AgileCarnival
Scrum As A Framework^<p>There has been a lot of conversation about the Scrum Guide that Jeff Sutherland and I made available on Scrum.org. It is there, along with more than a dozen translations, for anyone to download as a PDF. When people share the PDF with each other, we request proper attribution so that it is alway...s clear what is being read.</p>
<p>Many versions of Scrum are popping up these days. I want to make
AgileCarnival SeaSPIN Lightning Talk from Last Night^<p>Thanks to Jeremy Lightsmith, the lightning talk I did last night at SeaSPIN on <em>Portfolio Management and Software Debt</em> was caught on video. The talk went over 5 ills that you might see in software projects that can affect strategic planning and some ways that can help i...dentify the ills more quickly for planning purposes. It ends on a note about how we can do more of t
AgileCarnival We're still writing Big Balls of Mud^<br /><p> Various memory aids have been concocted to help us remember guidelines for writing good code, like SOLID, GRASP, and KISS. In general, these guidelines tend to encourage <em>high cohesion</em> and <em>low coupling</em> of software modules. When modules are tightly coup...led, the code becomes hard to understand, hard to modify, hard to reuse, and fragile (a change in on
AgileCarnival
But /My/ Team Needs a Leader^<blockquote>
<h3>“….leadership may be defined as:<br />
the ability to enhance the environment<br />
so that everyone is empowered<br />
to contribute creatively<br />
...to solving the problem(s).”</h3>
<p>Gerald M. Weinberg</p></blockquote>
<p>I talk to many managers (and some coaches) who bemoan that their teams can’t function without a leader (in this case “leader” usually means so
AgileCarnival Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?^Since this blog's earliest days, I have made a habit of surveying you, my subscribers. I did it originally as a demonstration of the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers, but I found the actual info so incredibly helpful, I have done it several&n...bsp;times since. Since the last time, your ranks have grown tremendously, and I thank you all f
AgileCarnival
Rehabbing my website^<p>I started martinfowler.com back in 2000, now its grown to around 3.5 million words in 500 pages, getting about 200,000 page views a month. One problem with the site is that it looks retro even for 2000 and seriously needs some cosmetic surgery. Another is that it’s not easy to browse to fi...nd useful articles.</p>
<p>So now the dsl book (which weighs in at 1.2 million words) is pretty muc
AgileCarnival
Silverlight 4 Service Release 4.0.50826.0^<p>In case you haven’t heard yet, Microsoft released a new update for Silverlight 4 yesterday, along with a new SDK.  You can check out the details at KB2164913.</p>
<p>The stuff I was interested in:</p>
<ul>
<li>Add New Row for the DataGrid </li>
<li>Improved application star...tup performance </li>
<li>Mouse wheel support for out-of-browser  applications on the Mac <
AgileCarnival
Old norms from Training Within Industry get a dust-off^When we created our training materials we included a time line stretching back to the 1700s, which identified significant events, revolutionary breakthroughs and key people that have influenced how we work today. This required quite a lot of research, whi...<div>
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Reference: <a href="http://ping.fm/dLzKI">http://ping.fm/EBKEN</a>
AgileCarnival Clojure: Mocking^An introduction to clojure.test is easy, but it doesn't take long before you feel like you need a mocking framework. As far as I know, you have 3 options.<ol><li>Take a look at Midje. I haven't gone down this path, but it looks like the most mature option if you're looking for a sophisticated solution....<br /></li><br /><li>Go simple. Let's take an example where you want to call a function that compute
AgileCarnival
The Importance of Nurturing Community^<p> According to Dictionary.com, a community is:</p>
<blockquote><p>1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.</p>
<p>2. a locality inhabited by such a group.</p>
<p>3. a social..., religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceiv
AgileCarnival
“Editing” trees in Clojure with clojure.zip^<p>Clojure.zip is a library that lets you move around freely within trees and also create changed copies of them. This is the tutorial I wish I’d had when I started using it.</p>
<p>In this tutorial, I’ll use sequences as trees. You can create your own kind of tree...s if you want, but I won’t cover that. </p>
<p>Here’s what we’ll be working with:
AgileCarnival
How to Improve Meeting When You Are Not in Charge^<p>Are you tired of attending endless meetings where the conversation goes in circles and nothing gets done? Even if you can’t stand up and take control, you can nudge the meeting in the right direction from where you sit. Here are some strategies for improving the qual...ity of meetings when you’re not in charge. </p>
<h3>Ask for an Agenda Ahead of Time</h3>
<p>When you
AgileCarnival Microsoft doesn’t create bad developers, developers do^<p>Have you ever stopped to think about the industry you have choose to work in (I’m bluntly assuming that if you are reading this you are working in the software industry in some way)? I would call it one of the most complex industries in the world. Think about it.... We are working in an industry that is evolving at an incredible pace, contains an incalculable num
AgileCarnival Clojure: Using Sets and Maps as Functions^Clojure sets and maps are functions.<br /><br />Since they are functions, you don't need functions to get values out of them. You can use the map or set as the example below shows.<pre>(#{1 2} 1)<br />> 1<br /><br />({:a 2 :b 3} :a)<br />> 2<br /></pre>That's nice, but it...'s not exactly game changing. However, when you use sets or maps with high order functions you can g
