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Friday, December 30, 2005 1:34 PM

Trying out pair programming

Greetings all – My team has been reporting success with pair programming, so I wanted to try it out myself. This week one of my reports and I paired up to do a bit of maintenance work where we’re moving some automated tests around and setting aside some
Posted by cflaat | 4 Comments
Friday, December 30, 2005 12:50 PM

Software metrics primarily useful as negative indicators?

Dear Readers – I was thinking about metrics, and it occurred to me that most of the metrics we commonly use in the industry are really good as negative indicators of quality, efficiency, testing, etc. but lousy positive indicators. That is, most software
Posted by cflaat | 4 Comments
Friday, December 16, 2005 5:59 PM

People are not fungible resources

Hi all – We are currently using both Scrum and more traditional project management on several efforts going on within our product unit, and I thought I’d share some learnings. Something we’re running into is that getting people dedicated to one effort
Posted by cflaat | 1 Comments
Thursday, November 10, 2005 12:37 PM

Sprint 9 complete

Hi all – Well, we did sprint 9 broken up into two subteams, and it went quite well overall. The tone of the team in the sprint retrospective was generally positive, and the “things that could be improved” were generally focused on the way we were executing
Posted by cflaat | 2 Comments
Monday, October 17, 2005 12:55 PM

Bridging the Gap, etc.

Greetings all – My apologies for being behind on posting. Things have been really crazy around here with VS2005 shutting down and work on the next major release ramping up. I’ve been tasked to help out with some engineering improvement initiatives going
Posted by cflaat | 1 Comments
Tuesday, August 02, 2005 2:09 PM

Agile 2005

Hi all - Several people from MSBuild, the Developer Division, and Microsoft went to Agile 2005 last week in Denver . It was very worthwhile. I really enjoyed the keynotes and getting to meet a lot of others at MSFT doing agile methods as well as people
Posted by cflaat | (Comments Off)
Friday, July 01, 2005 6:25 PM

Sprint 6 winding down

Well, we finally kicked off sprint 6 in June, and it finishes up next week. Being summer, there have been a lot of vacations plus a Microsoft-wide forum that ate up a lot of time. I expect that sprint 7 will have fewer randomizations, esp. since the core
Posted by cflaat | 1 Comments
Thursday, May 05, 2005 1:48 PM

Pondering next steps

Hi all - With sprint 5 done, we are now in a quiet period, as we have balanced most of the resources on our project toward helping Whidbey get finished. We will probably pull some resources back soon, however. I have been thinking about how to get the
Posted by cflaat | (Comments Off)
Monday, April 18, 2005 12:56 PM

Managing the Product Backlog

There was a question from Dave Froslie on what we use to store our Product Backlog. We use an internal wiki page. Wiki's are nice because they're easy to view, easy to edit (not only for the Product Owner but also for people with suggestions who can add
Posted by cflaat | 1 Comments
Wednesday, April 13, 2005 1:58 PM

Question about Scrum, waterfall, and more

Hi all – A reader named Steve Henke writes with some questions: First, you mentioned your concern about waterfall being used in the next major division release but with even more centralized control than before. Why do you expect more centralized control?
Posted by cflaat | (Comments Off)
Tuesday, April 12, 2005 2:17 PM

Scrum and development methods

I got a question from René Landgrebe about what development methods we use along with Scrum. He writes: "I wonder what developing method you use in combination with SCRUM. I read about combining XP and SCRUM is very reasonable. So, what combination do
Posted by cflaat | 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 12, 2005 12:52 PM

Sprint 5 complete

Greetings all – Well, sprint 5 ended and yesterday we had the sprint review. Overall the sprint was successful, although we did have one work item bleed over (which we of course disclosed to the stakeholders at the sprint review). We had small turnout
Posted by cflaat | (Comments Off)
Monday, April 11, 2005 10:52 AM

Too little sleep, too much caffeine

It seems like forever since I got eight hours of decent sleep. I love my kids, but it sure would be nice if they would sleep past 6am! My wife is on me for drinking too much pop -- she thinks 4 a day is too many (if only she knew it was more like 5 or
Posted by cflaat | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005 4:22 PM

Trying to tame our estimates

Greetings all – It would seem that our estimates are slowly getting better with time. When I compare the burndown chart for sprint 5 with the prior three charts, it’s quite good. The first three look like a silhouette of the Olympic mountain range, whereas
Posted by cflaat | 2 Comments
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:53 PM

Scrum and Productivity

Hi all – A reader named David Wylie wrote and commented the following (I’m posting his question here with his permission): I am new to scrum, and one of the selling points is significantly increase productivity. Have you experienced this, or is it just
Posted by cflaat | 2 Comments
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