Agile Teams

I’ve started testing out BackPack and its collaborative WriteBoards, and finding a few awkwardnesses … will eventually be writing up a ‘review’ with my results. I am also going to compare it to Chandler before I make a paid-upgrade decision or invest substantial data-time in BackPack. At first glance, Chandler’s pluses are that (1) it’s free (elemental BackPack is too, but I hit two of the limits of free accounts in less than a day), and (2) it seems to have some nicer to-do list management features (like triage and ticklers). BackPack may be stronger in live document co-authoring, though (the WriteBoards). Stay tuned!

anyone interested in privacy and medical records management should see this recent post by Annie Anton of ThePrivacyPlace on the weaknesses of Microsoft’s HealthVault.

I definitely want to try using a Writeboard for the very next technical paper I co-author with someone I can’t pair-write with in person! and I’ll be experimenting to see how it works with their BackPack companion product. Continue Reading »

today a colleague at work, whose opinion I value, recommended the book Beautiful Code to me, as one of the best he had read in a long time. I did a quick search tonight and found lots of plaudits for the book, as well as an interesting dissent.

as soon as I digest Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative Software Engineering, I’m going to pick up Beautiful Code and decide for myself. then, I think, Geekonomics and the second edition of The Art of Software Testing (which my colleagues in China are using in ebook form, in Chinese) will be next.

this quote, in a Syster’s sig, gave me some food for thought today:

“In absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” — Unknown

I’m guessing this will remind you of at least one software development organization you’ve worked in, as it does me?

Today I found an essay on choosing development strategies which briefly references PSP and TSP. I generally agree with the essay’s principles and arguments, and the main point that one size does not fit all. But I noticed that the descriptions of PSP and TSP were rudimentary at best - a one-liner on the assumed prescriptiveness of PSP, and “TBD” for TSP. The article’s less than a year old, and the author is a respected luminary in the field (I own several of his books and regularly read his writings). This leaves me pondering why such low awareness of PSP/TSP, rarely beyond the (usually inaccurate) sound bite stage, is still so pervasive.

This book on software quality and security just shot to the top of my wish list, plus I think I will buy a few copies for geek friends as holiday gifts: Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software

Perhaps it will become a (the?) blockbuster that will finally motivate change in the software industry.

in case any of you noticed that these sites were offline for several days - we’re now back online. the outage was due to a horrible Navisite botch-up of server migrations. an outage planned for less than a day was started over the weekend; domain access problems still aren’t fully resolved. agileteams came back less than 24 hrs ago and I’m crossing my fingers that it will stay up for good now.

see http://www.agileadvert.org/ for a creative approach to use of ‘web 2.0′ for evangelizing agile (in conjunction with Agile 2007)

I found this discussion on the nature of coaching interesting.