Oh, and it also has a few mechanical things about a monthly Sprint and daily Scrum. Trivial stuff compared to the rest. But guess which part people adopt? That’s right–Sprints and Scrums. Rapid cycles, but none of the good stuff that makes rapid cycles sustainable.
James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile

Hero Pattern

One popular solution to the operation issue is a Hero who can and often will manage the bulk of the operational needs. The Hero Pattern can work in a small environment when one individual has the talent and capacity to understand an entire system, including the many nuances required to keep it functioning properly. For a large system of many components this approach does not scale, yet it is one of the most frequently-deployed solutions.

The Hero often understands service dependencies when no formal specification exists, remembers how to toggle features on and off or knows about systems everyone else has forgotten. The Hero is crucial but the Hero should not be an individual.

I believe the best solution to the Hero Pattern is automation. However, it also helps simply to rotate individuals from team to team if the organization has the capacity. In banking, it’s sometimes mandatory to take vacation so any “I’ll just run this from my workstation” activities can be brought to light.

Scalability Worst Practices [InfoQ]

Lately I’ve faced this pattern, or maybe anti-pattern, more times than I ‘d like to, either for lingering around a “hero” or even being one. My experience tells me that Agile practices like Scrum, although never addressing it explicitly, when properly implemented can minimize this problem.

All those Portuguese speaking interested in Scrum followers now have a place to share thoughts, experiences and everything else Scrum related, yet in a very early stage.

Scrum em Português

A new year is now beginning and that usually means New Years Resolutions, so here are mine, just the geek oriented and in no particular order:

• Finish TemujinPhoto, finally I’m working on it and in a few weeks I hope to have a working beta.
• Probably this is the year I’ll take a certification, most likely a Microsoft Certified Professional. Probably…
• Take photos.
• Must dive into .Net 3.5 and LINQ.
• Been thinking about creating a desktop client for Remember The Milk in WPF, I’m needing one and the guys at RTM have a neat API (WPF is for learning something new).
• Must buy a tripod, need to do night shots.
• Get a taste of EJB 3.0 and the Spring 2.5, just a small taste to check what I’ve been missing on the Java world.
• Put my reading up to date, I still haven’t read this one (no need to buy me a copy, I already own one and it has been gathering dust for some time).
• Take more photos: night photos, motion photos, street photos, concept photos and all kinds of photos I haven’t been doing lately.
• There has been some ideas to make a few short movies, I sure hope we can turn them real. Another reason to buy a tripod…
• Probably dump Windows on my laptop completely, I’m getting happier with Ubuntu everyday.

Found an bug on a library I was working on, created a failing unit test for that error, solved the problem, the newly created test now runs OK, bug fixed. That’s the beauty of Test Driven Development!

Technorati Tags: tdd, test driven development

Javalobby is asking one simple thing: are you into pair programming or prefer to perform all the work alone. The article does a pretty good job in showing the advantages and disadvantages of either of them, but then just tries to ask you whether you’re in one side of the barricade or the other, with most of the comments being nothing more than the resulting flame war. I doubt making a holy war of such an issue is the right way to go, the same I doubt there’s an universal solution to all problems, in this case The Right Way to code.
Maybe the solution lies somewhere in the middle, personally I like pair programming for critical sections or some important core modules, it makes me feel safe having two people looking and thinking the same thing. Pair programming doesn’t mean two people looking to one screen, nowadays with laptops becoming more vulgar you can have one person writing code and other reviewing it but also searching for online help or updating documentation. On the other hand, for boilerplate code, which probably includes the vast majority of the code base in normal projects, it’s much faster not having someone on your side.

Lone Wolf vs Pair Programming [Java Lobby]

…I just like to show people nice ways to solve problems.

About a year ago I committed myself to introduce Agile Methodologies to my company just after I started working in a new project where SCRUM.

Apparently I succeeded in such task, as there are already some teams doing things the Scrum way.

Neat!!

Technorati Tags: scrum

“If Scrum feels too heavy or as if it has too much overhead, it likely is being done incorrectly”

Scrum Shouldn’t Be a Burden

The trick is not to loosen the rules and the team’s habits, every time we did that things went wrong: daily scrums that became a burden and useless or a sprint burndown that simply did not reflect reality, just to name a few.

Technorati Tags: scrum

Because some people don’t understand why some other people should spend so much time building a robust solution for a web form with just a couple of text boxes.

Because some people don’t understand column A must allways be on the left of column B, and that’s a non-negociable issue…

Let the Experts Make the Decisions (Agile Advice)

Although I’ve been using it for some time, successfully I might add, I’ve never done a Scrum related post in this blog.

While my personal views on the best agile methodology around aren’t posted, here’s a neat introduction to Scrum:

Scrum in Five Minutes