Ivan’s agile thinkings

My Halloween costume this year is going to be epic.  We gave everyone a chance last year, but the return of something on the level of paper mache Pinky and The Brain must be seen this time around.

The (secret) costumes I’ve selected (plus other friends) requires a whole bunch of ‘pieces’.  We’re in the prep phase so we’ve got piles of inventory building up.  This isn’t very lean, but I thought at least we try a little agile.  Note that the total number of pieces may go up at any point as we refine the design.

So, here’s the burn-down for the preparation phase – still got a ways to go!

Piece Burndown Snapshot

I’m constantly reading, watching or listening to stuff that makes me learn an I recently found the following very useful and timely for the work I’m doing at the moment (or in the near future).

• Dave Syer from Spring Source talking about Spring Batch – extracting the essential elements of batch processing Spring style.  If you have to write batch jobs in Java you could do a lot worse than use Spring Batch as a base.
  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/syer-introducing-spring-batch
• Mishkin Berteig on how using (incredibly short) 2 day Scrum iterations acted as a catalyst to make a business become more collaborative and better prioritise the work for their (rather small) IT department.  Eventually determining that the IT department shouldn’t have been working on any projects other than one that would make the company more money than the rest of the projects put together!
  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Short-Iterations-Mishkin-Berteig 
• A friend of mine sent me a link to a very interesting talk by Mitch Lacey about how a Scrum project he was leading went very wrong – what happens when the business just doesn’t ‘get’ agile development.

  http://www.infoq.com/presentations/A-Story-of-Project-Failure-Mitch-Lacey

• Randy Shoup on the architecture of eBay – learn that data consistency doesn’t have to be 100% but you have to trade-off with availability and data partitioning – extremely illuminating.
  http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2008-09/episode-109-ebay039s-architecture-principles-randy-shoup

About two months ago I stumbled on the Software Engineering Radio podcast, and in my opinion it’s one of the best techy podcasts out there (anyone knows any different?).

There are currently 107 podcasts available and the 13 I’ve listened to (and listened to again) have been worth their virtual weight in gold.  There are a lot of interviews about many, many topics and the interviewees really know there stuff.

SE-Radio is an invaluable resource for the professional software developer.