March 2006 Entries
It's my wife's birthday today, happy birthday Dawn!
Tag: Birthday
I've updated the netBake site with the latest progress. You can check it out here if you are following along at home.
How many SCRUM sprints do you have on the go at once? Probably one right? We tend to work with two at a time. I'll explain how we do it, then I'll tell you why we do it that way.
We start a sprint and one developer works on it until it is code complete, (including NUnit tests). In parallel, another developer will write the system test scripts. Once the sprint is code complete, the application will be given to a member of our admin staff who will execute the scripts and pass feed back to another developer who will fix any bugs. This process is repeated until all bugs are fixed. The application and the test scripts are then passed to a more technical user and are re-executed, with any bugs being passed back to the developer for fixing. Again, this process is repeated until all bugs are fixed. At this point the sprint is deemed complete. In the meantime, the original developer and myself, have been planning the next sprint and it has been started. So, at any given time we usually have two sprints on the go.
So, why do we do it this way? Well the answer is because I reckon it'll give us the best chance of getting the project completed on time and within budget. As you'll probably know, there are three main elements to a project: resources; timescales and functionality. Usually, two of them are fixed, leaving a project manager the ability to flex the remaining one. However, this is not the case in this project. An investment has been made to allow us to carry out this work and as the investment is finite this means the both timescales and resources are fixed. Unfortunately, we are further challenged because this project is a replacement for a current COBOL system, so no matter how many bells and whistles we add to it, it can't have any less functionality than is in the current system. The current system is over 20 years old. So, as you can see the functionality is somewhat fixed as well, not leaving us much "wiggle" room at all.
On top of all that, our development team is a profit center and not a cost center, that is it is meant to add the the profitability of the company. So, while we are working on this, we are not working on other fee earning work. Hence, the two sprints at once tactic. This allows us to have one developer working on the project full time. It also allows us to have another developer part time on this project and part time on other fee earning work. Lastly, it also allows us to farm out some of our testing to the admin department, which is a cost center and so (in respect of the project budget) we get their work for free.
I'd be interested to hear opinions from other agile developers / architects regarding this.
Tag: Scrum
We have decided that our bakery control system is going to be called netBake. We've started an official blog for it, which you can see here.
Tag: netBake
The latest update is available on the official netbake site here.
Tags: netbake, bakery software
Across on his blog, Michael points out that it's a year since his first blog post. Cool, happy birthday mate - the cakes are on you come Monday :)
Today Norman Kember and two Canadian hostages were rescued by coalition forces. Good news! Now these men worked for Christian Peacemaker Teams who had this to say. You can't be serious! These men were not released, they were rescued for cyring out loud. A simple "thanks" would have been nice! Jeez, words fail me. Thankfully, I don't have to use my own words, I have this
"And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."
Tags: Christian Peacemaker Teams, hostage rescue
The latest burn down graph for the bakery control system is available here for you to look at. It shows an increase in the workload caused by the complex nature of the invoices. Bakeries require to be able to show invoices in a number of formates. One of these formats is an aggregation of several day's deliveries. This makes updating the underlying line items more complex than normal. This has taken longer than estimated.
Tags: Bakery control system, SCRUM
We had our dogs down at the beach this afternoon, they had a great time :) Pictures in this flickr set.
We're having some unseasonally cold weather just now, as you can see from this picture. You can check out some more snowy March day pictures on my flickr account here.
It's posts like this and this that make me think that RSS is a technology on the wane, and that it's time to take more of an interest in ATOM.
Tags: RSS, ATOM
Sprint 4, which covered pricelists, was finally signed off yesterday. I'm glad to see the back of it to be honest. It's been a bit of a pain. Sprint 4 was started before I began to publish the burn down graphs, so you can't see just how much of a pain it was, but if I tell you it was almost 10 days late, you get the idea.
Most of that time was taken up with bugs found during testing, we have a project budget for testing, which is around 100% of development time and the testing versus development% for sprint 4 was 208%. Ouch! Because of this the project, as a whole, is running 4.25 days behind, although we should be able to make it up from sprint 6 onwards; so I'm still confident of finishing the project on time.
So, what caused the pain in sprint 4? Well, one of the requirements of the system is that input speeds attained in the current Unix/Cobol system, must be retained in the new .Net 2.0 system. To acheive this, we had to design and code a quick entry panel, to allow expert users to keep their speed, but also create a "search and select" machanism for those new users. This proved to create a few wrinkles that required to be ironed out during sprint testing.
Now that we have done that, we should not see these problems again in sprint 5 (which has order entry) testing. I have uploaded screen shots of the finished sprint 4 GUI, you can see them here, into the bakery control GUI set on flickr. Feel free to take a look if you are interested.
Tags: Bakery control system, .net 2.0, C#
The latest burn down graph, for sprint 5 of our Bakery Control System, is available to look at and comment on here.
Tags: Burn down graphs, bakery control system, scrum
...it's probably nothing compared to what these guys are having.
...or is Dave Winer paranoid? Every second post of his these days seems to be about how the tech world is doing him down. Someone of his standing doesn't have to do so much whining. When he complains of Microsoft not paying him for work he's done, it makes me think what was the agreement between them when they started? Besides, it's not like either of them are short of a pound or two. :)
Tag: Dave Winer
...but it's worth doing again, 'cos it's fun. I've created a little mashup that gets realtime(ish) info from the USGS regarding earthquakes and then plots them on a Google map control. You can click on the pin to get more information on the quake, or you can select to get an aerial view of the quake area (via virtual earth). You can check it out here, if you are interested.
Tags: Mashups, Google Maps, Virtual Earth
At the latest Under the Radar conference Dabble DB was voted best in show, and it won the "make it easy" category. It is, of course, written in my beloved Smalltalk. :)
Technorati: Smalltalk
The latest burn down graph has been added to flickr. You can view it here.
This week we have managed to pull the sprint more or less back on track. However, Michael is going on holiday next week so I'm expecting progress to slow slightly. Whether we finish on time or not, I think, will come down to how well the testing goes. To date testing tends to go over budget. :(
Tune in next week to see what effect Michael's holiday has had on progress.
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