 1172 ? S 11:11 0:00 nginx: worker process www-data 1098 0.0 0.1 6016 1172 ? S 11:11 0:00 nginx: worker process root 1130 0.0 0.4 175560 4212 ? Ss 11:11 0:00 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php5/php-fpm.conf) www-data 1131 0.0 0.3 175560 3216 ? S 11:11 0:00 php-fpm: pool www www-data 1132 0.0 0.3 175560 3216 ? S 11:11 0:00 php-fpm: pool www www-data 1133 0.0 0.3 175560 3216 ? S 11:11 0:00 php-fpm: pool www root 1686 0.0 0.0 4368 816 pts/1 S+ 11:11 0:00 grep --color=auto nginx\|php-fpm I have mounted the NTFS share at /mnt/webfiles by editing /etc/fstab and adding the following line: //192.168.0.199/c$/Websites/ /mnt/webfiles cifs username=Jordan,password=mypasswordhere,gid=33,uid=33 0 0 Where gid 33 is the www-data group and uid 33 is the user www-data. If I list the contents of one of my sites you can in fact see that they belong to the user www-data: root@ubuntu-server:~# ls -l /mnt/webfiles/nTv5-2.0 total 8 drwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 0 Jun 6 19:12 app drwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 0 Aug 22 19:00 assets -rwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 1150 Jan 4 2012 favicon.ico -rwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 1412 Dec 28 2011 index.php drwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 0 Jun 3 16:44 lib drwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 0 Jan 3 2012 plugins drwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 0 Jun 3 16:45 vendors If I switch to the www-data user, I have no problem creating a new file on the share: root@ubuntu-server:~# su www-data $ > /mnt/webfiles/test.txt $ ls -l /mnt/webfiles | grep test\.txt -rwxr-xr-x 0 www-data www-data 0 Sep 8 11:19 test.txt There should be no problem reading or writing to the share with php-fpm running as the user www-data. When I examine the error log of nginx, it's filled with a bunch of lines that look like the following: 2012/09/08 11:22:36 [error] 1096#0: *1 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Primary script unknown" while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.199, server: , request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock:", host: "192.168.0.123" 2012/09/08 11:22:39 [error] 1096#0: *1 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Primary script unknown" while reading response header from upstream, client: 192.168.0.199, server: , request: "GET /apc.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock:", host: "192.168.0.123" It's bizarre that this was working previously and now all of sudden PHP is complaining that it can't "find" the scripts on the share. Does anybody know why this is happening? EDIT I tried editing php-fpm.conf and changing chdir to the following: chdir = /mnt/webfiles When I try and restart the php-fpm service, I get the error: Starting php-fpm [08-Sep-2012 14:20:55] ERROR: [pool www] the chdir path '/mnt/webfiles' does not exist or is not a directory This is a total load of bullshit because this directory DOES exist and is mounted! Any ls commands to list that directory work perfectly. Why the hell can't PHP-FPM see this directory?! Here are my configuration files for reference: nginx.conf user www-data; worker_processes 2; error_log /var/log/nginx/nginx.log info; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; multi_accept on; } http { include fastcgi.conf; include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; set_real_ip_from 127.0.0.1; real_ip_header X-Forwarded-For; ## Proxy proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; client_max_body_size 32m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffers 32 4k; ## Compression gzip on; gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)"; ### TCP options tcp_nodelay on; tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; sendfile on; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; } my site config server { listen 80; access_log /var/log/nginx/$host.access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; root /mnt/webfiles/nTv5-2.0/app/webroot; index index.php; ## Block bad bots if ($http_user_agent ~* (HTTrack|HTMLParser|libcurl|discobot|Exabot|Casper|kmccrew|plaNETWORK|RPT-HTTPClient)) { return 444; } ## Block certain Referers (case insensitive) if ($http_referer ~* (sex|vigra|viagra) ) { return 444; } ## Deny dot files: location ~ /\. { deny all; } ## Favicon Not Found location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; } ## Robots.txt Not Found location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; } if (-f $document_root/maintenance.html) { rewrite ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html last; } location ~* \.(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)$ { # Some basic cache-control for static files to be sent to the browser expires max; add_header Pragma public; add_header Cache-Control "max-age=2678400, public, must-revalidate"; } location / { try_files $uri $uri/ index.php; if (-f $request_filename) { break; } rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?url=$1 last; } location ~ \.php$ { include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; } } php-fpm.conf ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; FPM Configuration ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; All relative paths in this configuration file are relative to PHP's install ; prefix (/opt/php5). This prefix can be dynamicaly changed by using the ; '-p' argument from the command line. ; Include one or more files. If glob(3) exists, it is used to include a bunch of ; files from a glob(3) pattern. This directive can be used everywhere in the ; file. ; Relative path can also be used. They will be prefixed by: ; - the global prefix if it's been set (-p arguement) ; - /opt/php5 otherwise ;include=etc/fpm.d/*.conf ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Global Options ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; [global] ; Pid file ; Note: the default prefix is /opt/php5/var ; Default Value: none pid = /var/run/php-fpm.pid ; Error log file ; Note: the default prefix is /opt/php5/var ; Default Value: log/php-fpm.log error_log = /var/log/php5-fpm/php-fpm.log ; Log level ; Possible Values: alert, error, warning, notice, debug ; Default Value: notice ;log_level = notice ; If this number of child processes exit with SIGSEGV or SIGBUS within the time ; interval set by emergency_restart_interval then FPM will restart. A value ; of '0' means 'Off'. ; Default Value: 0 ;emergency_restart_threshold = 0 ; Interval of time used by emergency_restart_interval to determine when ; a graceful restart will be initiated. This can be useful to work around ; accidental corruptions in an accelerator's shared memory. ; Available Units: s(econds), m(inutes), h(ours), or d(ays) ; Default Unit: seconds ; Default Value: 0 ;emergency_restart_interval = 0 ; Time limit for child processes to wait for a reaction on signals from master. ; Available units: s(econds), m(inutes), h(ours), or d(ays) ; Default Unit: seconds ; Default Value: 0 ;process_control_timeout = 0 ; Send FPM to background. Set to 'no' to keep FPM in foreground for debugging. ; Default Value: yes ;daemonize = yes ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Pool Definitions ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Multiple pools of child processes may be started with different listening ; ports and different management options. The name of the pool will be ; used in logs and stats. There is no limitation on the number of pools which ; FPM can handle. Your system will tell you anyway :) ; Start a new pool named 'www'. ; the variable $pool can we used in any directive and will be replaced by the ; pool name ('www' here) [www] ; Per pool prefix ; It only applies on the following directives: ; - 'slowlog' ; - 'listen' (unixsocket) ; - 'chroot' ; - 'chdir' ; - 'php_values' ; - 'php_admin_values' ; When not set, the global prefix (or /opt/php5) applies instead. ; Note: This directive can also be relative to the global prefix. ; Default Value: none ;prefix = /path/to/pools/$pool ; The address on which to accept FastCGI requests. ; Valid syntaxes are: ; 'ip.add.re.ss:port' - to listen on a TCP socket to a specific address on ; a specific port; ; 'port' - to listen on a TCP socket to all addresses on a ; specific port; ; '/path/to/unix/socket' - to listen on a unix socket. ; Note: This value is mandatory. ;listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock ; Set listen(2) backlog. A value of '-1' means unlimited. ; Default Value: 128 (-1 on FreeBSD and OpenBSD) ;listen.backlog = -1 ; List of ipv4 addresses of FastCGI clients which are allowed to connect. ; Equivalent to the FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS environment variable in the original ; PHP FCGI (5.2.2+). Makes sense only with a tcp listening socket. Each address ; must be separated by a comma. If this value is left blank, connections will be ; accepted from any ip address. ; Default Value: any ;listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1 ; Set permissions for unix socket, if one is used. In Linux, read/write ; permissions must be set in order to allow connections from a web server. Many ; BSD-derived systems allow connections regardless of permissions. ; Default Values: user and group are set as the running user ; mode is set to 0666 ;listen.owner = www-data ;listen.group = www-data ;listen.mode = 0666 ; Unix user/group of processes ; Note: The user is mandatory. If the group is not set, the default user's group ; will be used. user = www-data group = www-data ; Choose how the process manager will control the number of child processes. ; Possible Values: ; static - a fixed number (pm.max_children) of child processes; ; dynamic - the number of child processes are set dynamically based on the ; following directives: ; pm.max_children - the maximum number of children that can ; be alive at the same time. ; pm.start_servers - the number of children created on startup. ; pm.min_spare_servers - the minimum number of children in 'idle' ; state (waiting to process). If the number ; of 'idle' processes is less than this ; number then some children will be created. ; pm.max_spare_servers - the maximum number of children in 'idle' ; state (waiting to process). If the number ; of 'idle' processes is greater than this ; number then some children will be killed. ; Note: This value is mandatory. pm = dynamic ; The number of child processes to be created when pm is set to 'static' and the ; maximum number of child processes to be created when pm is set to 'dynamic'. ; This value sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests that will be ; served. Equivalent to the ApacheMaxClients directive with mpm_prefork. ; Equivalent to the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment variable in the original PHP ; CGI. ; Note: Used when pm is set to either 'static' or 'dynamic' ; Note: This value is mandatory. pm.max_children = 50 ; The number of child processes created on startup. ; Note: Used only when pm is set to 'dynamic' ; Default Value: min_spare_servers + (max_spare_servers - min_spare_servers) / 2 pm.start_servers = 20 ; The desired minimum number of idle server processes. ; Note: Used only when pm is set to 'dynamic' ; Note: Mandatory when pm is set to 'dynamic' pm.min_spare_servers = 5 ; The desired maximum number of idle server processes. ; Note: Used only when pm is set to 'dynamic' ; Note: Mandatory when pm is set to 'dynamic' pm.max_spare_servers = 35 ; The number of requests each child process should execute before respawning. ; This can be useful to work around memory leaks in 3rd party libraries. For ; endless request processing specify '0'. Equivalent to PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS. ; Default Value: 0 pm.max_requests = 500 ; The URI to view the FPM status page. If this value is not set, no URI will be ; recognized as a status page. By default, the status page shows the following ; information: ; accepted conn - the number of request accepted by the pool; ; pool - the name of the pool; ; process manager - static or dynamic; ; idle processes - the number of idle processes; ; active processes - the number of active processes; ; total processes - the number of idle + active processes. ; max children reached - number of times, the process limit has been reached, ; when pm tries to start more children (works only for ; pm 'dynamic') ; The values of 'idle processes', 'active processes' and 'total processes' are ; updated each second. The value of 'accepted conn' is updated in real time. ; Example output: ; accepted conn: 12073 ; pool: www ; process manager: static ; idle processes: 35 ; active processes: 65 ; total processes: 100 ; max children reached: 1 ; By default the status page output is formatted as text/plain. Passing either ; 'html' or 'json' as a query string will return the corresponding output ; syntax. Example: ; http://www.foo.bar/status ; http://www.foo.bar/status?json ; http://www.foo.bar/status?html ; Note: The value must start with a leading slash (/). The value can be ; anything, but it may not be a good idea to use the .php extension or it ; may conflict with a real PHP file. ; Default Value: not set pm.status_path = /status ; The ping URI to call the monitoring page of FPM. If this value is not set, no ; URI will be recognized as a ping page. This could be used to test from outside ; that FPM is alive and responding, or to ; - create a graph of FPM availability (rrd or such); ; - remove a server from a group if it is not responding (load balancing); ; - trigger alerts for the operating team (24/7). ; Note: The value must start with a leading slash (/). The value can be ; anything, but it may not be a good idea to use the .php extension or it ; may conflict with a real PHP file. ; Default Value: not set ping.path = /ping ; This directive may be used to customize the response of a ping request. The ; response is formatted as text/plain with a 200 response code. ; Default Value: pong ping.response = pong ; The timeout for serving a single request after which the worker process will ; be killed. This option should be used when the 'max_execution_time' ini option ; does not stop script execution for some reason. A value of '0' means 'off'. ; Available units: s(econds)(default), m(inutes), h(ours), or d(ays) ; Default Value: 0 ;request_terminate_timeout = 0 ; The timeout for serving a single request after which a PHP backtrace will be ; dumped to the 'slowlog' file. A value of '0s' means 'off'. ; Available units: s(econds)(default), m(inutes), h(ours), or d(ays) ; Default Value: 0 ;request_slowlog_timeout = 0 ; The log file for slow requests ; Default Value: not set ; Note: slowlog is mandatory if request_slowlog_timeout is set ;slowlog = log/$pool.log.slow ; Set open file descriptor rlimit. ; Default Value: system defined value ;rlimit_files = 1024 ; Set max core size rlimit. ; Possible Values: 'unlimited' or an integer greater or equal to 0 ; Default Value: system defined value ;rlimit_core = 0 ; Chroot to this directory at the start. This value must be defined as an ; absolute path. When this value is not set, chroot is not used. ; Note: you can prefix with '$prefix' to chroot to the pool prefix or one ; of its subdirectories. If the pool prefix is not set, the global prefix ; will be used instead. ; Note: chrooting is a great security feature and should be used whenever ; possible. However, all PHP paths will be relative to the chroot ; (error_log, sessions.save_path, ...). ; Default Value: not set ;chroot = ; Chdir to this directory at the start. ; Note: relative path can be used. ; Default Value: current directory or / when chroot ;chdir = /var/www ; Redirect worker stdout and stderr into main error log. If not set, stdout and ; stderr will be redirected to /dev/null according to FastCGI specs. ; Note: on highloaded environement, this can cause some delay in the page ; process time (several ms). ; Default Value: no ;catch_workers_output = yes ; Pass environment variables like LD_LIBRARY_PATH. All $VARIABLEs are taken from ; the current environment. ; Default Value: clean env ;env[HOSTNAME] = $HOSTNAME ;env[PATH] = /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin ;env[TMP] = /tmp ;env[TMPDIR] = /tmp ;env[TEMP] = /tmp ; Additional php.ini defines, specific to this pool of workers. These settings ; overwrite the values previously defined in the php.ini. The directives are the ; same as the PHP SAPI: ; php_value/php_flag - you can set classic ini defines which can ; be overwritten from PHP call 'ini_set'. ; php_admin_value/php_admin_flag - these directives won't be overwritten by ; PHP call 'ini_set' ; For php_*flag, valid values are on, off, 1, 0, true, false, yes or no. ; Defining 'extension' will load the corresponding shared extension from ; extension_dir. Defining 'disable_functions' or 'disable_classes' will not ; overwrite previously defined php.ini values, but will append the new value ; instead. ; Note: path INI options can be relative and will be expanded with the prefix ; (pool, global or /opt/php5) ; Default Value: nothing is defined by default except the values in php.ini and ; specified at startup with the -d argument ;php_admin_value[sendmail_path] = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f [email protected] ;php_flag[display_errors] = off ;php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/fpm-php.www.log ;php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on ;php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 32M php_admin_value[sendmail_path] = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

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  • Rails, Capistrano, Nginx, Unicorn - Application has been already initialized (RuntimeError)

    - by Andy Copley
    Can anyone shed some light on what exactly this error refers to? I'm having trouble deploying new versions of the site. I, INFO -- : reloading config_file=[snip]/current/config/unicorn.rb I, INFO -- : Refreshing Gem list E, ERROR -- : error reloading config_file=[snip]/current/config/unicorn.rb: Application has been already initialized. (RuntimeError) E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/railties-3.2.3/lib/rails/application.rb:135:in `initialize!' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/railties-3.2.3/lib/rails/railtie/configurable.rb:30:in `method_missing' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/releases/20120907085937/config/environment.rb:5:in `<top (required)>' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.2.3/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:251:in `require' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.2.3/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:251:in `block in require' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.2.3/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:236:in `load_dependency' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.2.3/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:251:in `require' E, ERROR -- : config.ru:4:in `block in <main>' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rack-1.4.1/lib/rack/builder.rb:51:in `instance_eval' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rack-1.4.1/lib/rack/builder.rb:51:in `initialize' E, ERROR -- : config.ru:1:in `new' E, ERROR -- : config.ru:1:in `<main>' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/lib/unicorn.rb:44:in `eval' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/lib/unicorn.rb:44:in `block in builder' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/lib/unicorn/http_server.rb:696:in `call' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/lib/unicorn/http_server.rb:696:in `build_app!' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/lib/unicorn/http_server.rb:677:in `load_config!' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/lib/unicorn/http_server.rb:303:in `join' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/unicorn-4.3.1/bin/unicorn:121:in `<top (required)>' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin/unicorn:23:in `load' E, ERROR -- : [snip]/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin/unicorn:23:in `<main>' I, INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 3182 exit 0> worker=0 I, INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 3185 exit 0> worker=1 I, INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 3188 exit 0> worker=2 I, INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 3191 exit 0> worker=3 I, INFO -- : worker=0 ready I, INFO -- : worker=3 ready I, INFO -- : worker=1 ready I, INFO -- : worker=2 ready Unicorn.rb root = "/home/[user]/apps/[site]/current" working_directory root pid "#{root}/tmp/pids/unicorn.pid" stderr_path "#{root}/log/unicorn.log" stdout_path "#{root}/log/unicorn.log" listen "/tmp/unicorn.[site].sock", :backlog => 2048 worker_processes 4 preload_app true timeout 30 before_fork do |server, worker| defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and ActiveRecord::Base.connection.disconnect! end after_fork do |server, worker| defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection end Any help appreciated - I can pull more config files if required.

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  • Prioritizing Product Features

    - by Robert May
    A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization.  Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company.  This is unfortunate.  Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner!  Most features built into software are never even used.  Clearly, not much return for features that go unused. So how does a company avoid building features that add little value to the company?  This is a tough question to answer, but usually, this prioritization starts at the top with the executives of the company.  After all, they’re responsible for the overall vision of the company. Here’s what I recommend: Know your market. Know your customers and users. Know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. Implement the Vision Know Your Market We often see companies that don’t know their market.  Personally, I’m surprised by this.  These companies don’t know who their competitors are, don’t know what features make their product desirable in the market, and in many cases, get by with saying, “I’ve been doing this for XX years.  I know what the market wants!”  In many cases, they equate “marketing” with “advertising” and don’t understand the difference. This is almost never true.  Good companies will spend significant amounts of time and money finding out who they’re competing against and what makes their competitors successful in the marketplace.  Good companies understand that marketing involves more than just advertising.  Often, marketing is mostly research and analysis, not sales.  Until you understand your market, you cannot know what features will give you the best return on your investment dollar. Good companies have a marketing department and can answer the next important step which is to know your customers and your users. Know your Customers and Users First, note that I included both customers and users.  They’re often not the same thing.  Users use the product that you build.  Customers buy the product that you build.  It’s a subtle difference, but too often, I’ve seen companies that focus exclusively on one or the other and are not successful simply because they ignore an important part of the group. If your company is doing appropriate marketing, you know that these are two different aspects of your product and that both deserve attention to have a product that is successful in your target market.  Your marketing department should be spending a lot of time understanding these personas and then conveying that information to the company. I’m always surprised when development teams think that they can build a product that people want to use without understanding the users of that product.  Developers think differently than most people in the world.  They know what the computer is doing.  The computer isn’t magic to them.  So when they assume that they know how to build something, they bring with them quite a bit of baggage.  Never assume that you know your customer unless you’re regularly having interaction with them.  Also, don’t just leave this to Marketing or Product Management.  Take them time to get your developers out with the customers as well.  Developers are very smart people, and often, seeing how someone uses their software inspires them to make a much better product. Very often, because the users and customers aren’t know, teams will spend a significant amount of time building apps that are super flexible and configurable so that any possible combination of feature can be used.  This demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the customer.  Most configuration questions can quickly be answered by talking to the customer.  In most cases, if your software requires significant setup and configuration before its usable, you probably don’t know your customers and users very well. Until you know your customers, you cannot know what features will be most valuable to your customers and you cannot build those features in a way that your customers can use. Know Where You’re Going and What You Want to Achieve Many companies suffer from not having a plan.  Executives will tell the team to make them a plan.  The team, not knowing their market and customers and users, will come up with a plan that doesn’t reflect reality and doesn’t consider ROI.  Management then wonders why the product is doing poorly in the market place. Instead of leaving this up to the teams, as executives, work with Marketing to understand what broad categories of features will sell the most product in the marketplace.  Then, once you’ve determined that, give this vision to the team and let them run with it.  Revise the vision as needed, but avoid changing streams frequently.  Sure, sometimes you need to, but often, executives will change priorities many times a month, leading to nothing more than confusion.  If the team has a vision, they’ll be able to execute that vision far better than they could otherwise. By knowing what products are most important, you can set budgetary goals and guidelines that will help you achieve the vision that was created. Implement the Vision Creating the vision is often where the general executives stop participating in the plan.  The team is responsible for implementing that vision.  Executives should attend showcases and and should remain aware of the progress that the team is making towards meeting the vision, however. Once a broad vision has been created, the team should break that vision down into minimal market features (MMF).  These MMFs should be sized using story points so that, using the team’s velocity, an estimated cost can be determined for each feature.  The product management team should then try to quantify the relative value of the MMFs based on customer feedback and interviews.  Once the value and cost of creating the feature is understood, a return on investment can be calculated.  The features should then be prioritized with the MMF’s that have the highest value and lowest cost rising to the top of features to implement.  Don’t let politics get in the way! Once the MMF’s have been prioritized, they should go through release planning to schedule them for implementation. Conclusion By having a good grasp on the strategy of the company, your Agile teams can be much more effective.  Each and every story the team is implementing will roll up into features that matter to the company and provide ROI to them.  The steps outlined in this post should be repeated on a regular basis.  I recommend reviewing them at least once per quarter to make sure that the vision hasn’t shifted and that the teams are still working on what matters most to the company. Technorati Tags: Agile,Product Owner,ROI

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  • Time Tracking on an Agile Team

    - by Stephen.Walther
    What’s the best way to handle time-tracking on an Agile team? Your gut reaction to this question might be to resist any type of time-tracking at all. After all, one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.  Forcing the developers on your team to track the amount of time that they devote to completing stories or tasks might seem like useless bureaucratic red tape: an impediment to getting real work done. I completely understand this reaction. I’ve been required to use time-tracking software in the past to account for each hour of my workday. It made me feel like Fred Flintstone punching in at the quarry mine and not like a professional. Why You Really Do Need Time-Tracking There are, however, legitimate reasons to track time spent on stories even when you are a member of an Agile team.  First, if you are working with an outside client, you might need to track the number of hours spent on different stories for the purposes of billing. There might be no way to avoid time-tracking if you want to get paid. Second, the Product Owner needs to know when the work on a story has gone over the original time estimated for the story. The Product Owner is concerned with Return On Investment. If the team has gone massively overtime on a story, then the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on the story and reconsider the story’s business value. Finally, you might want to track how much time your team spends on different types of stories or tasks. For example, if your team is spending 75% of their time doing testing then you might need to bring in more testers. Or, if 10% of your team’s time is expended performing a software build at the end of each iteration then it is time to consider better ways of automating the build process. Time-Tracking in SonicAgile For these reasons, we added time-tracking as a feature to SonicAgile which is our free Agile Project Management tool. We were heavily influenced by Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) in the way that we implemented time-tracking (see his article http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2007/03/time-tracking-is-anti-scrum-what-do-you.html). In SonicAgile, time-tracking is disabled by default. If you want to use this feature then the project owner must enable time-tracking in Project Settings. You can choose to estimate using either days or hours. If you are estimating at the level of stories then it makes more sense to choose days. Otherwise, if you are estimating at the level of tasks then it makes more sense to use hours. After you enable time-tracking then you can assign three estimates to a story: Original Estimate – This is the estimate that you enter when you first create a story. You don’t change this estimate. Time Spent – This is the amount of time that you have already devoted to the story. You update the time spent on each story during your daily standup meeting. Time Left – This is the amount of time remaining to complete the story. Again, you update the time left during your daily standup meeting. So when you first create a story, you enter an original estimate that becomes the time left. During each daily standup meeting, you update the time spent and time left for each story on the Kanban. If you had perfect predicative power, then the original estimate would always be the same as the sum of the time spent and the time left. For example, if you predict that a story will take 5 days to complete then on day 3, the story should have 3 days spent and 2 days left. Unfortunately, never in the history of mankind has anyone accurately predicted the exact amount of time that it takes to complete a story. For this reason, SonicAgile does not update the time spent and time left automatically. Each day, during the daily standup, your team should update the time spent and time left for each story. For example, the following table shows the history of the time estimates for a story that was originally estimated to take 3 days but, eventually, takes 5 days to complete: Day Original Estimate Time Spent Time Left Day 1 3 days 0 days 3 days Day 2 3 days 1 day 2 days Day 3 3 days 2 days 2 days Day 4 3 days 3 days 2 days Day 5 3 days 4 days 0 days In the table above, everything goes as predicted until you reach day 3. On day 3, the team realizes that the work will require an additional two days. The situation does not improve on day 4. All of the sudden, on day 5, all of the remaining work gets done. Real work often follows this pattern. There are long periods when nothing gets done punctuated by occasional and unpredictable bursts of progress. We designed SonicAgile to make it as easy as possible to track the time spent and time left on a story. Detecting when a Story Goes Over the Original Estimate Sometimes, stories take much longer than originally estimated. There’s a surprise. For example, you discover that a new software component is incompatible with existing software components. Or, you discover that you have to go through a month-long certification process to finish a story. In those cases, the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on a story and re-evaluate the business value of the story. For example, the Product Owner discovers that a story will require weeks to implement instead of days, then the story might not be worth the expense. SonicAgile displays a warning on both the Backlog and the Kanban when the time spent on a story goes over the original estimate. An icon of a clock is displayed. Time-Tracking and Tasks Another optional feature of SonicAgile is tasks. If you enable Tasks in Project Settings then you can break stories into one or more tasks. You can perform time-tracking at the level of a story or at the level of a task. If you don’t break a story into tasks then you can enter the time left and time spent for the story. As soon as you break a story into tasks, then you can no longer enter the time left and time spent at the level of the story. Instead, the time left and time spent for a story is rolled up from its tasks. On the Kanban, you can see how the time left and time spent for each task gets rolled up into each story. The progress bar for the story is rolled up from the progress bars for each task. The original estimate is never rolled up – even when you break a story into tasks. A story’s original estimate is entered separately from the original estimates of each of the story’s tasks. Summary Not every Agile team can avoid time-tracking. You might be forced to track time to get paid, to detect when you are spending too much time on a particular story, or to track the amount of time that you are devoting to different types of tasks. We designed time-tracking in SonicAgile to require the least amount of work to track the information that you need. Time-tracking is an optional feature. If you enable time-tracking then you can track the original estimate, time left, and time spent for each story and task. You can use time-tracking with SonicAgile for free. Register at http://SonicAgile.com.

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  • "power limit notification" clobbering on 12G Dell servers with RHEL6

    - by Andrew B
    Server: Poweredge r620 OS: RHEL 6.4 Kernel: 2.6.32-358.18.1.el6.x86_64 I'm experiencing application alarms in my production environment. Critical CPU hungry processes are being starved of resources and causing a processing backlog. The problem is happening on all the 12th Generation Dell servers (r620s) in a recently deployed cluster. As near as I can tell, instances of this happening are matching up to peak CPU utilization, accompanied by massive amounts of "power limit notification" spam in dmesg. An excerpt of one of these events: Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU12: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Package power limit notification (total events = 11) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Package power limit notification (total events = 12) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Package power limit notification (total events = 377) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU11: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) A little Google Fu reveals that this is typically associated with the CPU running hot, or voltage regulation kicking in. I don't think that's what is happening though. Temperature sensors for all servers in the cluster are running fine, Power Cap Policy is disabled in the iDRAC, and my System Profile is set to "Performance" on all of these servers: # omreport chassis biossetup | grep -A10 'System Profile' System Profile Settings ------------------------------------------ System Profile : Performance CPU Power Management : Maximum Performance Memory Frequency : Maximum Performance Turbo Boost : Enabled C1E : Disabled C States : Disabled Monitor/Mwait : Enabled Memory Patrol Scrub : Standard Memory Refresh Rate : 1x Memory Operating Voltage : Auto Collaborative CPU Performance Control : Disabled A Dell mailing list post describes the symptoms almost perfectly. Dell suggested that the author try using the Performance profile, but that didn't help. He ended up applying some settings in Dell's guide for configuring a server for low latency environments and one of those settings (or a combination thereof) seems to have fixed the problem. Kernel.org bug #36182 notes that power-limit interrupt debugging was enabled by default, which is causing performance degradation in scenarios where CPU voltage regulation is kicking in. A RHN KB article (RHN login required) mentions a problem impacting PE r620 and r720 servers not running the Performance profile, and recommends an update to a kernel released two weeks ago. ...Except we are running the Performance profile... Everything I can find online is running me in circles here. What's the heck is going on?

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  • php5.4 + freebsd8.3+nginx can't get errors

    - by Alexey Perepechko
    I have a confusing behaviour. I can't get any error into log file or screen. I made a file index.php with content like this: "<?php a();".Normally, I will get message like this: "Call to undefined function a()" but when I called this script on my configuration I got nothing. Only white screen and empty logs. I checked all rights. I turned on all possible log file. Nothing. Please help me. My configuration is: freebsd 8.3-RELEASE PHP 5.4.7 (fpm-fcgi) nginx version: nginx/1.2.4 FPM-config [global] pid = run/php-fpm.pid error_log = log/php-fpm.log log_level = notice emergency_restart_threshold = 5 emergency_restart_interval = 2 process_control_timeout = 2 daemonize = yes events.mechanism = kqueue [puser] listen = /usr/local/www/host/tmp/php-fpm.sock; listen.backlog = -1 listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1 listen.owner = puser listen.group = puser listen.mode = 0666 user = puser group = puser pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 30 pm.start_servers = 2 pm.min_spare_servers = 2 pm.max_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_requests = 50 slowlog = /usr/local/www/host/logs/fpm.log.slow request_slowlog_timeout = 1s rlimit_files = 1024 rlimit_core = 0 chroot = /usr/local/www/host/ catch_workers_output = yes env[HOSTNAME] = $HOSTNAME env[TMP] = /tmp env[TMPDIR] = /tmp env[TEMP] = /tmp php_admin_value[upload_tmp_dir] = /tmp php_admin_value[cgi.fix_pathinfo] = 0 php_admin_value[date.timezone]= 'Europe/Moscow' php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 320m php_admin_value[max_execution_time] = 180 php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on php_admin_value[error_log] = /logs/fpm-err.log php_admin_value[error_reporting] = 'E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE' php_admin_value[display_errors] = on php_admin_flag[display_startup_errors] = on NGINX config user www; worker_processes 2; worker_rlimit_nofile 80000; error_log /var/log/nginx_error.log notice; #pid logs/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 2048; use kqueue; } http { server_tokens off; client_max_body_size 4m; include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; charset utf-8; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 65; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay on; log_format IP .$remote_addr.; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] $request $request_body ' '"$status" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; reset_timedout_connection on; server { listen 80; server_name www.example.com; access_log /usr/local/www/host/logs/access.log main; error_log /usr/local/www/host/logs/error.log error; error_page 500 502 503 504 /errors/50x.html; error_page 404 /errors/404.html; root /usr/local/www/host/htdocs; index index.php index.html index.htm; location / { index index.html index.php; try_files $uri /index.php?$args; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass unix:/usr/local/www/host/tmp/php-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /htdocs$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info; fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED /htdocs$fastcgi_script_name; include /usr/local/etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } } } PHP config (php.ini) [PHP] engine = On short_open_tag = On asp_tags = Off precision = 14 y2k_compliance = On output_buffering = 4096 zlib.output_compression = Off implicit_flush = Off unserialize_callback_func = serialize_precision = 100 allow_call_time_pass_reference = Off safe_mode = Off safe_mode_gid = Off safe_mode_include_dir = safe_mode_exec_dir = safe_mode_allowed_env_vars = PHP_ safe_mode_protected_env_vars = LD_LIBRARY_PATH disable_functions = dl,system,exec,passthru,shell_exec disable_classes = expose_php = On max_execution_time = 30 max_input_time = 60 memory_limit = 128M error_reporting = E_ALL display_errors = On display_startup_errors = On log_errors = On log_errors_max_len = 1024 ignore_repeated_errors = Off ignore_repeated_source = Off report_memleaks = On track_errors = On error_log = /var/log/php-fpm-error.log variables_order = "GPCS" request_order = "GP" register_globals = Off register_long_arrays = Off register_argc_argv = Off auto_globals_jit = On post_max_size = 8M magic_quotes_gpc = Off magic_quotes_runtime = Off magic_quotes_sybase = Off auto_prepend_file = auto_append_file = default_mimetype = "text/html" doc_root = user_dir = enable_dl = Off file_uploads = On upload_max_filesize = 2M max_file_uploads = 20 allow_url_fopen = On allow_url_include = Off default_socket_timeout = 60 [Date] date.timezone = Europe/Moscow [filter] [iconv] [intl] [sqlite] [sqlite3] [Pcre] [Pdo] [Pdo_mysql] [Phar] [Syslog] define_syslog_variables = Off [mail function] SMTP = localhost smtp_port = 25 mail.add_x_header = On [SQL] sql.safe_mode = Off [ODBC] odbc.allow_persistent = On odbc.check_persistent = On odbc.max_persistent = -1 odbc.max_links = -1 odbc.defaultlrl = 4096 odbc.defaultbinmode = 1 [Interbase] [MySQL] mysql.allow_local_infile = On mysql.allow_persistent = On mysql.cache_size = 2000 mysql.max_persistent = -1 mysql.max_links = -1 mysql.default_port = mysql.default_socket = mysql.default_host = mysql.default_user = mysql.default_password = mysql.connect_timeout = 60 mysql.trace_mode = Off [MySQLi] mysqli.max_persistent = -1 mysqli.allow_persistent = On mysqli.max_links = -1 mysqli.cache_size = 2000 mysqli.default_port = 3306 mysqli.default_socket = mysqli.default_host = mysqli.default_user = mysqli.default_pw = mysqli.reconnect = Off [mysqlnd] mysqlnd.collect_statistics = On mysqlnd.collect_memory_statistics = Off [OCI8] [PostgresSQL] pgsql.allow_persistent = On pgsql.auto_reset_persistent = Off pgsql.max_persistent = -1 pgsql.max_links = -1 pgsql.ignore_notice = 0 pgsql.log_notice = 0 [Sybase-CT] sybct.allow_persistent = On sybct.max_persistent = -1 sybct.max_links = -1 sybct.min_server_severity = 10 sybct.min_client_severity = 10 [bcmath] bcmath.scale = 0 [browscap] [Session] session.save_handler = files session.use_cookies = 1 session.use_only_cookies = 1 session.name = PHPSESSID session.auto_start = 0 session.cookie_lifetime = 0 session.cookie_path = / session.cookie_domain = session.cookie_httponly = session.serialize_handler = php session.gc_probability = 1 session.gc_divisor = 1000 session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440 session.bug_compat_42 = Off session.bug_compat_warn = Off session.referer_check = session.entropy_length = 0 session.cache_limiter = nocache session.cache_expire = 180 session.use_trans_sid = 0 session.hash_function = 0 session.hash_bits_per_character = 5 url_rewriter.tags = "a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=fakeentry" [MSSQL] mssql.allow_persistent = On mssql.max_persistent = -1 mssql.max_links = -1 mssql.min_error_severity = 10 mssql.min_message_severity = 10 mssql.compatability_mode = Off mssql.secure_connection = Off [Assertion] [COM] [mbstring] [gd] [exif] [Tidy] tidy.clean_output = Off [soap] soap.wsdl_cache_enabled=1 soap.wsdl_cache_dir="/tmp" soap.wsdl_cache_ttl=86400 soap.wsdl_cache_limit = 5 [sysvshm] [ldap] ldap.max_links = -1 [mcrypt] [dba] I need to get errors on display and detailed record in the error.log.

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  • That Escalated Quickly

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging  - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with  > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 25, 2011Popular ReleasesMosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 252: First public release There are 8 widgets: - Desktop - Gmail - Weather - Control panel - Me - Video - Clock - PicturesUsage Agent: Usage Agent 9.0.8: Latest release. Changes include: - Fixes for Optus - Usage Delta statistic for BigPond - Eliminated the need for UAC prompt at every startupjQuery List DragSort: jQuery List DragSort 0.4.3: Fix item not dropping correctly on Chrome and jQuery 1.6KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.3 [v1.0.5 Compatible]: I have added support for all the new items in Terraria v1.0.5. I have also added the ability to put your character in hardcore mode or take them out via a simple checkbox on the stats tab. If you come across any bugs, please let me know immediately.Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5Kinect Earth Move: KinectEarthMove sample code: Sample code releasedThis is a sample code for Kinect for Windows SDK beta, which was demonstrated on Channel 9 Kinect for Windows SKD beta launch event on June 17 2011. Using color image and skeleton data from Kinect and user in front of Kinect can manipulate the earth between his/her hands.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9b: Changes: - fix critical issue 262334 (AccessViolationException while using events in a COMAddin) - remove x64 Assemblies (not necessary) Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...MiniTwitter: 1.70: MiniTwitter 1.70 ???? ?? ????? xAuth ?? OAuth ??????? 1.70 ??????????????????????????。 ???????????????? Twitter ? 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Donate (EUR)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query v1.0.0.59794: This release includes the following enhancements: Added a Most Recently Used file list Added Row counts to the query (per tab) and table view windows Added the Command Timeout option, only valid for MSSQL for now - see options If you have no idea what this thing is make sure you check out http://pksoftware.net/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction. PK :-]HydroDesktop - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Desktop Application: 1.2.591 Beta Release: 1.2.591 Beta Releasepatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. 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NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...IronPython: 2.7.1 Beta 1: This is the first beta release of IronPython 2.7. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. The highlights of this release are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio are disabled by default. See http://pytools.codeplex.com for the next generation of Python Visual Studio support. See...New Projects.Net Image Processor: An image processing wrapper around GDI+, allowing you to apply one or more filters against an image source. 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PowerPackPS: PowerPackPS is a DSV for creating PowerGUI PowerPacks using Powershell instead of the GUI or XML.Resuming Action Results for ASP.NET MVC: Resuming Action Results for MVC provides a similar implementation as the standard FileResult ActionResult objects but with the intelligence to detect range requests and respond appropriately with no need to write a single extra line of code.SoundSwitch: SoundSwitch makes it easier to switch playback devices (sound cards). Normally, to switch a Playback device you need to right click the sound icon in the bottom right corner of your screen (system tray), choose "Playback devices" and then change the default playback device. Every time you want to switch. With SoundSwitch you just configure once between which Playback devices you want to toggle and then you can press Ctrl+Alt+F11 to toggle automatically!StopWatch Plus: This is a simple stopwatch with which you can set a countdown, save and control the various steps imposed by the pause button. The projects will is still under development and not yet possess all the qualities mentioned above, currently is a simple countdown. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Questo è un semplice cronometro col quale si potrà impostare un conto alla rovescia, salvare e tenere sotto controllo i vari step ...TFS Reports: The TFS Reports project is about sharing knowledge around the reporting capabilities in TFS and contains both guidance as well as ready to use reports. TRK ATR: Website for TV/Radio channel UpdateTool: A tool used to update client This project is for personal use. Please do not download in now.Windows Service Helper: Helps by creating a Play/Stop/Pause UI when running with a debugger attached, but also allows the windows service to be installed and run by the Windows Services environment as well. All this with one line of code!XNB filetype plugin for Paint.NET: This plugin allows viewing and editing of XNA compiled textures from inside Paint.NET.

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