Joben.Rara.blogs(".NET")

When working software is not enough

2008-09-29T06:25:26Z

A team that followed agile practices still finds itself in trouble.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/A-Story-of-Project-Failure-Mitch-Lacey

Points that stand out a.k.a note to self

Signs that project was in trouble but got ignored - starting 35 minutes

a statement of work that took 6 months. [requirements were unstable]
team was blind to complexity of customer organization Having a customer representative does not actually mean he or she represents the real customers
customer IT organization was not involved
customer thought of agile in terms of waterfall development
No accountability on side of customer

Common thread I see is a breakdown in communication. What people missed big time was the assumptions both sides made. Customer assumed everything they wanted would get built. The dev team assumed the customers understood that the product backlog determines what gets built, that its a finite bucket.

Lessons Learned - starting 50 minutes

customer representative did not take accountability for their decisions. Business users changes requirements that was validated by the customer rep
Team failed to hold customer accountable for their decisions
Having the data does not mean you are right
No true project owner. One was concerned with time/money. Another was concerned only with functionality. [Two headed monster]
Team did not learn about the real project approvers until later

Takeaways

If you know the true project cost - don't fool yourself in believing you can cut it down but moving work to the customer.
Customer education is paramount. There has to be a plan for continuous education.
Raise uncomfortable truths - takes courage [an agile value]
Build an escape plan. [Each building has a fire escape]

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Questions it raises in my mind

Should there be an agile-fitness test/assessment for dev teams and organizations - before you start out an agile project?
How much controls should be in place to stay agile without descending into chaos/anarchy?

AccelerIE8

2008-09-20T05:40:00Z

I’ve been using IE8 Beta 2 for some time now. One of its features is something called accelerators. The concept is simple. In our everyday browsing experience, we find ourselves copy and pasting text from one site to another. Examples of this would be searching for a particular term you read while browsing a page. What I’d normally do is open up a new tab, copy and paste the term into the search toolbar or type www.live.com in the address bar and then paste the term into the search text box.

What an accelerator does is to cut out the copy+open tab+paste steps.

To learn more about it, I tried my hand in creating an accelerator and ended up with two. An accelerator is nothing more than an xml file. I used this developer’s guide to get started.

The code below is an accelerator for looking up stock quotes from MSN Moneycentral.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0"> <homepageUrl>http://moneycentral.msn.com</homepageUrl> <display> <name>Get Stock Quote on MSN</name> <icon>http://moneycentral.msn.com/favicon.ico</icon> </display> <activity category="Quote"> <activityAction context="selection"> <execute method="get" action="http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote"> <parameter name="Symbol" value="{selection}" type="text" /> <parameter name="getquote" value="Get+Quote" type="text" /> </execute> </activityAction> </activity> </openServiceDescription>

[Edit] -- I can't get my link to work for now. I've uploaded these to http://www.ieaddons.com and I'll just link to them once they are up.

If you are using IE8, install my Get Stock Quote accelerator and try it out on the following: MSFT ORCL GOOG ACN (Select one of the stock symbols, right-click and select the 'Get Stock Quote' accelerator)

Or you can try out my Acronym Finder accelerator and look up the following acronyms: BRB YAGNI WTF JAFO

My only gripe at this point is the way the accelerators are accessed. I'm thinking a keyboard shortcut or a favorites mode would be better than what is available now.

Visualizing RegEx

2008-01-17T00:57:33Z

I'm a big fan of visualization. Seeing my del.icio.us feed for the day, I saw this RegEx visualizer built by Oliver Steele. It's not meant to be a regex workbench or validator (It does not recognize certain character ranges like [1-5] or qualifiers like {1,3}). Still, its educational and just reading "non deterministic finite-state automaton " brings back memories of Chomsky and grammars and hanging on to dear life to get a 3.0 :-) I still have my book "Introduction to Automata...(read more)

Software Estimation Tool - easy to use. requires little input. quick and definitive.

2007-09-04T16:52:00Z

Forget Function Point Analysis . Tell Steve McConnell to stuff his book someplace dark. This really works very well. Software Estimation Tool...(read more)

Ruby phone in question

2007-07-11T15:54:11Z

I'm meeting John Lam sometime this month... (ok, me and about 100 others ). I'm attending his talk on Dynamic Programming Languages for the Web a.k.a IronRuby, IronPython on Silverlight. If you want to ask him a "phone in" question, let me know so I can make a list....(read more)

A sample game using Silverlight

2007-06-27T06:48:35Z

Tim Heuer blogs about the experience of Terralever , a .NET shop who currently produce interactive games based on Flash. They wanted to see if Silverlight can be used to build the type of interactive games they have been building. The end-result is Zero Gravity . They even made their character, Lt. Bennett, "social network aware" so that you can add him to your Facebook, MySpace, and even Twitter. Read more about it here -> silverlight: who needs inertia, introducing lt. bennett About...(read more)

Ruby on Rails envy ads

2007-06-26T07:08:29Z

I don't know if you've seen these, its RoR vs. PHP/Java set into the famous "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ad format. I found about 4 of these. here , here , here...(read more)

Bug Bash Comic

2007-06-26T06:45:47Z

Funny but true. :-)...(read more)

Recycling: Short Introduction to Regular Expression

2007-06-25T15:22:00Z

I recently wrote a short article as an overview to why regular expressions should be in every developer's toolbox. I actually left the real discussion of regex to other experts so I used a lot of link-love. [:-)] Seeing that Mike Malone posted an advanced regex article, I decided to put up that short intro here. What are regular expressions and why should I (a.k.a. developer) care? If you’re looking for a definition, try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression . However I think it...(read more)

Setting Proxy settings in IE using PowerShell

2007-06-23T11:34:00Z

Whenever I go to a client and need to plugin to their network, I would find myself typing in proxy settings to get internet access. In IE, that would be in Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings. When I'm back in the office and plugged in to my corporate network, these settings get overridden to valid values in my corp network. Given that I regularly visit my client, you can see how I have to do this dance every now and then. So out with my PowerShell toolbox to hammer...(read more)

DLR on Mono

2007-05-18T12:45:05Z

Hey Cruizer, DLR is now on Mono. It’s now official. Thanks to Zoltan Varga’s recent check-in to SVN, Mono now successfully runs IronPython 2.0A1/DLR, [mdavid@domU-12-31-37-00-03-10 Debug]$ mono -V Mono JIT compiler version 1.2.4 (/trunk/ r77478) Copyright (C) 2002-2007 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com TLS: __thread GC: Included Boehm (with typed GC) SIGSEGV: normal Architecture: x86 Disabled: none [mdavid@domU-12-31-37-00-03-10 Debug]$ mono ipy.exe IronPython console: IronPython...(read more)

Name game on SilverLight

2007-05-17T03:09:00Z

Cruizer has a point, "SilverLight" really does sound like a play on "Flash". I never thought of it that way. I guess I'm losing my sense of fun. ~Groovy Names aside, I think looking at SilverLight just from a "Flash" angle is missing the exciting stuff. I'm not too pumped up about having another "media player" or animation engine. (That is a topic for a different post) What I'm really excited about is its support for dynamic languages. To think...(read more)

How Did We Come Up With Silverlight?

2007-05-16T11:49:36Z

Read the different names they were considering before settling on Silverlight. This is amusing. You can clearly see "geek" written all over with some smart ass ones. I seriously think MS needs a shot of "cool". Silverlight is ... well... just alright. Link to Tim Sneath : How Did We Come Up With Silverlight?...(read more)

"Clean up sources before packing them" by SBC Packers

2007-05-15T16:43:54Z

I recently did a walkthrough of the Web Service Software Factory for a group of developers. They are considering its use for their Web Services development. I used the accompanying Hands-On-Lab for the exercise and made some minor modifications to make it "fit" their current environment. After the walkthrough, I needed to send them a copy of the HOL including the changes I made. That should be easy enough, right? Compress and Send. First, I need to delete all the \bin and \obj directories...(read more)

PowerShell Links Roundup

2007-05-15T15:36:15Z

Link #1 Scott Hanselman writes about a Reflector add-in that outputs PowerShell Code The one I've been messing with for the last few weeks is the PowerShell Language Add-in. Reflector can "decompile" (not the correct word) the IL within an assembly and show you the "intent" of that IL in any number of languages like C#, VB, Delphi, etc. Daniel "kzu" Cazzulino has created a PowerShell Language Add-in that, for the most part, shows you what the code would look like...(read more)