Pascal Mestdach's Blog

Moving bookshelf to Goodreads and manage e-books in Calibre

2011-11-27T22:43:00.001+01:00

Over the past month I changed my toolset for managing my bookshelf and e-books. In this blog post I’ll explain why.

For the past years I used Shelfari from Amazon to manage the books I want to read, and the ones I’ve read. It was also useful to keep track of what friends are reading to pick up interesting books. There are also user groups, but those communities were not that vibrant. Nowadays some paper books also provide a free download of the e-book, and I didn’t use a tool to manage my e-books.

Now all of that has changed!

Check out Calibre, probably the best free e-book management tool around. After dropping your pdf into the tool it can sync with online services from Amazon, Google, Goodreads,… to get extra info about the book like covers, short description, ratings, and so on. You can apply tags to your books to group them into categories and search trough them. You can keep multiple formats for your books and sync to a range of mobile devices. It’s even possible to convert one format into another. Lots of available plugins can extend the functionality of Calibre. I was hooked immediately.

The other tool I use now is Goodreads. I didn’t realize Shelfari was lacking so many features until I saw Goodreads, for example:

you can make additional book shelves and put an RSS feed on the ones you want
you can export at any time (unlike Shelfari)
authors of the books also have profiles on Goodreads, so you can send them messages, ask questions,...
order books on your shelves the way you want them to appear
highly customizable widget to put on your website

I also have the feeling the community on Goodreads is a lot more vibrant than on Shelfari. So I’ll leave Shelfari soon, and will try to convince my Shelfari friends to do the same.

This blog post should help a little :-)

Special thanks to Jochen and Yoeri for showing me these great tools.

If you want to join me on goodreads, visit http://www.goodreads.com/pascalmestdach

Teams avatars increase fun!

2011-10-08T10:26:00.001+02:00

No matter how ‘challenging’ the project is you’re working on, it’s always important to keep a fun, positive attitude in the team.

One thing that definitely increases the fun factor in a team is introducing team avatars.

These avatars can indicate:

who’s working on what for the moment
who’s on vacation
who’s giving the upcoming product demo
who’s responsible for support today
…

Something like this:

As you can see we picked The Looney Tunes as our theme. In case you’re wondering, I picked Speedy :-).

Another theme was already taken in our company, The A-Team: “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire...”

Other themes that came to mind:

The Matrix
Ghostbusters ”Ain't afraid of no ghost”
Lord of the Rings

Do you know other thankful themes? Please share them…

Pick one, implement it… just because it’s fun and not a lot of work.

RoundhousE experience report

2011-08-09T18:09:00.001+02:00

RoundhousE is an automated database deployment and change management system. We started to use it over a year ago, so it’s time for an experience report.

At the current moment we’re using RoundhousE in 3 big projects and 5 smaller ones each deploying new versions and schema updates at least once a month in an automated way to over 25 on-site client installations. And it’s working great!

This year 2 more big projects are planned to start using RoundhousE for database migrations. And each new project that starts, small or big has to use RoundhousE. It has become a company policy.

Developer and integration sandboxes

We provide each project with development sandboxes on the developers machine and a project integration sandbox on the build server. The project databases get rebuild from scratch with every automated build using the MsBuild integration of RoundhousE. Database migration scripts are getting tested over and over on different platforms (sql server 2005/2008 and oracle 10/11).

Deploy into a copy of production

We’ve set up an internal production like environment where new versions are pushed upon and tested first, before being released to production.

We integrated the execution of the RoundhousE console in a self made PowerShell script, that also updates the version of the application (stopping/starting services and websites, copying binaries that kind of stuff).

Deploy into production

Because we have those environments mentioned above, and the deployment is already tested, a production migration rarely fails. And even if it fails on Sql Server, that’s not a big issue, because RoundhousE runs the migration in a transaction. So nothing happened.

Conventions around RoundhousE

We implied 3 conventions to make the process run smoothly:

Before we start deploying with RoundhousE on a project, the current databases in production need to have the exact same schema. This is also the hardest part in our process, but once it’s completed it’s a gift from heaven. :-)
Only the database user which RoundhousE uses to perform the migration has the right to make schema updates to the database. And the development team does not know those credentials. That way we assure that only RoundhousE performs schema updates.
Nothing gets deployed into production before it’s deployed to our internal environment.

To make it perfect

The Oracle integration still needs some work, so maybe a real Oracle expert can contribute to the project, enlightening us with the wonderful internals of Oracle.

General feeling

RoundhousE is still awesome!

20 Questions to help you define the meaning of an 'Agile company'

2011-08-08T21:15:00.002+02:00

The agile movement is happening for about 10 years now. A growing number of people and teams pick up the agile principles, methods and practices.

And no one would ever want to go back to the 'old' days. Agile becoming mainstream is definitively a good thing!

From time to time I hear people say that they work in an Agile Company. But what does that even mean?

Does it mean that everyone in your company knows and uses the agile lingua?
Or that you're doing iterative development with sprint planning and review meetings?
That teams continuously learn through retrospectives?
Or that you're applying continuous delivery, pair programming, test/behavior driven development,...?
Or that you’re applying Customer Development?
Or practice Lean and Kanban practices?
Or that your Scrum Masters and Product Owners are certified?
Or all of the above?

Let's take a step back and try to reflect a set of questions on the 4 agile values stated on the well known VersionOne Agile Poster: adaptability, transparency, simplicity and unity.

That way we might figure out for ourselves what an 'Agile Company' really means.

Value 1: Adaptability

How quickly can your company respond to a compelling product from a competitor?
How quickly can you evaluate and implement change requests from your customers?
How quickly can you implement new (government) regulations?
How quickly can you and your customers adapt new proven technologies? Or get rid of deprecated ones?
How easy is it to change the planning for your future product portfolio? And for your current work?

Value 2: Transparency

Do you know how your company is doing financially? What makes most money? What the cost structure is?
Do you know the prospects your company approaches? And what you can do to help in that process?
Do you know the return on investment for your products? What products are doing great? And which aren't?
Do you know what the other teams in your company are working on? And how they are doing?
How open are you in your communication with your customers?

Value 3: Simplicity

How easy is it to jump start new competent people in your teams?
How easy is it to visualize your products architecture? Visualize integrations with other products?
How easy is it to explain in 2 minutes what you do for a living? What your company does?
How much training do your end-users need to work with your products seamlessly?
How easy is it to deploy new versions of your products?

Value 4: Unity

Do you feel all the teams in your company are working to the same overall goals and vision?
How high is the level of colleague finger pointing when something bad happens? Or do they jump in to solve the issue?
Are team, management and stakeholder goals aligned?
Are you helping your customers to achieve their goals?
How high is the general one-for-all / all-for-one feeling?

With these kind of questions you should be inspired to help your company becoming a more agile one.

If you have great questions that should be in this list, please contribute.

Making apps that don’t suck: mind map

2011-07-01T17:53:00.000+02:00

Last weekend I really enjoyed watching an InfoQ presentation on Making apps that don’t suck (thx to Nick for ‘making’ me watch it).
During the talk I’ve made a mind map and would like to share it (click to enlarge):

And if you would like the XMind format, just ask.
We should all do effort in making apps that suck less, because “The world already has enough crap” like the presenter said.

The power of version control for maintaining a build farm

2011-06-22T23:50:00.001+02:00

We’re practicing Continuous Integration at Ihc for about 5 years now. We started small with a few projects on one build server.

Last week we added a third CruiseControl.Net server to our modest build farm and now run about 80 build projects.

We’re proud that we maintain the configuration of this build farm with minimal effort (only a few hours of maintenance per month) and at low cost (it’s open source).

The one thing that really made things a lot more maintainable is putting the CCNet configuration in Subversion.

We basically implemented the solution from this post: http://www.ifunky.net/Blog/post/Cruise-Control-Auto-Rebuild-with-CCNetconfig-in-Source-control.aspx

And added the following:

We structured the configuration into a folder per buildserver to be able to update the configuration per server.
We split the one ccnet.config per server into multiple files, one per team.
CCNet only reloads itself when ccnet.config is touched, so we Touch it now in the build with an Exec task.

So this makes it easy to:

create new projects with a simple commit
add a new buildserver (provide config + initial checkout on the server)
recover from a major buildserver crash (checkdisk removed our configs once)
change all configs at once with a tool like notepad++
move projects from one buildserver to another

This works quite well for us.

I’m wondering how easy and cheap this would all be in competing tools like TeamCity or Team Foundation Server. Any experiences you would like to share?

The customer decides the quality

2011-05-22T21:58:00.003+02:00

… but you can choose your customers.

Last week Michel wrote a nice post about a hot topic: Is focusing on quality stealing from your customer?
I proposed to talk about the same topic at the Belgium Agile Open 2011 and wanted to share the results.

How a developer and a customer think about quality differ a lot.

These are the kind of things developers think about when defining quality:

Is the code readable and maintainable?
Is the test coverage high?
Is there little code duplication?
Is the level of technical debt acceptable?
Is the code clean?
Are best practices applied? No anti-patterns?
…

No surprise there, we just want to prevent crap because we’ve seen enough of this, and we know it makes projects fail or even can bring a company down. But a customer really doesn’t care about these things. So, what does he care about?

Well basically the customer just wants the working product with the functionality he asks for, and he wants it fast!

It’s our job as developers to ask the right questions to get a grasp of the quality the customer wants:

Will the code be thrown away after 3 months?
How extensible should the product be?
How do you expect to scale?
What is likely to change?
How will the product be maintained?
…

The bad news is that it should be the customer who decides what level of quality he wants. It’s a business decision.

The good news is that you don’t need to work with a client who doesn’t care about continuous integration, iterative development, automated testing,... That is also a business decision. :-)

In the end we just need to find the sweet spot of course.

Welcome to the world of Android.

2011-03-06T22:55:00.001+01:00

Recently my spouse and me decided to invest some money in 2 smartphones. After some research and asking around we decided the best quality for the money was the HTC Wildfire running the Android.

A lot of articles on the best droid applications have already been written:

So I wont write another one, but wanted to share what applications we decided to use and how it all integrates.

Contacts are stored with pictures,mobile,e-mail and so in Gmail. We use Gmail itself for e-mail and can edit each others calendar and show both Google calendars on our phones. Integrates all really fine. No wonder there, right?

The only thing that didn’t sync well was the GList app with the Gmail tasks. So we switched to Cloudlist instead for keeping grocery lists and small to-do lists.

Advanced Task Killer is also something you want to manage your apps so that they don’t hurt performance or battery life. In the settings you can specify that apps get killed automatically when not used every hour or so.

HTC Peep was the standard twitter app and it works fine for now.

Some things I did change in my daily use:

Switch from Microsoft OneNote to Evernote for taking notes, because Evernote has a great droid app. Now my notes are synched between Pc/Mac at work and our phones.
Switch from Juice to Google Listen for listening to podcasts. It also integrates with Google Reader. (thx to Jochen for this one)
I keep using KeePass for my personal passwords, but now a KeePass file is stored in DropBox. Both are available on android also, but a little warning here: beware that you put your passwords in the cloud, so secure your file with a highly secure password, and maybe don’t save super sensitive passwords in there such as your home bank account or your PayPal account.

I also advice you to install some kind off anti-theft tool. We choose LMaxi Anti Theft Lite. You can ask the location of your phone, let an alarm go off or even wipe the phone all by sending SMS messages to the phone. But I suggest you change the standard text messages.

I don’t want viruses on our phones, so Risk Detector also made the list.

Another handy tool is the Astro File Manager for browsing the content on your SD card.

That’s about it, just some gadgets I installed to show off against iPhone users: Barcodescanner, Layar, Shazam, RunKeeper :-)

One thing I miss right now is a personal kanban tool that integrates with an online one. If you know one?

What apps do you use that are really handy? Any apps which are better than the ones we use now? Let me know…

How SCOM can disturb your build farm

2011-02-28T23:31:00.001+01:00

In our automated builds databases get build up from the ground with RoundhousE. We even deploy nightly to a Quality Assurance environment. And this works quite fine for about a year now.

But recently we get build failures with nice messages like: Could not obtain exclusive lock on database 'model'. Retry the operation later. CREATE DATABASE failed.

Strange message at first sight, but it makes sense.

When SQL Server creates a new database, "The SQL Server uses a copy of the model database to initialize the database and its metadata". Also, users could create, modify, drop objects in the Model database. As such, it is important to exclusively lock the model database to prevent copying the data in change from the Model database. For more info on creating the database see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176061.aspx

No exclusive lock? Who’s holding a lock then? Execute following query to find out. You should have no results.

SELECT spid
FROM master..sysprocesses
WHERE dbid = DB_ID('model')

But in our case it turned out that Microsoft’s SCOM is holding connections open to the Model DB. So each time SCOM is monitoring the build fails miserably.

We managed to add an exclude for the Model DB in the SQL Server Management Pack, but connections are still being made and stay open to long. SCOM is kind of a big black box, at least to us it is.

Our solution for now is to disable the SQL Server Management pack for our QA servers until Microsoft fixes the issue. Bummer.

How far should you take the monitoring of servers in a build farm? What do you think?

Making a presentation with prezi.com

2011-02-06T00:03:00.001+01:00

Soon I’ll give an internal presentation on Balsamiq Mockups, a wonderful tool for making wireframes in the early stages of software design.

As I was looking for an alternative to powerpoint presentations, I remembered seeing a really cool zooming presentation by Gojko Adzic on Specification By Example. He made it with prezi.com.

So let’s give this a try. It’s free if you want to publically share the presentations you make. After signing up and watching the 6 minute tutorial, you’re ready to make a presentation. It’s really intuitive and easy.

You just type in your ideas, upload some pictures, maybe link to video’s on YouTube. Play with the zooming and add some frames. The frames allow you to group items for zooming. The last step is making the presentation path by clicking on the items in the order you want them to show up.

In a couple of hours I made my first prezi: http://prezi.com/kbu_fak6srfl/wireframing/

Let me know if you like this, or if you know other cool alternatives to the boring powerpoint presentations.

Professional Goals 2011

2010-12-28T15:39:00.001+01:00

A new year is a good time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished last year and set goals for the next. These are my professional goals for 2011:

Code

Don't write any more code which is not covered by tests.
Write cleaner code. Less if-statements, smaller classes, better intention revealing code,...
Apply the Boy Scout rule all the time.
Contribute making an NHibernate set of classes that we can reuse in all our apps. Including a BaseEntity, Session Management classes, BaseRepository,...

Methodology

Focus more on the customer, he/she doesn't care if we use Kanban, XP, Scrum, Lean or whatever.
Try to convince our project coaches/management that there is a better suited methodology for doing pure product development instead of what we do now.
Work together with operations to get our code deployed more smoothly. Features aren't done, until you've worked on the feedback you get on them from your customer using it in production. And if you don't want to wait long on that feedback, deployment should be smooth.
Keep using the Pomodoro Technique because it's one of the few things that really helps me to hold focus.

Learn

Read books (read 16 books last year, will be hard to keep up that pace)
- Nhibernate 3.0 Cookbook
- Asp.Net MVC2 in Action

Attend at least one Agile conference.

Share

Find a way to get more people on the bandwagon in our company.
Publish at least one new blogpost every month.
Continue contributing to the RoundhousE project.
Keep getting in touch with other good developers.

I’m writing this post to hold myself accountable for the accomplishment of this goals.

I also hope this will inspire some other people to start writing down and tackling their goals for the upcoming year.

(Beyond) The Goal

2010-12-03T16:25:00.001+01:00

The Goal was recommended to me by several people from the Agile Community. It’s a book written more than 20 years ago and it has over 3 million copies sold. Nick Oostvogels loaned it to me (Thx Nick!) and I enjoyed it so much that I ordered “Beyond The Goal” also on Audible and listened to it on the way to work.

Both the books are about the Theory of Constraints.

The Goal is written as a novel and very easy to read. Main character, Alex Rogo, is a plant manager at UniCo, and his factory is facing troubles. The book is written from Alex Rogo’s perspective. I could tell you the story here, but you should read it :-)

Beyond the Goal is a lecture of Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt where he talks about companies which have applied the TOC, and diving deep into the details of it why some of them succeeded, and some of them failed.

Below is a mindmap I created while reading/listening to both books. (click to enlarge)

Reading the books helped me to understand the lean movement and The Toyota Way better. It also helps to reflect some of the principles in Kanban and why some things in some other approaches don’t work that well.

And beside that… The Goal was fun to read!

XpDays Benelux 2010

2010-11-28T23:49:00.001+01:00

XpDays 2010 was again great fun combined with a lot of learning!

There were 4 timeslots a day, each with 5 concurrent sessions. Next to this there were also some open space sessions.

I first attended a session on DevOps. Patrick explained a lot of tools that can end the war between developers and operations. There was also a great story about BBQ, loaded with lot’s of metaphors.

Then Complexity vs Lean by Jurgen Appelo, great entertaining speaker! Many controversial topics on Lean and Kanban principles. I definitely plan to read his upcoming book “Management 3.0”.

After dinner we learned folding Frogs in an Agile game on Kanban. Beware… next time I’m in a boring meeting, some frogs will be made! Hoped to learn more on Kanban in that session.

The last session I attended on the first day was on Story Mapping. Actually, if we used this technique last week when trying to define stories on a new project, it would have been a lot smoother. Something for the next time we do this.

The first day ended in the pub where we even won a price in a very difficult Agile Pub quiz. :-)

I started the second day with a workshop by iLean on Value Stream Mapping. Definitely a teaser to learn more on the topic.

Then a session on tools for Lean Architecture. It was all about ways to communicate about Architecture. I need to get better at drawing, will read “The Back of the Napkin” to achieve that.

Then a coding Dojo on the Open-Closed principle, the O in SOLID. Did you know that each time that you write an If-statement a little white rabbit gets killed? Wow, now I will think twice before writing one of those again.

And to end this years edition of XpDays my colleague Jochen Jonckheere and myself gave our session on Database Change Management. The hard work paid off, the session went well and the participants where quite happy with the session.

And as always XpDays was really well organized, those guys & girls really keep up the good work!

Book Review: The Toyota Way

2010-08-31T23:39:00.001+02:00

The Toyota Way is the book where many of the Lean / Kanban ideas originate from.

It felt to me that this book was a must read, before further learning on Lean and Kanban.

So I ordered it on Audible and listened to it on my way to work.

This is what I learned:

The concept of learning by doing is very important. It’s often quicker just to try out things and see what happens rather than spending huge amounts of time reading up on the best approach.
Employers should try to obtain an atmosphere of continuous learning.
In the book there’s a lot of focus on how to add value to the customer, something that we can improve on a lot in software development.
The idea of stopping the production line when problems arise, and using that moment as a learning point for continuous improvement made me think about Continuous Integration. We should more often help each other out when a build breaks, not wait until the breaker fixes it. Maybe we can prevent it next time, and become more productive.
Toyota is not bleeding edge on new technology, but works with standards and let those evolve when the time is right and the value of new technologies is high enough. Something we techies can learn from a lot, we seem to have an urge to always use the latest technology available, no matter what the value is for the customer.
It takes up to 10 years to really get The Toyota Way and use it in a sustainable way. Wow… 10 years? We’d better start right now :-)

For me the book served as an introduction to some terminology such as eliminate waste, inventory, kanban, kaizen,…

Ready for the LeanKanban2010 conference now, hope we get approval to attend it very very soon. It’s almost sold out.

Agile meets Red Monkey

2010-08-05T00:21:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time there was a monkey that went to the edge of his forest where he met a red fish. They started talking about how things are done in both their worlds, and a new innovative idea emerged from the conversation… a Red Monkey.

The enthusiastic monkey wanted to take this new idea to the center of the jungle as quickly as possible to convince the other animals to start doing things this new innovative way. But during his journey he encountered the harmless Red Monkey Hunters, resisting change and trying to kill the poor thing for numerous reasons.

Sometimes the hunters succeed, sometimes the Red Monkey survives, resulting in introducing innovation in the Jungle.

And that’s what we agile evangelists want to do in a company, right? Introduce innovative ideas such as Continuous Integration, BDD, Lean concepts, Scrum, Acceptance Testing,… and so on.

My Organisation is a Jungle by Jef Staes is one of those books that can help us a little in our quest. I learned quite some things from the book. I enjoyed it also, maybe you will too.

Clean Windows7 install for a .Net developer

2010-08-04T18:50:00.001+02:00

Time to review my toolset again for a clean installation.

Nevertheless I’m native Dutch speaking, I prefer to have all my tools installed in English. The main reason is to be able to Google for clear error messages in case of troubleshooting.

The Core toolset:

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
Visual Studio 2010 Premium with following extensions:
- PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 (free)
- Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools (free)
- AnkhSVN for Subversion support (free)
ReSharper 5.1
TortoiseSvn as Subversion client (free)
SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition with latest Service Pack
Launchy lets me forget about the windows "start-menu" (free)
Windows Grep for file content searching

The office tools:

Notepad ++ (free)
WinMerge as diff tool (free)
Microsoft Office 2010 (Excell, Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Communicator, Visio, OneNote, …)
Trend Micro OfficeScan for antivirus
KeePass to hold all my passwords (free)
Windows Live Writer 2009 for blogging (free)
xMind and eMindMaps for mindmapping (both free)
Acrobat Reader (free)
Juice for podcasts on my Zen X-Fi media player (free)
7-Zip (free)
John’s Background Switcher for rotating nice wallpapers.
Paint.NET (free)

I strive to publish most of my personal things into the cloud, so all I need for these is Google Chrome and these free tools:

My RSS subscriptions are in Google Reader
My Professional Profile and network contacts are on LinkedIn
My web favorites are on Delicious
My personal agenda is Google Calendar
My personal email is Gmail
My bookshelf is on ShellFari
Extensions I use for Google Chrome:
- Vimium for mouse less browsing
- Delicous Bookmark Extension

Some tools that didn’t made the list for now:

FireFox because I don’t need FireBug and WebDeveloper for now. So I’ll go Google Chrome all the way.
Stickies got replaced by Microsoft Office OneNote
GhostDoc because we don’t use it.
AutoHotkey to replace spaces by underscores
TeraCopy, Total Commander, Smart Defrag, Gadwin Printscreen, MultiMon TaskBar because I hope Windows7 will handle this better now :-)

That’s it, if there’s a tool I should be using as a .Net developer and it’s not in the list… let me know!

Oh, and if anyone knows a good Twitter client?

How to align HR with Agile?

2010-06-12T10:36:00.002+02:00

In my previous post I reviewed Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn. In the book Mike talks about if you want agile to stick in a company, it has to go beyond software development. Other departments have to follow, such as the Human Resources department.

At the Belgian Agile Open 2010 last month, the topic came along in an open space, and this week I listened to a podcast on Interviewing software developers by the guys from Herding Code.

To make things clear, I’m not in the HR business, I don’t even know the business, but just want to blog about 4 things I learned on combining Agile with HR. So here we go…

1. Beware off individual performance reviews & incentives

Individual performance reviews are not agile at all. Problem with them is that they don’t support the mindset of teamwork. Why should a senior developer help out a junior developer who slows him down? A far better approach is to reward teams with incentives when they continuously accomplish goals that they have committed to.

2. Pair-programming is a great way of recruiting developers

Probably the best way to hire good and motivated developers for a company is to pair-program with them. Along the way you find out if the candidate is a team player, if he/she likes to work with us, if he/she likes to work in our code, if he/she is willing to work out of their comfort zone, how he/she solves problems,… and you get a grasp of their technical skill level. Another idea that came across is to have someone observing this pair-programming session.

3. Certificates are useless for software developers

Did it ever happen to you that you had a candidate with an MCSD (or whatever certificate), who could explain all things very well and with great technical detail, but when he/she was hired, couldn’t crank out a single line of code? Listen to the podcast, you’ll be amazed :-). I learned that a certificate proves that you have theoretical knowledge, but that it does not mean that you can apply it. So which developer do you want to hire? The one that can write code, or the one who can explain how to write code?

4. Shorter feedback loops than once a year!

Getting feedback once a year is not agile. In software development we make hard work of shortening the feedback loops, and with that feedback we build better products. Why should this not apply to HR to 'build' better employees?

Book review: Succeeding with agile

2010-05-24T12:14:00.001+02:00

Do you really want agile software development to stick within your company? Than this is the book to read!

Understanding the mechanics of an agile process is just not enough. The quest of transitioning a company to agile is hard, full of mysteries, and also never ending :-). This book is a distillation of everything Mike Cohn has learned over the years working with many many companies that are trying to become more agile.

As usual I’ve made a mind map from the book. Below is a screenshot of it, not everything is expanded. If you want the digital version (made with the free version of xMind), send me an email.

Some things we will need to apply from the book:

Handle our Technical Debt better
Evaluate the use of having our backlog in a tool, because we’ve made every mistake there’s to make when using such a tool :-)
A new cycle in our adaption to agile needs to start, guided by an Enterprise Transition Community.
Some other departments of our company need to become more compatible with agile, such as HR and Sales, in order to make agile stick.

Agile games

2010-04-27T23:36:00.001+02:00

Got the question of a former colleague if I had some online resources for Agile Games, for learning Scrum/Lean/Xp concepts in a fun way.

Let’s list them…

Games from the Belgian XP/Agile User Group:

Games from Agile Fairytales:

Games from Tasty Cupcakes:

Making Pamphlets: Kanban Game
Thumb Wars
Pocket-sized Principles
Project Pinwheel
Map Flap
Sizing Game
Example Please!
People Polling
The Problem with Principles
Presto Manifesto
The story of our sprints
Football Scrum

Other agile games:

If you have more of them, or want to share experiences on games you played… please comment.

Thanks and keep on gaming :-)
Pascal

How to set up FitNesse for .Net

2010-03-08T21:39:00.001+01:00

Setting up a FitNesse environment is quite easy nowadays. This is what to do.

1. Installation of FitNesse

The latest version of the FitNesse wiki can be downloaded at http://fitnesse.org/FrontPage.FitNesseDevelopment.DownLoad

Java Runtime 6 is needed to run FitNesse, you can get at http://www.java.com/download/

Make a run.bat next to fitnesse.jar file containing:

java -jar fitnesse.jar –e 0 -p 8888

Now start run.bat and FitNesse will extract itself.

The option -e 0 disables the versioning system of FitNesse. No need for versioning if you check the folders into your source code repository.

The option –p 8888 changes the port on which FitNesse will run. The default is port 80.

FitNesse is now running, open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8888

2. Make FitNesse ready for .Net with SLIM.

The latest version of the SLIM.Net testrunner can be downloaded at http://github.com/jediwhale/fitsharp/downloads

Extract it in a folder called ‘Slim’ next to your fitnesse.jar file.

Now edit the root page of FitNesse http://localhost:8888/root?edit

Add the following lines to the dialog box and save.

!path MyProjectBinaries\*.dll

!define TEST_SYSTEM {slim}
!define COMMAND_PATTERN {%m -r fitSharp.Slim.Service.Runner,slim\fitsharp.dll %p}
!define TEST_RUNNER {slim\Runner.exe}

This tells FitNesse to use the Slim.Net testrunner and to look for .Net assemblies in a folder named MyProjectBinaries. In the properties of your .Net projectfile, make sure to compile to this directory. No references to FitNesse assemblies are needed with Slim.

You’re ready now to make your first test.

Database Change Management with RoundhousE

2010-03-04T23:19:00.002+01:00

Three weeks ago we started a search for a good tool for handling Database Change Management.

We had quite some requirements for such a tool. It has to support SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008 and Oracle platforms. It should be able to run in our automated builds, and should be executed with automated installers into production. We need logging when something goes wrong, should be able to run database changes in a transaction, be able to load testdata in test environments,…

Furthermore, we have different development platforms, so it has to be a solution that also works for non .Net technologies. And we didn’t want to learn all our teams a new programming language or DSL, just for making our database changes possible.

Woaw, quite a list, isn’t it?

We made a selection on a bunch of tools. Some articles helped us making the choice:

.Net Database Tool Migration Roundup by Ben Scheirman
Database Migration library for .Net on StackOverFlow

We decided to implement RoundhousE in a spike project and we contributed during the past weeks to the open source project.

RoundhousE is by far the most promising tool. It has a clear roadmap, and provides a lot of the functionalities we wanted out of the box. It also has great support in the community (MassTransit, ChuckNorrisFramework,…)

RoundhousE didn’t support Oracle, but we pulled in the code and with the support of Rob Reynolds our team was able to provide it. At the moment the Oracle support lives in a seperate branch, there’s still some work, but we hope it will be finished soon and merged back in the trunk.

Soon we will start the implementation of RoundhousE in our first project, and we have already plans to use it for all of our projects. That was the goal in the first place :-). We will have a lot of evangelizing to do in some of our teams, but it will be worth it. We are very excited about RoundhousE and the vision it takes on database change management.

I can only say: Give RoundhousE a try, it’s awesome!

FitNesse Cheat Sheet

2010-02-02T01:24:00.001+01:00

While searching the web for a nice cheat sheet for working with SLIM and FitNesse, I didn’t found one, so I made one. :-)

Here's a link to download the pdf version.

If there is something important I forgot, let me know… there’s still some space left.

How to debug FitNesse.Net tests

2009-11-27T21:11:00.003+01:00

FitNesse is the tool we use to specify our Acceptance Criteria.

To debug a FitNesse test where glue code is written in C# or any other .Net language, there are several possible options:

Specify FitNesse TestRunner.exe as an external program in the debug properties of your glue code project. See this blog post: Debugging FitNesse Tests
Put a “Thread.Sleep(5000);” in your glue code so that you have 5 seconds to attach your Visual Studio to the process that executes your tests (FitServer.exe)
Use the plug-in written on TestDriven.Net. You may have to recompile it depending on the version of TestDriven.Net you use, but it works.
Use GFlags.
…

My favorite option so far to debug FitNesse tests is using GFlags because it’s really simple and doesn’t require any code changes.

All you need to do is to make 2 registry files, for example:

AttachDebuggerToFitserver.reg, containing:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\fitserver.exe]
"Debugger"="vsjitdebugger.exe"

DetachDebuggerFromFitServer.reg, containing:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\fitserver.exe]
"Debugger"=""

If you want to debug FitNesse, execute the first file. When you run the tests in the Wiki, a debug window will pop-up, and you can attach your Visual Studio Solution containing the glue code.

If you want to disable the debugging again, just execute the second file.

I saw this possibility for the first time on TechEd Barcelona 2006 in a Hardcore Debugging session by Ingo Rammer. Ingo used it to debug a Windows Service which failed at startup.

Final tips:

Also commit this 2 files into your code repository, so that your colleagues can use them. Don’t keep these precious things for yourself.
Add this 2 little reg files to your Launchy catalog. Then you can start/stop debugging FitNesse by hitting <ALT>+<ENTER> and typing for example “debugfit” or “stopdebugfit”.

Just try it, it’s really simple and effective.

Retrospective: The Safety Exercise

2009-07-07T18:54:00.001+02:00

In many teams the retrospective has always the same format where the team members are asking these 3 questions over and over again:

What went well? What didn’t went well? What are we going to change?

They probably don’t get the most out of that. They end up with telling the standard things, maybe even those things that managers want them to change instead of the things that really help them move forward. Just asking these 3 questions, wont let them think deeply enough to really improve their work. Another option is that they end up with a gigantic list of impediments, not prioritized, not taken action upon. Doing the same meeting over and over again will even get them bored! And maybe they will question if they still need to do the boring retrospective meeting.

That said I would like to refer to the book “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. The book describes a set of practices that you can apply in your retrospectives to make them better.

In our retrospectives we apply practices such as the TimeLine, Prioritize with Dots, Mad-Sad-Glad,… All practices described in the book.

In our latest retrospective we tried a new practice “The Safety Exercise”. One which is not in the book, but talked about on the Agile Toolkit Podcast.

The Safety Exercise is really important with a new team. It's a way to loosen up, or at least assess how comfortable a team feels.

Especially where there are managers in the room or their Scrum Master is their former Project Manager. Team members are not sure of their place, they're not sure how much they can really say. And you don't know how safe people feel.

A way to do it, is passing out index cards to each team member, and let them put a score 1 to 5 on the card indicating how safe they feel.

The Safety Exercise gets a temperature reading on that, the numbers meaning:

5 Oh well, I'll talk about anything!
4 I'll talk about most things, but there are a few things I wont talk about.
3 I'll talk about the easy, non controversial stuff. Nothing negative.
2 I'll agree with what everybody else says.
1 I just don't want to talk!

One of the team members will thereafter collect the cards, shuffle them and read the numbers out loud. Write them on the board. Throw the cards away. You can also make an average number if you want to.

It gives a really anonymous reading how comfortable the group feels.

If you've got a lot of fours and fives, you probably got a group that feels rather comfortable with each other.
If you have a lot of twos and threes, it will probably be hard to talk about a lot of the stuff. Probably for good reasons for things that happened in the past.

If it’s really bad, maybe you need to have a retrospective without having the managers around. Be aware: the feelings of the managers can be hurt. :-) Why are they hiding from us? Why are they afraid from us? Do I allow my team to be self-organising?

Maybe it just needs some time. The good thing is that it creates awareness by the managers and the team.

In our retrospective, we got a lot of fours, a couple of fives, and a few threes. And we will apply the practice again in one of our next retrospectives.

Trying out the Pomodoro Technique

2009-05-26T23:30:00.001+02:00

[Starting a new Pomodoro timer of 25 minutes. My task is to write this blog post.]

A while ago i picked up on Twitter a lot of enthusiasm for the Pomodoro technique. It is a time management technique which is very well suited for Agile Software Development.

Staffan Nöteberg is writing a illustrated book on the Pomodoro Technique, which I enjoyed reading a lot.

Basically, you have 5 steps in applying the technique and a bunch of rules.

Step 1: Start your day with planning

You need to maintain an Activity Inventory where you list up and estimate your tasks. Estimations are expressed in number of pomodori, being time units of 25 minutes. (Max 7 per task)

Every morning you select a number of tasks and write them on your To Do Today Sheet. That’s your commitment for today.

Step 2: Tracking: subsequent Pomodoro of 25 minutes each.

Choose a task to complete and whenever you’re up to it start a Pomodoro timer for 25 minutes and focus on finishing that task.

So until the timer rings… work focused on the task! Don’t start other tasks.

[I just remember that I need to answer a SMS message on my cell phone. But I’m in the middle of a Pomodoro, so I can’t do this now! I put it on the bottom of my To Do Today sheet so that I don’t forget this and mark the internal interruption with an ‘X‘ near my task.]

If you finish the task before the timer rings, continue reviewing the task, and draw a line through the task on your sheet when the Pomodoro rings.

Step 3: Recording

Recording is about listing up your daily observations such as the number of pomodori you completed that day. (your Pomodoro velocity).

You can record also the number of interruptions, number of voided pomodori,…

Step 4: Processing

Processing is about abstracting the raw data from the recording into information such as calculating averages of pomodori spent…

[RRRRIIIIING –Pomodoro is over... let me just complete that sentence]

…on a task or the sum of pomodori you complete in a week.

[Now I take a break of 5 minutes. I’ll take a thee and answer that SMS message now. Back again and rewinding the Pomodoro timer to 25 minutes. Time is ticking again…]

Step 5: Visualizing

In this last step you hold a personal daily retrospective to optimize your day. You can make for example a daily what I’ve learnt mind map. Or you can think about how to handle internal and external interruptions. Goal is continuous improvement.

The Rules:

Once a Pomodoro begins, it has to ring!
If a task takes more than 5–7 Pomodoros, break it down.
If the task takes less than one pomodoro, add it up, and combine it with another task.
The next pomodoro will go better :-)
Don’t use the Pomodoro Technique for activities you do in your
free time. Enjoy free time!

[go back, reading over and polishing the text a bit...]

This cheat sheet will help you getting started with the Pomodoro technique. Just give it a try!

[RRRIIIIIIING. Ok, let’s post this to my blog and draw a line through the task on my To Do Today sheet. And let’s take another break before I pick my next task.]