AgileJava

Even if you are using Scrum or any other development model, agile or not, it is always good practice to have a short status meeting with your team every day. Usually the best time for such a meeting is in the beginning of the day as it gives the team the chance to resolve any issues the same day. Having the meeting in the afternoon implies that any issues probably have to wait until next morning, which is usually not a good thing.

So far, nothing new. The practice of a short stand-up synchronization meeting is pretty well established and non-disputed.

What if you have a team that is distributed not only in distance, but also over different time zones?

Which time zone should be used as basis for determining when to have the meeting? Usually the project it ends up being run by the project manager’s (*) watch. That means that the team in the other end probably will have the meeting in the afternoon. A pretty usual distributed team setup in Europe nowadays are something like this:

Europe: Project manager, architect, test manager
Offshore (China or India): Lead developer, developers, testers

That means that the largest part of the team, the team that actually are doing most of the work are having the daily scrum at a less optimal time of the day than the project management. I think that to really succeed with distributed agile development, you have to let the team decide how to work even if this implies awkwardly timed daily scrums for the project management. Of course, this applies to other aspects of the development process as well.

(*) …or Scrum Master if you prefer…

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I have been giving a couple of talks on Kanban lately, so I figured it would be a good idea to write a Kanban post here again…

The Limited WIP Society is a great place to start finding information about Kanban.  You can also find lots of useful information at http://www.crisp.se/kanban.

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I was not present at the conference yesterday, so this is actually my second day here, and that also explains why there were no post from yesterday. Another explanation could have been that I was lazy, but that is not the case this time…

Well, over to what this post is all about: the conference. The keynote was held by Scott Hanselman. He gave an excellent talk about effectiveness and efficiency. Some really good stuff to bring back from that speech. Will try to list some of the techniques and tools he mentioned in a later blog post.

I will also summarize the rest of the sessions I attended today very soon here…

Great conference!

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I really like the simplicity in Kanban. It should be enough for most small projects, and especially AO teams. Even though all you really need as tool support is a white-board and a couple of post-it notes, larger organizations often require you to hook into existing tools for requirement management, issue tracking etc.

I have not been able to find any tool fulfilling this need, so I decided to create on myself. Thereby, KanbanFX was born!

KanbanFX is a JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board. Source code and a very limited demo version is available on Kenai:

http://kenai.com/projects/kanbanfx.

Please join the project if you want to contribute. I am pretty sure that I will need help with at least the graphical elements when we get to that…

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One of the new words buzzing around in the software industry these days is Kanban. Most people have heard of, or is using, some variant of Scrum or ScrumButt, but Kanban is still pretty new. Henrik Kniberg has written a great article where he compares Kanban and Scrum: Kanban vs Scrum – a practical guide.

In short, Kanban is the Less-is-more cousin of Scrum.
Kanban prescribes only three constraints:

• Visualize the workflow
• Limit WIP (Work In Progress)
• Measure the lead time

The rest is up to you. Kanban does not exclude Scrum or vice versa. Read the article, inspect and adapt and find what is best for you and your organization.

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I wrote about JUnit Max in a previous post. In that post I commented that I was not sure if people were willing to pay $2/month for it. It turned out that I was right. Kent Beck just announced that he has deadpooled JUnit Max.

It is kind of sad that it seems impossible to sell such a great product, but I guess we have got used to that all tools are free. If I look at myself, I would rather have to pay one-time license fee for it than a $2/month subscription. Too much hassle filing expense reports every month for such a small amount.

That said, I actually never tried it since it was not available for NetBeans. Please remember us NetBeans folks next time! Maybe we are easier to get money from than the Eclipse guys…

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Kenai is Sun’s connected developer destination. It is a integrated suite of developer services where you can host your open source projects. Currently the following features are supported:

• Source Code Management (Subversion, Mercurial, and Git)
• Issue Tracking (Jira and Bugzilla)
• Wiki
• Forums
• Mailing Lists
• Download facility for documents
• Evolving integration with NetBeans

When you create an account at Kenai, you can host up to five projects for free. I imported two of my hobby projects to try it out, and I liked it. See wikipedia for a comparison of open source software hosting facilities.

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Most agile methodologies does not mention anything about the role of the architect. The team is supposed to be self-managed and take care of everything, including architecture.

“Big Design Upfront is to be avoided at all costs!”

But what about technical debt? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had the big picture? Someone who knows the key technologies and standards to use and makes sure that central mechanisms such as error handling are handled conformly?

This has always been some of the focus areas of a software architect. But how does an agile architect differ from a “traditional” one?

In my view, the traditional, high-tower, ivory architect is long dead anyway, so the role of an agile architect is just the same as that of any architect independent of what kind of development methodology that is being used – agile or not.  You have to be pragmatic, know the technologies used, be able to communicate through code with developers (no-one likes PowerPoint anyway…) as well as being close to the business stakeholders.

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In the post The Decline and Fall of Agile, James Shore highlights some of the problems with introducing agile methodologies.

“Scrum is popular because it’s easy–and that’s part of the problem.”

It is a great blog post, and I am sure that you will feel familiar with the  descriptions if you have been applying Scrum or other agile methodologies in real life. I certainly do!

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In an earlier post, I wrote about ScrumWorks. After having used it on a couple of projects I have gathered some thoughts here.

I usually prefer the good old whiteboard with post-its or an Excel sheet to track progress and generate burndown charts. But ScrumWorks has proved to be an excellent alternative to these old techniques. Developers find it pretty easy to use, and ScrumMasters get a pleasent user interface and a nice burndown chart almost for free.

So what is the downside? Well, sooner or later you will be asked by management to report progress. And managers are usually not willing (or capable) to using any unfamiliar tools, so you end up exporting the data to make some burndown chart or excel sheet available for them. This type of status reporting is overhead (or waste in lean terminology) and boring.

Luckily, ScrumWorks has a decent Web Services API which makes it fairly easy to extract the information you want. For example generate live burndown charts automatically on a wiki, or use the task information in ScrumWork to verify valid commit comments in a Subversion hook script. Imagination is the only limit…

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