Guild Blogs

Bugzilla updated to 3.4.5

2010-02-01T18:14:03Z

All Bugzilla instances have been updated to 3.4.5 in order to resolve a security issue announced yesterday.

You can read the release announcement here.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Bugzilla updated to 3.4.4

2009-11-19T18:31:30Z

All Bugzilla instances have been updated to 3.4.4 in order to resolve a security issue announced yesterday.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Hosted Bugzilla Service Announced

2009-11-16T18:03:25Z

The Consultants Guild is excited to announce the first of several hosted services.

Our first service is the widely used and extremely popular Bugzilla.

Bugzilla is a "Defect Tracking System" or "Bug-Tracking System". Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively.

Our hosted Bugzilla service will provide you with your own instance of which you will be the administrator. You can then choose whether or not your instance will be public or private, as well as all the standard Bugzilla options.

Pricing is as little as $10/month and there is a 14 day free trial, no credit card required.

Bugzilla.ConsultantsGuild.com

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Oregon Motorcycle Tours announces their 2010 Tour Schedule

2009-11-04T16:43:03Z

2010 Schedule

Original post blogged on Wayne Allen's Blog.

Twist of the Wrist II Now on DVD

2009-10-14T17:01:26Z

Twist of the Wrist II Now on DVD

Original post blogged on Wayne Allen's Blog.

New Tires, Self Mounted

2009-08-10T20:43:38Z

After the Oregon Desert Tour it was definitly time for a new rear tire. My 2001 Ducati ST2 came to me with an inexpensive tire with OK performance and I wanted something like I had on my 1998 ST2. I also wanted to tackle doing the work myself. After spending hours pouring over the internet I ordered a Diablo Strada Rear Tire.

The only things that had me worried as a first time tire changer was breaking the bead, seating the bead and balancing the tire. My original KLX 250S tires were not balanced and I didn't want that feeling on the ST2. I ran across Dyna Beads as an alternative to stick-on weights and I was sold. Other various sites and youtube videos convinced me that I could break the bead without expensive equipment and that my compressor was more than capable of seating the tire.

Here is the bike with the tire removed. No big surprises here except the shop manual doesn't say what size the axle nut is (30mm) and I had to go buy one.

I thought about building a home-made bead breaker, but I found that my largest C-clamp would fit around the tire and it worked great for breaking the bead.

Here you can see the end results next to the old tire - definitely time for a change.

Total time to change the tire was about 3 hours. Mostly because I was being careful and it was about 98F. I expect next time it should take me about an hour. The Dyna Beads seem to work great.

Original post blogged on Wayne Allen's Blog.

Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

2009-07-21T19:25:44Z

Tom DeMarco, arguably one of the key thinkers when it comes to how we develop software has been reflecting.

My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation (Prentice Hall/Yourdon Press, 1982), played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.

-- http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf

If that doesn't rock you back on your heels, then you need to re-read that paragraph.

Next you need to go read the whole article (2 pages).

As someone who prefers the agile approach I have been pushing the value based approach over the control based one for nearly a decade now. But to see someone like Tom question publicly what he (and we) have been doing for the last 30 years makes me respect Tom even more, and give me hope that as an industry we are heading in the right direction.

Original post blogged on Wayne Allen's Blog.

What metrics should you track?

2009-07-21T17:47:16Z

Jack Milunksy of Brightspark and AgileBuddy was reacting to a Agile Project Management forum topic on metrics.

Jack was of the opinion that:

the more one spends time tracking metrics, the less time there is for development

While I have some sympathy for this point of view having worked for larger organizations in the past, I have come to realize that you do need some type of metric that is understandable to the rest of the organization. All the other departments in your organization have an overriding single number that describes how they are doing, why not software development?

As I mentioned in my No More Iterations post, throughput is my metric of choice. The cost of collecting this metric is so low that it doesn't matter.

Now I have been asked to provide all sorts of low level metrics in the past not knowing how they were going to be used. I was not inclined to cooperate in those cases since the time required to collect them was never going to be offset by any value coming back to my teams. And this is most likely what Jack is protesting.

I like being proactive and providing a metric I think is useful, rather than waiting for someone who doesn't really understand software development ask me to have my teams track actual effort against estimated effort in units of 0.1 hours (really I have been asked to provide this!).

Original post blogged on Wayne Allen's Blog.