Rick Tonoli

Category: Agile

  • Implementing an Effective Build Dashboard (for Hudson) (Part 2)

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    Rick Tonoli
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    This is a follow on of my previous post and details how to implement the code available in the original post by Fabio Parera here, together with the modifications I made for our environment. I suggest you look at the original post first though to understand the extra stuff that I did not implement (I…

  • Implementing an Effective Build Dashboard (for Hudson) (Part 1)

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Information radiators are one of the core building blocks of any agile environment, you should never hide or feel the need to hide anything you’re doing. Information radiators encourage (or at least they should) a feeling of pride in teams allowing them to show off what they’re doing. They should be freely accessible for everyone…

  • Performance appraisals, do we really care?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I often wonder why companies think the current way of doing Performance Appraisals are actually effective (you know, a few times a year, you sit with your manager and he tells you what a good/bad boy you were). For me they’re unnecessary and this is why: Firstly, “appraising” someones “performance” is something that should have…

  • Continuous Integration with Hudson and .NET

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Recently I was tasked with setting up a development environment for a .NET shop. I’m a great fan(atic) of Continuous Integration (CI) and set about thinking of a good way of doing this (and a fun/cool way as well). For those of you new to Continuous Integration, I think Martin Fowler describes it best on…

  • The chatty daily standup…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    One of the “ceremonies” of Scrum (man that sounds so culty) is the “Daily Standup”, a daily planning meeting where teams realign and coordinate their efforts for the upcoming day. It’s a concise, no frills no fluff zero waste of time meeting that answers three questions: what have I done, what am I doing and…

  • But haven’t we always been working this way?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    When I was a kid I had a Commodore 64 with a cassette player, awesome little machine with cool games! I decided I had to write my own game, this is where it all started some 25 odd years ago. I decided I would write a “maze-like” game where an “avatar” would navigate through a…

  • My questions on agile processes

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Something I have found very interesting in today’s “agile environments” is the adoption of processes. I’m caught in an endless loop on my thoughts around the place of processes and how they should fit in a team. Generally processes are put in place in order to protect the team, sort of like a safety net. …

  • An (agile) environment…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Scrum often talks about “ideal development environments” (Mike Cohn has a nice blog post on this entitled The Ideal Agile Workspace, well worth the read) and this often excludes anything related to engineering (hardware, software etc.), for the obvious reason that Scrum does not profess to offer guidance on engineering practices (but clearly states they…

  • Why do we do what we do?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I thought of doing a few short posts on the why’s of agile and specifically scrum. Product owners are driven by ROI, so why should we not adopt the same attitude regarding the various “ceremonies” and practices we adopt in our day to day agile development lives… why do I do <something> and what is…

  • Anarchy anyone?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I was thinking today, while watching a team fail miserably at planning, that we all know what we would do if asked to choose between Agile or Waterfall; but what if you had to choose between “MakeItUpAsWeGoAlongNoRules”-Agile and Waterfall. In other words, “Aspects of Agile” vs Pure Waterfall. I’d have to say I’d go for…