Agile

I’m using a hosted version of JIRA and needed to obtain quick totals based on filters that I have setup. I could not find any easy documentation online so I thought I’d share my quick hack. The REST API is very well documented and uses the same JQL as the filters do. In order to view the commit list for an iteration I have some JQL that looks like: fixversion = 20120611 and fixversion was 20120611 ON “2012/06/11” AND status NOT IN (canceled, “on hold”) ...

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me. We are at a point in this iteration where I have too many stories in progress and it is taking a few extra days to get work completed and accepted. This does not concern me greatly since this is a new team and it usually takes a few turns to get into a rhythm. I was walking down the hall and one of developers said that things are going ‘Awesome’. I said “Great, but awesome is not a metric”. ...

I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country. Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”. All too often I’ve seen Agile work because a scarcity of resources (money, time or knowledge) pushed an otherwise waterfall loving group into giving Agile a shot. The tenants of Jugaad resonate with me as a more general philosophy about how to get things accomplished then Agile’s focus on “working software”. ...

This about this: If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss. If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of $50MM then project management is less critical. a 10% variance will not really matter in the big picture. Given my fictional example even a 100% to 500% cost overrun could happen and keep the “success” label. ...

I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkies in a previous post and I’m not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems. Today’s pattern is the ‘Onion of Stupidity’. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up. A colleague here promoted the term “technical debt” to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them. I’m thinking that my Onion is more about ‘strategy debt’. The onion is usually built with best intentions at all sides. ...