For Geeks Only!

Can an Agile Team have Managers?

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:40:00 -0700

I have a confession to make. I’m a manager. I’ve been a manager for many years. I’ve led agile development teams most of that time. I’ve been told I’m a pretty good manager. And when I look in the mirror, I don’t see any pointy hair. And as a point of fair disclosure, I believe there actually is a place for managers in an agile team.

Ever since the first days of extreme programming, I’ve noticed a definite view in the agile community that managers become superfluous. Self organizing teams, coupled with the principles and practices that ease the path toward product and project management, have removed the need for management. This is a seemingly wonderful sentiment, but it just doesn’t happen that way. Companies will always have some sort of management structure. Who those managers are, and what they do, will change considerably though...

via blogs.versionone.com

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Facing Quality Challenges in Agile...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:05:00 -0700

One of the Agile practitioners tweeted this quote : "Many Agile-related questions I get are of the type "How do we drive a car safely when it has only 3 wheels, no breaks, and a blind driver?". This is pretty true, because many people consider that software product quality will find itself a path through and just be there, without giving it even small portion of thought. As mentioned in various literature about Agile teams, that the product Quality is the responsibility of the whole team. All team members work closely(Product owner - Developers - Testers - Architects - Technical Lead..etc.)to get the software product to the light. And the capacity to create high-quality solutions lies in the (Will) of the team and their dedication in considering quality through project's different phases. On tight schedules teams tend to squeeze out the time dedicated for QA and testing activities, with a whole focus on getting the set of features done. Actually this may work for small projects and teams, but getting sloppy with process not always succeed; as we ignore the fact that higher penalty and technical dept will accumulate on the team, and then you find that more time and cost are depleted in the maintenance and rework. This was discussed before the Technical dept posted recently. If we looked at the project life cycle through the QA lens, we can see it mainly as the iterating of two major activities: Bug Injection Phase and Bug Removal Phase

Check out this website I found at trap.it

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What’s an Agile PM to Do?

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:45:00 -0700

You interviewed with team members a month ago, and you were a little concerned--it didn’t seem as if they were keeping to their iterations. Their product owner wasn’t grooming the backlog often enough to keep the backlog filled for the release meeting. They seemed to have an awful lot of defects piling up at the end of the iteration. And it sure looked as if they finished only two or three stories every four-week iteration.

But you really like the product domain--it’s where you want to go with your career. And you think you can learn a lot from your VP, so you decided to take the position. Now it’s your second day on the job and you realize that your original concerns have understated the problem. Not only does your project have all of those problems, but everyone is working on several other projects simultaneously--including the testers.

The iterations are too long. The stories are humongous. Everyone is multitasking. The product owner is not available enough. This is a rich, problem-solving environment--the project has a ton of problems. You know you can help the team fix these issues, but you just have one problem: Where do you start?

via gantthead.com

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Introducing HTML5 video

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:02:00 -0700

What is HTML5 video, and how is it different from what you're used to? What problems does it solve, and what issues does it have? Since HTML5 doesn't require a plug-in, is it open source? Find the answers to these questions and learn the basic terminology for understanding how video works. Learn how to embed HTML5 video, explore the API, and explore browser compatibility.

via ibm.com

Get HTML5: Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim

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Don't be alarmed but your iPhone may have a daylight saving bug

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:26:00 -0700

As NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT and South Australia switched to daylight saving time at the weekend, a bug in the Apple iPhone caused some workers to run late yesterday.

The bug appears to affect only those with a "recurring" alarm, which is useful for when you want to be woken up at the same time each and every day of the week.

Online forums were filled with Australians discovering the bug; they have found a simple fix - to set their alarms one hour late. Setting a manual alarm each day - instead of having it occur automatically - was also said to work, Macworld said.

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Some users said their iPhone alarms did not go off at all.

There has been no indication when a fix might be made available. Apple Australia has been contacted for comment but is yet to respond.

via smh.com.au

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Google New

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:48:00 -0700

via google.com

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Inversion of Control Freak: HTTP and HTTPS with Google CDN

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:43:00 -0700

One little trick that I learned not too long ago was the ability to load a file from Google’s CDN (or any CDN for that matter) relative to the protocol of the page, e.g. if the page is HTTPS, the CDN content would load HTTPS, and vice versa.

In virtually all CDN examples you’ll see something like this:

<script src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js”></script>

But what if my page is HTTPS? Do I somehow have to go through and either by hand, or with Javascript, update all src values to be HTTPS?

Nope. There’s a much shorter way that’s part of the official URL spec that’s compatible with really old browsers, such as IE 3 and Netscape 3.

<script src=”//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js”></script>

Did you see that it was missing “HTTP:” at the beginning? It may look weird, but it’s a perfectly valid src attribute. All the browser does is infer the protocol from the current location.

via jonathan-oliver.blogspot.com

Get Google Code Blog on Kindle

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Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Isai… Aapas Mein Hain Bhai Bhai..

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:43:10 -0700

Every school in India has a similar looking painting put up on their notice board. And such paintings by students get appreciated more around Independence day.. Here’s one such painting which was put up at Samaritan Mission School in Calcutta.

via indiadailyphoto.com

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Java 4-ever - JavaZone Trailer

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:01:00 -0700

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In front of my Apartment

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:08:26 -0800

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30 Photographic Goals for 2010

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:05:36 -0800

via digital-photography-school.com

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Too Many Ebook Readers...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:21:45 -0800

Gizmodo has published an article on the current state of the eReaders - http://goo.gl/WvLH

Do u buy ebooks or download from torrents?

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Case Study: RESTful Web Services at Orbitz

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:37:04 -0800

Alex Antonov explains why Orbitz needed to ditch Jini and Java serialization in favor of REST and Protocol Buffers. Most of the presentation contains a demo of a sample application using these technologies to handle client-server requests/responses.

via infoq.com

Restful Web Services

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

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How to make WSAD ask for workspace location?

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:17:21 -0800

When WSAD starts-up, it ask for the workspace location to open. In the same dialog box, there is a checkbox below the workspace location and it reads like - Use this workspace as the default and donot show this dialog box again.
Accidently, I checked the checkbox, and alas, I was unable to change my workspace. So, what to do now? How to get the dialog box prompt back?
Right click on the WSAD icon and go to Properties -> Shortcut -> Target. Add -setworkspace to Target, and we are ready to go.
After making the changes, Target should read like the below-
"C:\tools\IBM\WebSphere Studio\Application Developer\v5.1.2\wsappdev.exe" -setworkspace
Next time, you open WSAD, you will be prompted to select your workspace!

via rgarg.blogspot.com

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How to be a Good Project Manager

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 12:20:00 -0800

Show appreciation - thanking people for their assistance is not only the right thing to do it is expected.

Listen effectively - think before speaking. Listen attentively. Make the person feel like they are the only thing you are focusing on.

Give credit to others - always give credit where credit is due.

Don't be negative - negative people can kill team creativity...

via projectsteps.blogspot.com

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

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Aryan

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 13:12:10 -0800

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Why the HTML5 'Video' Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in the Browsers Which Support It

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:24:34 -0800

Why the HTML5 ‘Video’ Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in the Browsers Which Support It

via daringfireball.net

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Real-Time Mobile Video Stitching

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:19:56 -0800

Mobile live video casting is a special form of video sharing that involves a person recording an event using his mobile phone and while the video is being recorded it gets streamed to a website where viewers can watch the live video stream. Recently, a number of service providers have started to provide mobile live video casting, and the usage of these services has been constantly on the rise since their introduction.

There is an opportunity to greatly enhance the viewing experience of the casted event by exploiting the ubiquity of video capture-capable mobile phones. Towards this end, this project aims at developing a system for mobile live video casting, named Mobicast, that enables the collaboration between multiple users casting the same event from their mobile phones to provide a better collective viewing experience of the event to end viewers.

via research.microsoft.com

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Perils of Being Financially 'Literate'

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:28:36 -0800

Laments about the lack of financial literacy are a common refrain whenever anyone discusses any financial regulatory issue. There is an explicit assumption that if only customers of financial products did not suffer from this condition of financial illiteracy, then they would make better choices with their income, savings and investments. It sounds logical, but is it actually true?

A few days back I came across an article on the Bloomberg website referring to a study that had discovered the opposite. This 2006 study on investor fraud had been conducted in the U.S. by a non-profit called the FINRA Investor Education Foundation. The study learned that people who were ripped off by fraudulent investor schemes outscored those who hadn’t been by a “statistically significant” 27 percentage points when it came to financial literacy...

via new.valueresearchonline.com

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How to Get Free Inflight Wi-Fi This Holiday Season

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:47:18 -0800

via gizmodo.com

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