Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Enjoy Today’s Scrum’d Updates

by Robert Dempsey on February 8, 2010

Scrum'd Home Page

I’d like to thank Mike Sutton and David Harvey for taking the time to speak with me about their experience with Agile tools and the issues they’ve found with the ones out there. We’ve taken their feedback to heart, and have started to implement a number of ideas they gave us. So a big shout out to Mike and David.

Today’s update brings a little more goodness to Scrum’d. Here’s what we’ve got.

Project RSS Feeds

Scrum’d tracks everything that goes on in a project, including the creation, updating, and removal of projects, releases, sprints, user stories, tasks, and more. Now you can see this flood of information for each of your projects by subscribing to it’s RSS feed. This is our initial go with RSS feeds for project, so we’re looking for your feedback to make it more useful. For now, drink from the firehose!

Simpler Security

During my discussion with Mike Sutton we discussed how much an application should enforce rules. Until today, Scrum’d would restrict who could do and see what based on your role in a project – ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Scrum Team, or Stakeholder. People not as familiar with Scrum and its guidelines were confused by this. So today we simplified it.

There are now two roles in a project – Project Admin and Stakeholder. So, you can either do everything (Project Admin) or only see everything (Stakeholder).

The reason for this is as follows: we don’t feel that an Agile tool should have to enforce the rules. It goes against Agile principles. If you have a product owner messing with your sprint then you all need to have a conversation. It isn’t the job of the tool to take the place of communication, a principle tenant of the Agile Manifesto.

Sprint Cleanup

Closed releases no longer show up in the release drop down when you are creating a new sprint. A minor update, but one of a series of tweeks we’re working on to make Scrum’d more usable.

More to Come

We have a long list of updates and new features planned for Scrum’d. This week’s sprint is going down the path of helping those that want to stick closer to “best practices” in Agile and Scrum including how to craft user stories and estimate them, and there’s something about bug tracking too. What are we adding? Well just sign up for Scrum’d today and you’ll see next week.

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WordPress, Fun and Sun at WordCamp Miami

by Robert Dempsey on February 8, 2010

WordCamp Miami

Atlantic Dominion Solutions and Scrum’d are proud to sponsor WordCamp Miami, being held on the University of Miami campus February 20, 2010. The more we get into the WordPress community the happier we are to be a part of it.

Come on down to Miami and meet fellow WordPress community members, an awesome speaker lineup, and if you see some guy sporting a bright red backpack and looks like he’s about to take off say hello.

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Welcome to Your Weekend – Work

by Robert Dempsey on February 6, 2010

Clock Head

Many of us that own our own business work on the weekend. Many out there that work for someone else work on the weekend.

Where did these weekends go? When did they start to disappear?

Competition is fierce, and today even more so. and it isn’t going to be letting up anytime soon. Not only are we bombarded in our own locality, but from elsewhere on the globe. Developers are quite familiar with this situation.

But work is not always work if you like what you do. And we really don’t have to work all the time to get and stay ahead. Focus is our friend, and prioritization is key.

Always remember to spend time with those closest to you, that mean the most. A life of all work and no play is a life that is incomplete.

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Shut Off Your Hype Engine

February 5, 2010

Israel Gat added his thoughts to a post by Marcel Den Hartog wherein Marcel discussed technology assimilation in the face of hype. While the post talks mainly about the adoption of cloud computing in IT organizations (which is steadily picking up), Marcel brings up a point that is true with all new technologies:
When the press, [...]

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Attention Managers! Focus on Results, Not Charts

February 4, 2010

In a recent post on burndown charts and student syndrome, Bob Tarne wrote about an Agile team that was unnecessarily padding daily estimates, leading management to be nervous as the burndown didn’t move until it nosedived at the end of the sprint. Though I chuckled when I read this, it is a very common occurrence. [...]

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The Biggest Difference Between Waterfall and Agile

February 3, 2010

I saw this tweet come through on my RSS reader and felt I had to respond. Thankfully Rich told us that he was being sarcastic, however, I’ve seen real misconceptions like this come up many times over the past few months. So, let’s clear this one up shall we?
There are many major differences between waterfall [...]

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Yay Google Is Helping Kill IE6

February 2, 2010

I just got this email from Google telling me what browsers they will continue to support. Thankfully, IE6 is not one of them.
IE6 is the bane of every web developer living today, and my friends Nick and Jim are doing their part to kill it as well. While I understand that there are many companies [...]

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TDD is A Good Thing

February 2, 2010

I always sorta kinda did TDD. But not really. It never really clicked for me until several months ago and before that I didn’t even realize that it hadn’t clicked yet. The other day I wrote about pairing with Corey Haines and something that he said that really hit home: When I write my tests, [...]

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Get Scrum’d All Over Your Screen With The January 2010 UI Update

February 1, 2010

All of the UI goodies that I mentioned in a previous post that we were adding to Scrum’d are now live! This update has been one month in the making, and you thought we weren’t doing anything didn’t you? And just in case you missed it, here’s the video again.

And for this week we’re working [...]

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Mocking is dead. Long live mocking!

February 1, 2010

I’ve had a rocky relationship with mocking in ruby tests. It went something like this:

Discover testing. Is neat!
Discover rspec, mocking, and the isolation of my model and controller tests. Is super neat!
Discover the pain of refactoring when I have tons of expectations, each with long and specific lists of parameters that must be passed.
Associate “mocking” [...]

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