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Category Archives: professional practice

JAOO Brisbane 2009

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

If you are going to JAOO Brisbane 2009 next week (May 11 & 12) don’t forget to come up and say hi. I’ll be the crazy one. But seriously, there are $250 tickets floating around, for the full two days. Get yourself one if you haven’t already

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Building Oracle 10g portlets in a continuous integration environment

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Ignoring all the hints (to use wizards and manual deployments) from the Oracle information as to how to go about creating JSR168 portlets for the Oracle 10g Portal server, we have successfully designed a continuous integration environment for the Oracle portal environment for a client. The Oracle 10g portal server is the old-school Oracle app-server [...]

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Are fixed-price contracts evil?

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Alef Arendsen asks ‘Are fixed priced contracts evil?’, especially to the agile process, and summarises there a number of responses that others have had into this question. Especially in the contractual arrangements that consulting companies need to make in the agile development sphere. He points to an excellent post by Seth Schubert on this matter. [...]

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Burning down your value, not your story

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

What’s the problem with reporting the amount of work we’ve completed the last iteration in story points? Story points are a somewhat arbitrary, but consistent measure of the technical complexity to implement a feature. But that’s not the problem with reporting them to management. The thing is, it’s not what management are interested in. Consider [...]

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I’m not making this mess anymore!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

XP: After 10 years why are we still talking about it? By Robert C. Martin. Uncle Bob argues passionately, and correctly, for the principles of software craftsmanship. Link: http://www.viddler.com/explore/sergiopereira/videos/7/.

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Introduction to XP by Jason Yip

Saturday, March 14, 2009

This is a set of the slides for a presentation introducing Extreme Programming and Agile by Jason Yip. It’s pretty good explanation of agile development principles. An Introduction to XP and Agile View more presentations from Jason Yip.

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Achieving high velocity

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sprint to the lead in your industry – and stay there! So says the back of the dust cover on Chasing The Rabbit: How market leaders outdistance the competition and how great companies can catch up and win by Steven J Spear (McGraw Hill, New York, 2009). I referenced this book last week in my [...]

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Agile primer for business people

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Here is a primer for business people wanting to know what all the terminology in Agile means to them: What You Need To Know About Agile (PDF). It maps the various agile practices like TDD, Iterative Development, Retrospectives, Backlog, Continuous Integration, User Stories and so forth onto common business categories like Increased Quality, Process Visibility, [...]

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Let it fail then learn to succeed

Sunday, March 1, 2009

On the scrum development mailing list, Dave Nicollette recommended shortening sprint length until it failed, then backing up one step: “Oh, my God! You’re going to let a sprint fail, just so you can determine the optimum length?” Yes. In other words, failure lets you learn your limits. But more importantly, as suggested here, is [...]

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97 things …

Friday, February 27, 2009

I just came back from a great week in Tasmania. It was really good to be away from communications infrastructure for that amount of time – there’s no mobile service in many parts of Tassie. You can see the photos on my Flickr photostream (although it might take me a couple more days to get [...]

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