Category Archives: Agile Practices

A Coder’s Challenge

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I was recently “challenged” by a fellow agile member who claimed that Java developers have a higher maturity level then their fellow .NET developers.  His claim was that .NET developers rely too much on the mouse when programming, which makes them slower because their hands have to leave the keyboard more frequently.  Java developers, on the other hand, are more familiar with their tool (e.g. IDE) and all the keyboard shortcuts that are programmed into it.

So, I considered his claims and his challenge.  I scoured the interwebs, searching for the knowledge I sought that would help me master the .NET coder’s tool of choice (the great Visual Studio), until I found what I was looking for.

And so, for my fellow .NET “adolescents”, I share with you this, straight from our god herself:

You threw down the gauntlet, B.C. and I accept your challenge.

The Definition of “Done”

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There is a good post over at the Agile Advice blog regarding Scrum’s definition of “done” and how to customize it to your own team environment.

This is something my team has been struggling with lately. We’ve been implementing a Kanban-like approach to managing our work items. For most of our work items, we have common activities that we need to accomplish, such as:

  • Holding peer design reviews
  • Writing unit tests
  • Filling out PCM requests (gotta love SOX)

However, we don’t keep a list of these activities out in the open which means we sometimes forget – or “forget” – to do a particular task.

By creating a checklist of tasks required to call a work item “done” and posting it in a visible location (like a wall), this helps keep everyone on the team honest and makes sure that no tasks are forgotten.