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  • Long list of if statements in Java

    - by steve
    Hi, Sorry I can't find a question answering this, I'm almost certain someone else has raised it before. My problem is that I'm writing some system libraries to run embedded devices. I have commands which can be sent to these devices over radio broadcasts. This can only be done by text. inside the system libraries I have a thread which handles the commands which looks like this if (value.equals("A") { doCommandA() } else if (value.equals"B") { doCommandB() } else if etc. The problem is that there are a lot of commands to it will quickly spiral to something out of control. Horrible to look out, painful to debug and mind boggling to understand in a few months time.

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  • My table cells don't highlight immediately when touched

    - by Steve Denenberg
    Hi, In my app, I have a table view that has about eight cells. There is a navigation bar at the top. When a user touches a cell, nothing happens for about 1/2 second. Then the touched cell highlights blue and immediately the new view slides into position. The problem is that there is no feedback to the user about which cell he touched until just before the new view slides into position. For example, when I explore the tables in the iPhone's Settings application, when you touch a cell, the cell immediately turns blue, and then there is a 1/2 second delay, and then you see the new view. How do I get my table's feedback of highlighting the cells to happen immediately? I am using tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:, and each cell has an accessory button. Thanks for any insight.

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  • Cannot translate date formats from rails form to mysql db

    - by Steve
    I have a simple search form in rails 3 that has two date fields. I'm having a problem getting these dates into my mysql db. I've tried using the american_date gem, specifying date formats in my initializers, in the config/locales/en.yml file, and directly on the date on the date fields themselves. Currently, I'm setting the rails-approved date format in the view - <%= f.text_field :depart_date, :value=> Date.today.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') %> The dateformat in my DB is also YYYY-mm-dd, so things should be going smoothly. The console tells me that the two date fields are both class = "Date" I think I've found the disconnect. From the logs - Started POST "/searches" for 127.0.0.1 at 2013-10-30 17:43:26 -0400 Processing by SearchesController#create as HTML Parameters: {"utf8"=>"v","search"=>{"depart_date"=>"2013-10-30", "return_date"=>"2013-11-09"} ?[1m?[35m (0.0ms)?[0m BEGIN ?[1m?[36mSQL (0.0ms)?[0m ?[1mINSERT INTO `searches` (`depart_date`,`return_date`) VALUES ('2013-30-10','2013-09-11')?[0m ?[1m?[35m (2.0ms)?[0m COMMIT Note that the month and day values are switched in the insert statement. How can I prevent this from happenening?

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  • Check for changes with jquery and a database

    - by Steve
    I am doing a notification system. When a new post is published, users will be notified immediately by an small notification on the screen. I am currently using this: setInterval(function(){ checkForChanges(); }, 2*1000); function checkForChanges(){ $.post("http://"+ document.domain + "/posts/checkForChanges/", function(dat){ if(dat>0){ .... /*create notification*/ } }); } And i was wondering if this is the correct way to do it or not. Because, this is calling a PHP function every 2 seconds and making a query to the database. In case there are no new changes, it won't do anything... Thanks.

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  • Localized database strings

    - by Steve
    I have a small Grails application that has the following domain: class Meal { String name String description String allergyNote } For localization purposes the three strings should now be available in multiple languages. For example, while an English user would see name="Steak", a Spanish user should see name="Filete" in the output. I was thinking of doing the following: class Language { String isoCode String languageName } class TranslatedString { Language language String translation } but I am not sure how to link the Meals with the TranslatedStrings as it is used for three members, also I would like to use it for other classes (not just Meal) as well (or do I need to have separated tables, i.e. a MealNameTranslated, MealDescriptionTranslated, etc tables?). I know this is probably a stupid question, but I am a beginner and have not been able to figure this out :-(

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  • create variable from array actionscript 3

    - by steve
    I'm currently trying to make a dynamic menu via an array and a loop. So when someone clicks on the first item of the array, "menu_bag_mc" it will link to the content "menu_bag_mc_frame" (or some name that will be unique to this array) that is another movieclip that will load. Below is the code I have so far: //right here, i need to make a variable that I can put in the "addchild" so that //for every one of the list items clicked, it adds a movieclip child with //the same name (such as menu_bag_mc from above) with "_frame" appended. //I tried the next line out, but it doesn't really work. var framevar:MovieClip = menuList[i] += "_frame"; function createContent(event:MouseEvent):void { if(MovieClip(root).currentFrame == 850) { while(MovieClip(root).numChildren > 1) { MovieClip(root).removeChild(MovieClip(root).getChildAt(MovieClip(root).numChildren - 1)); } //Here is where the variable would go, to add a child directly related //to whichever array item was clicked (here, "framevar") MovieClip(root).addChild (framevar); MovieClip(root).addChild (closeBtn); } else { MovieClip(root).addChild (framevar); MovieClip(root).addChild (closeBtn); MovieClip(root).gotoAndPlay(806); } } Is there a way to make a unique variable (whatever it is) from the array so that I can name a movieclip after it so it will load the new movieclip? Thanks

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  • How can I use Javascript to access sub-elements?

    - by Steve
    I am dynamically creating forms dynamically according to a users actions. It is an entry-box and a two "buttons" for each instance. Each instance will be wrapped in a unique div tag. What I tried to do without success is when I dynamically create the "button" I attach a function with the input variable containing the div of its instance. This a brief excerpt: var newDivClass = document.getElementById("instance"+1); button1.innerHTML = "<a href=\"#\" onclick=\"buttons("+newDivClass+");\" id=\"button1\"> Button1 </a>"; function buttons(selected) { //I want this to select the first instance //of button1 found within div newDivClass selected.getElementById("button1"); //I also tried //this.getElementById("button1"); //selected.getChildren[0]; } The problem appears to be in passing newDivClass to the the actual function.

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  • JQuery - Widget Public Methods

    - by Steve
    If I create a JQuery widget (code example below), and then define a "public" method, is there any other way to call the method other than using the following form? $("#list").list("publicMethod"); I would like to create a series of widgets that all define the same methods (basically implementing the same interface), and be able to call the method without knowing anything about which widget I currently am invoking the method on. In the current form, I need to know that I am executing the method on the "list" widget. Below is an example of creating a widget with the "public" method. (function($) { var items = []; var itemFocusIdx = 0; $.widget("ui.list", { // Standard stuff options : { ... }, _create : function() { ... }, destroy : function() { ... }, // My Public Methods publicMethod : function() { ... } ... }); }(jQuery));

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  • Does .live() binding work for jQuery in IE7?

    - by Steve
    Hi everyone, I have a piece of javascript which is supposed to latch onto a form which gets introduced via XHR. It looks something like: $(document).ready(function() { $('#myform').live('submit', function() { $(foo).appendTo('#myform'); $(this).ajaxSubmit(function() { alert("HelloWorld"); }); return false; }); }); This happens to work in FF3, but not in IE7. Any idea what the problem is?

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  • Tracking Useful Information

    - by Steve M
    What do the clever programmers here do to keep track of handy programming tricks and useful information they pick up over their many years of experience? Things like useful compiler arguments, IDE short-cuts, clever code snippets, etc. I sometimes find myself frustrated when looking up something that I used to know a year or two ago. My IE favourites probably represent a good chunk of the Internet in the late 1990s, so clearly that isn't effective (at least for me). Or am I just getting old? So.. what do you do?

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  • Testing IPhone code on Windows

    - by steve
    I'm picking up a new Dell laptop. My primary machine is a IMac. I will most likely have to write some IPhone projects for someone in the future. While I do most of my work on the IMac there would be maybe 25% of the time where I work from my laptop. Can anyone tell me if I use objective C / IPhone SDK's if there is a generic objective C compiler I can use to see if my code would in theroy work? Not looking to do hackintosh or anything like that. My other option is to just get a discounted mac mini (Think this is most likely) as well as the Dell. Thanks for any advice

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  • When I do ""+1 I get a String - Why

    - by steve
    Hi, Please understand firstly that I fully understand that Java will return a String when I use ""+int. What I'm really not sure about is what exactly is happening down at the memory aspect. How exactly is java performing this conversion. I mean this in a very indepth way, not 'auto boxing' or anything like that :) I'm hoping someone with a deeper understanding can explain what exactly is done.

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  • Tell me what's wrong [closed]

    - by steve care
    public class Sample { public static void main (String[]a){ int[] x; x = new int[10]; int i;' int n=0; for (i=0;i<=10;i++){ n++; x[i]=n; System.out.print(x[i] + " "); } } } the problem is I got an error of "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 10"

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  • '??' Not a valid unicode character, but in the unicode character set?

    - by Steve Cotner
    Short story: I can't get an entity like '𠂉' to store in a MySQL database, either by using a text field in a Ruby on Rails app (with default UTF-8 encoding) or by inputting it directly with a MySQL GUI app. As far as I can tell, all Chinese characters and radicals can be entered into the database without problem, but not these rarely typed 'character components.' The character mentioned above is unicode U+20089 and html entity &#131209; I can get it to display on the page by entering <html>&#131209;</html> and removing html escaping, but I would like to store it simply as the unicode character and keep the html escaping in place. There are many other Chinese 'components' (parts of full characters, generally consisting of 2 or 3 strokes) that cause the same problem. According to this page, the character mentioned is in the UTF-8 charset: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20089/charset_support.htm But on the neighboring '...20089/index.htm' page, there's an alert saying it's not a valid unicode character. For reference, that entity can be found in Mac OS X by searching through the character palette (international menu, "Show Character Palette"), searching by radical, and looking under the '?' radical. Apologies if this is too open-ended... can a character like this be stored in a UTF-8-based database? How is this character both supported and unsupported, both present in the character set and not valid?

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  • Windows: what is the difference between DEP always on and DEP opt-out with no exceptions?

    - by Peter Mortensen
    What is the difference between DEP always on ("/NoExecute=AlwaysOn" in boot.ini) and DEP opt-out ( "/NoExecute=OptOut" in boot.ini) with no exceptions? "no exceptions" = empty list of programs for which DEP does not apply. DEP = Data Execution Prevention (hardware). One would expect it to work the same way, but it makes a difference for some applications. E.g. for all versions of UltraEdit 14 (14.2). It crashes at startup for DEP always on, at least on Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition x64 edition. (2010-03-11: this problem has been fixed with UltraEdit 15.2 and later.) Update 1: I think this difference is caused by the backdoors that Microsoft has put into hardware DEP for OptOut, according to Fabrice Roux (see below). In the case of IrfanView, for which Steve Gibson observed the same difference as I did for UltraEdit (see below), the difference is caused by a non-DEP aware EXE packer (ASPack) that Microsoft coded a backdoor for. Is there a difference between Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 ? Is there a difference between 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows ? Sources: From [http://blog.fabriceroux.com/index.php/2007/02/26/hardware_dep_has_a_backdoor?blog=1], "Hardware DEP has a backdoor" by Fabrice Roux. 2007-02-26. "IrfanView was not using any trick to evade DEP ... Microsoft just coded a backdoor used only in OPTOUT. Bascially Microsoft checks the executable header for a section matching one of the 3 strings. If one these strings is found, DEP will be turned OFF for this application by windows. ... 'aspack', 'pcle', 'sforce'" From [http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-078.htm], by Steve Gibson. "I can’t find any documentation on Microsoft’s site anywhere, because we’re seeing a difference between always-on and opt-out. That is, you would imagine that always-on mode would be the same as opting out if you weren’t having any opt-out programs. It turns out it’s not the case. For example ... the IrfanView file viewer ... runs fine in opt-out mode, even if it has not been opted out. But it won’t launch, Windows blocks it from launching ... in always-on mode." From [http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-083.htm], by Steve Gibson. "... IrfanView ... won’t run with DEP turned on. It’s because it uses an EXE packer, an executable compression program called ASPack. And it makes sense that it wouldn’t because naturally an executable compressor has got to decompress the executable, so it allocates a bunch of data memory into which it decompresses the compressed executable, and then it runs it. Well, it’s running a data allocation, which is exactly what DEP is designed to stop. On the other hand, UPX, which is actually the leading and most popular EXE compressor, it’s DEP- compatible because those guys realized, hey, when we allocate this memory, we should mark the pages as executable."

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  • What networking hardware do I need in this situation (Fairpoint [ISP] "E-DIA" connection)?

    - by Tegeril
    Right away you'd probably want to say, "Well just ask Fairpoint." I've done that, a number of times in as many different ways I can phrase it and just keep hitting a brick wall where they will not commit to giving any useful information and instead recommend contracting an outside firm and spending a pile of money. Anyway... I'm trying to help a family member out with an office connection that is being setup. I've managed to scrape tiny details here and there from our discussions with the ISP (Fairpoint in Maine) about what is going to be done and what is going to be needed. This is the connection that is being setup: http://www.fairpoint.com/enterprise/vantagepoint/e-dia/index.jsp Information I have been given: Via this connection I can get IPs across different C blocks if that were necessary (it is not) Fairpoint is bringing hardware with them that they claim simply does the conversion from whatever line is coming in the building to ethernet, they have referred to this as the "Fairpoint Netvanta" which I know suggests a line of products that I have looked up, but some (most? all?) of those seems to handle all the routing that I saw. Fairpoint says that I need to bring my own router to sit behind their device. They have literally declined to even suggest products that have worked for other clients in the past and fall back on "any business router works, not a home router." That alone makes my head spin. Detail and clarity hit a brick wall from there. At one moment I got them to cough up that the router I provide needs to be able to do VPN tunneling but they typically fall back to "not a home router" and I was even given "just a business router, Cisco or something, it'll be $500-$1000". Now I know that VPN tunneling routers exist well below that price point and since this connection is going to one machine, possibly two only via ethernet, my desire to purchase networking hardware that over-delivers what I need is not very high. They are literally setting all this up, have provided no configuration details for after they finish, and expect me to just plunk a $500+ router behind it and cross my fingers or contract out to a third party company. If there were other options available for the location, I would have dropped them in a second, but there aren't. The device that is connected requires a static IP and I'm honestly a bit hazy on the necessity of an additional router behind their device and generally a bit over my head. I presume that the router needs to be able to serve external static IPs to its clients, but I really don't know what is going to show up when they come to do the install. This was originally going to be run via an ADSL bridge modem with a range of static IPs (which is easy and is currently setup properly) but the location is too far from the telco to get speeds that we really want for upload and this is also a connection that needs high availability. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated (I see a number of options in the Cisco Small Business line and other competitors that aren't going to break the bank…), especially if you've worked with Fairpoint before! Thanks for reading my wall of text.

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  • 500.19 error NetBios command limit thread on forums.iis.net

    - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site
    Here is a great thread on how a person reported fixing a problem 500.19 error NetBios command limit and using a UNC based content architecture. http://forums.iis.net/p/1165964/1937935.aspx http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/f/74fe970d-4a7d-4034-9f5d-02572567e7f7/24_CHAPTER_11_Troubleshooting_IIS_6.0.doc http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813776 Check out the UNC tag regarding others that have great information. http://weblogs.asp.net/steveschofield/archive/tags/UNC/default.aspx Steve Schofield...(read more)

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  • Scrum in 5 Minutes

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

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  • SQL SERVER – What the Business Says Is Not What the Business Wants

    - by pinaldave
    This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Steve Jones. Steve raised a very interesting question; every DBA and Database Developer has already faced this situation. When I read the topic, I felt that I can write several different examples here. Today, I will cover this scenario, which seems quite amusing. Shrinking Database Earlier this year, I was working on SQL Server Performance Tuning consultancy; I had faced very interesting situation. No matter how much I attempt to reduce the fragmentation, I always end up with heavy fragmentation on the server. After careful research, I figured out that one of the jobs was continuously Shrinking the Database – which is a very bad practice. I have blogged about my experience over here SQL SERVER – SHRINKDATABASE For Every Database in the SQL Server. I removed the incorrect shrinking process right away; once it was removed, everything continued working as it should be. After a couple of days, I learned that one of their DBAs had put back the same DBCC process. I requested the Senior DBA to find out what is going on and he came up with the following reason: “Business Requirement.” I cannot believe this! Now, it was time for me to go deep into the subject. Moreover, it had become necessary to understand the need. After talking to the concerned people here, I understood what they needed. Please read the exact business need in their own language. The Shrinking “Business Need” “We shrink the database because if we take backup after shrinking the database, the size of the same is smaller. Once we take backup, we have to send it to our remote location site. Our business requirement is that we need to always make sure that the file is smallest when we transfer it to remote server.” The backup is not affected in any way if you shrink the database or not. The size of backup will be the same. After a couple of the tests, they agreed with me. Shrinking will create performance issues for the same as it will introduce heavy fragmentation in the database. The Real Solution The real business need was that they needed the smallest possible backup file. We finally implemented a quick solution which they are still using to date. The solution was compressed backup. I have written about this subject in detail few years before SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to New Feature of Backup Compression. Compressed backup not only creates a small filesize but also increases the speed of the database as well. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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  • Craftsmanship Tour: Day 3 &amp; 4 8th Light

    - by Liam McLennan
    Thursday morning the Illinois public transport system came through for me again. I took the Metra train north from Union Station (which was seething with inbound commuters) to Prairie Crossing (Libertyville). At Prairie Crossing I met Paul and Justin from 8th Light and then Justin drove us to the office. The 8th Light office is in an small business park, in a semi-rural area, surrounded by ponds. Upstairs there are two spacious, open areas for developers. At one end of the floor is Doug Bradbury’s walk-and-code station; a treadmill with a desk and computer so that a developer can get exercise at work. At the other end of the floor is a hammock. This irregular office furniture is indicative of the 8th Light philosophy, to pursue excellence without being limited by conventional wisdom. 8th Light have a wall covered in posters, each illustrating one person’s software craftsmanship journey. The posters are a fascinating visualisation of the similarities and differences between each of our progressions. The first thing I did Thursday morning was to create my own poster and add it to the wall. Over two days at 8th Light I did some pairing with the 8th Lighters and we shared thoughts on software development. I am not accustomed to such a progressive and enlightened environment and I found the experience inspirational. At 8th Light TDD, clean code, pairing and kaizen are deeply ingrained in the culture. Friday, during lunch, 8th Light hosted a ‘lunch and learn’ event. Paul Pagel lead us through a coding exercise using micro-pomodori. We worked in pairs, focusing on the pedagogy of pair programming and TDD. After lunch I recorded this interview with Paul Pagel and Justin Martin. We discussed 8th light, craftsmanship, apprenticeships and the limelight framework. Interview with Paul Pagel and Justin Martin My time at Didit, Obtiva and 8th Light has convinced me that I need to give up some of my independence and go back to working in a team. Craftsmen advance their skills by learning from each other, and I can’t do that working at home by myself. The challenge is finding the right team, and becoming a part of it.

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  • First look at the cloud with Google App Engine and Udacity

    - by Ken Hortsch
    Udacity is free online university and offers a CS253 intro to web development class.  Since I am currently a web developer/architect in ASP.Net (and recent project has brought me back to Java) it is a bit light.  However, it does offer me a nice problem set and my first exposure to writing cloud apps with GAE and Google Datastore. Steve Huffman, who developed reddit, is the instructor and does offer nice real-life stories.  Give it a look.

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