Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations, so they used timeboxes. Senior management had made the decision to fire all the local testers and buy cheaper tester time over the...more »

A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning itself. In Scrum, the team is supposed to generate all of the planning itself. The checkin is different from the Scrum standup and the objectives of the checkin...more »

I've used LinkedIn for many years now, long before I joined Facebook ... I liked the concept of never losing contact information with business contacts and technologist. It just seemed like a good idea (though I do sometimes wonder if LinkedIn has any particular purpose). I tend to only connect with people I've met in person, or at least talked to on the phone. One thing that drives me crazy about LinkedIn is that you aren't forced to customize the message. As far as I'm concerned, the...more »

A summary of a discussion about the advantages of Tapestry over Struts: Exceptional exception reporting Significantly less code Live class reloading Sensible defaults, especially for SEO-friendly URLs Great community Flexibility and customizability Interestingly, the quality of Tapestry's documentation was mentioned ... favorably! Between the revised home page, and Tapestry JumpStart (and Igor's coming book), I think we're headed in the right direction in terms of...more »

Github has these cool ribbon images that you can use if you want to encourage forking your project on your site. They're great and I wanted to use them on a little project I am working on. However, one of my goals was not to use any images, but rather produce all display elements with CSS. It was a little bit of trial and error but I got it working. Basically you do the following: Create a link in a div with an id of "banner" Force div#banner to be 149px x 149px. Set overflow to...more »

Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were too large. Normally I suggest smaller iterations, but one of the developers suggested they move to kanban. The New York developers had a...more »

Tapestry 5.3.1 is out in the wild ... and if Tapestry is to stay relevant, Tapestry 5.4 is going to need to be something quite (r)evolutionary. There was some confusion on the Tapestry developer mailing list in advance of this blog post; I'd alluded that it was coming, and some objected to such pronouncements coming out fully formed, without discussion. In reality, this is just a distillation of ideas, a starting point, and not a...more »

Tapestry 5.3.1 is out in the wild ... and if Tapestry is to stay relevant, Tapestry 5.4 is going to need to be something quite (r)evolutionary. There was some confusion on the Tapestry developer mailing list in advance of this blog post; I'd alluded that it was coming, and some objected to such pronouncements coming out fully formed, without discussion. In reality, this is just a distillation of ideas, a starting point, and not a...more »

Last week, Luke Daly arrived in Portland to teach a three day Gradle class; the folks at Gradleware were nice enough let me audit the class (so it only cost me a couple of thousand dollars of lost billing revenue to attend). My goals for the class was to gain a deeper understanding of how Gradle works, so that I could write more efficient builds, diagnose problems, and write my own plugins. The class scored very high on all of those counts! Much of the first day was spent on basics,...more »

I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile. Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all excited. This is good. Then reality hits. Scrum is meant for collocated geographically cross-functional teams. Uh oh. Almost all of these teams are separated by function: the...more »

I'll be speaking in my hometown this week. I'll be presenting at the Philadelphia Area New Media Association (PANMA) meeting for January. Topics: jQuery Mobile PhoneGap Typekit Edge CSS Shaders Description: Adobe and HTML5 In the past few months, there has been a number of new tools and new services from Adobe for HTML5. Some of these tools, like PhoneGap Build and jQuery contributions are aimed at developers and some, such as Edge, are more focused on designers....more »

A friend of mine alerted me this weekend to just how much I have a weird fascination with Venn diagrams. I decided to roll with it. So yeah, I have an irrational love of Venn diagrams. But that begs the question, can I make a Venn diagram with just CSS? I found a couple of examples out there: Dusting off front-end skills: CSS Venn Diagram HTML And CSS Venn Diagram But I felt like they had a bit too much fluff in the HTML markup. Not that there is anything technically wrong with...more »

A few days ago I was discussing the topic of builders during a Grails training session. After surveying the usual suspects found in the standard Groovy distribution (MarkupBuilder, SwingBuilder, Antbuilder and ObjectGraphBuilder) we jumped into Grails' DomainBuilder. Once we got familiar with it the team seized the opportunity to refactor an existing application they've been working on for a few weeks. The idea was to remove a very verbose data setup during the bootstrap sequence. Like many...more »

I’m so pleased to announce that Shane Hastie and I are leading a workshop on Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams, April 17-18, 2012 in Pleasanton, CA. Yes, that is Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Agilistry Studio. Shane and I first delivered this workshop last year in Australia, when I was there for Software Education‘s SDC. We had a great time, and so did many of the participants. We have since evolved the workshop, to address the needs of the...more »

I have posted last week’s Pragmatic Manager, Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More?. At Agile 2011, I had a great video conversation with Shane Hastie about agile project portfolio management. The chair is big, I’m not so short. The chair is big, I’m not so short. How many times do you think I have to say that to make it true? The chair is big, I’m not so short. That ought to do it. more »

I was originally scheduled to help out my colleague Kevin Hoyt as a TA. Turns out that there was a slight scheduling SNAFU and I'm taking a full slot. My topic: The Future of HTML5 Motion Design HTML5 and CSS3 are hot, driven by an explosion of new, Internet connected devices. While they offer many new features that should allow you to do the types of things that you previously did in Flash, actually making it happen is really hard. Until now. If you weren't sure, I'll be talking...more »

Merlyn Albery-Speyer is organizing a Hackergarten while Luke Daley (creator of Geb, and Gradle committer) is in town to run an in-depth Gradle training. I'll be there, working on Tapestry, or Gradle, or a video game, or something. Please see Meryln's blog to RSVP. I look forward to meeting and coding with more PDX peeps! more »

I love teaching Groovy to existing Java developers, because they have such a hard time holding back Tears Of Joy when they see how much easier life can be. Today, though, I did a quick demo that resulted in a line of Groovy that was so amusing I had to post it here. Consider a trivial POGO (Plain Old Groovy Object) called Course: class Course String name int days String toString() { "($name,$days)" } } The goal was to take a collection of courses and...more »

My new Gantthead column is up, Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games? If you liked the schedule games from the more traditional projects, you’ll love the agile schedule games. Please comment over there. more »

I posted my most recent Pragmatic Manager: Are Your “Shoulds” Driving Your Decisions? Yes, in case you couldn’t tell, I am doing a series on project portfolio management, so that you do take a look at my Peer Project Portfolio Coaching. Several people took advantage of the early bird pricing. We’re in the not-quite-early-bird pricing now. And, if you sign up with a buddy, you can still get early bird pricing for the two of you. It’s a steal. If you are...more »