Recently there has been a lot of talk in the Agile community about moving away from estimated stories into more of a Kanban-style “pull-based” system. At Agile 2008, Joshua Kerievsky did a talk on MicroReleases where he discussed how his team did just that. They base the next release (which is just a couple of…
Month: September 2008
Making Tradeoffs
Last week, we had a small incident arise with the team I’m working with. Our Continuous Integration server is now live, meaning that code gets compiled with every check-in. This is great from the perspective of rapid feedback – if there is a failure, we don’t have to wait for a nightly build – or…
Follow up: Binary Clock in Ruby in under 55 lines of code using Shoes
After some great comments in my last post and some judicious refactoring, I now present an entire binary clock in Ruby in less than 55 lines of code using Shoes: Shoes.app {@width = 40@left = 10@margin = 10@top = 180@offset = @width + @margin@fill = red@images = [[],[0],[1],[0,1],[2],[0,2],[1,2],[0,1,2],[3],[0,3]] def gen_recs(num) return stack { fill @fill num.times do |i| rect…
A binary clock in Ruby using Shoes
When Shoes – a “tiny graphics toolkit for Ruby” – first came out a month or two ago, I was excited, but didn’t really have much to do with it. Then it hit me – I love my Binary Clock on my iGoogle home page – why not build one? The first thing to learn…
When Planning Games Go Too Long
This topic has come up in several of my readings today. While I’ve seen several strategies for what to do when your planning game is going too long, the best one is perhaps the simplest, and comes from none other than Ron Jeffries on the Scrum Development mailing list: I suspect you’re going into way…