Hi, We work on different projects, And we use different tools. Over the years I've found that Excel and Word are the most essential tools that have ever been used at almost all stages of a project life-cycle. I use them for time-tracking, effort-estimations and requirements-management, but all of them have specific templates that make t...
G'day, I was reading the article "Database as a Fortress" by Dan Chak from the excellent book "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" (sanitised Amazon link) which suggests that databases should not be designed using an agile approach. There's an SO question on agile approaches and databases "Agile development and database cha...
I recently read this post regarding how "Agile Fails Better" and found myself wondering if anyone out there had good examples of how their project under an agile management process failed...and more importantly how they got the project back on track. Question: How did your agile project fail? Were you able to recover from it? How did yo...
As a programmer I'm all in favour of the agile methodology, we all know it makes sence, however how do you sell this to a third party ?. The work we do is generally fixed price and it is usual for us to only have a high level view of the requirements when we quote as it is often a competitive situation. We often find that when we win a ...
Hello, where do you guys draw the line between being agile and publishing early (with a limited feature set) and publishing too early (not meaning buggy)? I am thinking that if you publish too early, potential users may simply get turned away thinking that your product is just some half-baked thing thrown on the market that can't compet...
How do you prevent agile methodology with monthly sprints/iterations causing a fragmented design. For ex. take the case of design of Manhattan Streets vs Design of Boston streets. The blueprints for Manhattan Streets were designed as a whole resulting in easy manoeverability and driving. Boston streets were designed in a piece meal appro...
My team has been progressively adopting more and more lightweight methodologies, moving from Scrum to Lean/Kanban where there is less and less formal process. At some point we will be back to Cowboy Coding; indeed I fear we may already be on the border line. Where can the line be drawn between a very lightweight Lean and Agile process a...
Hi folks, I'm thinking about developing a web app to visualize the agile wall. The reason is that the project I'm working in has multiple distributed teams, so it is very difficult to share the information on the agile wall across the teams. I know some tools like JIRA do have agile wall functionality built in, what I want to have is a ...
There are many new concepts to learn for a typical asp.net webform developer who is happy with their event driven, drag and drop world where the code behind is abstraction enough. What is the best way to introduce the concept of mvc, unit testing, loose coupling, dependency injection and continuous integration whilst still maintaining e...
I know that for me I first got started following the waterfall method of project management and along with that I went with the predictive approach to software design. In this I mean we had huge packets of documentation, UML, database schemas, data dictionaries, workflows, activity diagrams, etc. Having worked in software for over 10...
We are looking into adopting Scrum and would want our Scrum Masters to be able to handle 3~4 parallel Sprints. These parallel sprints can be for a single product or unrelated products. Is it a better practice to start the parallel sprints 1~2 days appart or have a wider gap than that. ...
Hi all, I'm working a web project that use: - Java - Jetty - Fitnesse tool - etc.. I have a difficulty to simulate/generate a SocketTimeoutException, more info below: The use-case-simplified: I wrote a API that make calls to a host(WebServer). In the source-code if I receive a RemoteException and is a SocketTimeoutException, I nee...
In an iterative development environment, such as an agile one, how do you draw the line between a regular iteration and the beginnings of scope creep? At what point do you tell the client that, "No, we can not do that change, because of ?" ...
Is there a difference between Sprint and an Iteration or one can have Iterations within a Sprint or Sprint is just the terminology used instead of Iteration in Scrum? It will be helpful if someone can throw some light on this. Suppose there are 4 sprints and you have decided the first sprint will go up to 10 days is it required that oth...
Hi, I have been in the IT industry for 10 years now but have worked in "traditionally" managed project teams (both well managed and badly managed ones). I have heard of the "new" scrum or XP type of project management and yearned to be part of one (as s/w folks we always like anything new I guess) but have not got an opportunity. My q...
Lets take an example suppose we got 5 stories A,B and C,D,E. Importance Name Estimate 90 B 70 A 50 C 35 E 10 D The stories are ordered based on their importance(priority) now how you do estimate them? Is it estimated based on size of the feature? If so what does that numeric Value so for exam...
In the agile scrum methodology, if we fail to identify the hidden areas in the project plan on the burndown it could pottential cause a major threat to the project. Also if a resource miss-interpretate the item on the burndown it could lead to a confusion as well. If we do not make an attempt to identify the subtasks and the overheads on...
What are the challenges of transition a team in a corporate atmosphere from a traditional non-iterative, spec list, gantt chart, phase dependent team to a more iterative approach? Moreover, what was a successful way to gain acceptance with other groups while using a newer development strategy? ...
When planning a 2-week iteration in the past I have taken a user story: Story: Rename a file And broken it into tasks which were then estimated in hours: Story: Rename a file Task: Create Rename command (2h) Task: Maintain a list of selected files (3h) Task: Hook up to F2 key (1h) Task: Add context menu option (1h) I would then...
As I am just learning about Scrum, it seems to me that for part of an iteration you may be a chicken but then become a pig when it comes time to do your part. Then go back to being a chicken. Is this correct thinking? That your stake in the iteration will change during an iteration? if not how does that work? because when software is bui...