I must admit that I am incredibly jealous of those developers who happen to live near active user groups (e.g. the ALT.NET guys in Austin). I often read blog posts and listen to podcasts that reference these in-person meetings and find myself wishing that I could sit in and participate as well. But it just isn't realistic to fly across...
What is the single best tactic a developer can use to avoid spending time in meetings? I'm mainly thinking of the seemingly-pointless meetings that (project) managers often schedule, that can be a real barrier to getting real work done. So far, I have had some success with the following techniques, which seem to remove some of the need...
We're trying to improve the format of our Monday morning meetings (M3). The meeting is among all members of our company (20 persons) including developers, designers, administrative and the company's president. It starts with a round-table of 1 word check-in (social) and then transitions into business aspects. We tried a project-focused...
Hi, At a first meeting with a client who has expressed interest in hiring you on a freelance basis what would you bring up? Should you focus on the project in question or your skills or their more general needs or something else? Advice/comments appreciated :-) ...
When you are in a meeting or while you are talking to you boss, project manager, technical leader etc. or doing something similar to these actions what strategies do you have in terms of thinking? (Question can be expanded and strategies of -answering- or -asking- or saying -OK- can be asked but since all these actions are based on think...
Does anyone know a good web based meeting solution that allows for live screencasting to meeting participants? We don't mind installing software on the local machines but the views of the meeting don't have that flexibility so they would require a browser based solution ...
I work in a medium sized team (20+ developers) where I believe communication amongst team members is not as good as it could be. Like most teams, I suppose, we have several systems that we build and maintain. We also use dozens of varied tools in our work such as Visual Studio 2008, Subversion, Resharper, Tibco, TeamCity etc. We also d...
I think I'm great at implementing solutions, fixing, tackling technical problems creatively, etc. but I have a really hard time when I have to go to long meetings with lots of people where requirements are discussed. I tend to zone in and out and contribute / remember very little. All I can think of is "just tell me what to do and I'll...
Recently I signed up for DevDays London and I would like to know how people get most of the seminars like this. Skipping a session in favour of some good corridor discussion seems to be one. But do you do some preparation, for example do you check beforehand who is coming to that seminar and try to meet them? Or do you try to lobby you...
I noticed that there is a growing community in Australia for Ruby on Rails developers called RORO. It boasts monthly meet ups where developers discuss new ideas, new technologies and techniques over pint of beer. I did a search to find a similar community for ASP.NET developers to no avail. Is there a community like RORO for ASP.NET ...
** EDIT: Rephrased the question to re-focus ** Our Scrum team meets as seldomly as possible, but we meet with the product owner every chance we get. We track everyone's agreed action points (particularly theirs). We are 100% agile, but our product owner lives in traditional world, we remain off-site. We facilitate him in crossing ove...
What's the difference between the difference some of the Microsoft Unified Communication Products? Primarily Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communicator? The two seem very similar, but I don't quite know what each one is especially useful for. Or are they all integrated into one product, but marketed as different pro...
I'm creating an application using the ASP.NET MVC 1 framework in C#, where I have users that register for events. Upon registering, I create an outlook meeting request public string BuildMeetingRequest(DateTime start, DateTime end, string attendees, string organizer, string subject, string description, string UID, string location) {...
Hi everybody, I'm decommissioning a meeting room scheduling [web] tool in favor of the same Outlook's functionality. I'd like, however, to publish (read-only) a "Group Schedule" view in a web page. To make the idea more clear: On Outlook's Calendar view, select Actions / View Group Schedules and then create a new group for say, Confere...
I'm interested to see how other people have handled scheduling the various scrum meetings (standup, sprint planning, estimation, retrospective, etc.) but none of the books I've read on Scrum include any template calendars for 2 or 3 week sprints. There are lots of recommendations like standup should be first thing in the morning, you s...
Hi All, I don't see Meeting Workspace Option in OWA 2007 Basic or Premium. Is it by design? Also, When I setup a meeting from Outlook 2007 and also create a meeting workspace in sharepoint, all the attendees shows up as optional in Attendees List in SharePoint site. One more issue is that when an attendee accepts the meeting from OWA...
I'm looking for light weight, free and installable scrum meeting minutes collaboration tool. Twiki seems pretty heavy weight for just this purpose. I've seen several other SO threads but they all mainly focus on 'complete' Agile/Scrum management. I'm just looking for a meeting minutes collaboration tool. Thanks. ...