Comments for One Man's Walk in work

Comment on How do you start a Startup Weekend company? by Lewis Lin

Lewis Lin — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:58:42 +0000

Jeremy,

I love the “Startup Weekend” cheat sheet. I attended startup weekend last month, and I definitely would have benefited from a detailed checklist, especially the “morning after” section!

Lewis

Comment on Stop running test:unit tests when using rspec by John

John — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:49:00 +0000

Thanks for this. Although rspec seems to still leave something or other hanging around. I describe the problem in this stack overflow question.

Comment on Self Healing Systems by Jeremy Lightsmith

Jeremy Lightsmith — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:53:04 +0000

Actually, magnets, but same deal. We got the magnetic sheets of paper that you can print on with an inkjet and then cut, and that’s how we made our tasks and southpark characters. The board itself is just a sheet of metal screwed into the wall .

Comment on Self Healing Systems by Tim Connor

Tim Connor — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 05:59:56 +0000

Awesome thanks, the preso link makes it clearer what your implementation was – premade stickies for the commonly needed chore buckets.

Comment on Self Healing Systems by jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:00:21 +0000

Here’s a link to the presentation :

http://jeremylightsmith.com/files/self_healing_systems.pdf

Comment on Self Healing Systems by Tim Connor

Tim Connor — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:48:15 +0000

It’s hard to make out slides from the video. Any chance you could post a pic of the chore board, to get an idea of what is actually on it? How you handle doing your own stuff, like your own dishes, is that a a chore? Do you use a preset group of magnets, or write on sticky notes for each one?

Comment on Making Refactoring Sexy… by Ville Oikarinen

Ville Oikarinen — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:35:47 +0000

You should just keep on doing what you do, preferably pairing with your colleagues. If none of them will eventually get it, then the problem is not the “how” you are showing them, it’s the “what”, and there is nothing that can be done to help them.

The first level are the “trivial” refactorings that simply save (a lot of) keystrokes. I don’t think it’s difficult for them to appreciate them. But when someone sees a simple refactoring create an opportunity for a new refactoring, he’ll start to get addicted. And when a series of simple refactorings create an opportunity to easily add behaviour/fix bugs (that have been pending as too difficult), you’re done.

It may be a long road, but what do you have to lose? If not anything else, you can keep on doing what you know to help yourself.

Comment on What Shape Is Your Backlog? by Alex Chaffee

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:58:07 +0000

Great survey! One of the big deficits in XP theory has been backlog management. Every team and tool (including Tracker) has failed to give a polished story around how to make sense of the medium-term and long-term future.

One thing I’ve tried is what I call the “Priority Pyramid” — put your cards in rows, where the first row has one card, the second row two cards, etc., up to a reasonable limit like 8 or 10, after which point you enter what’s basically Tracker’s “Icebox”. Sounds similar to “graduated limited backlog”. But even that doesn’t allow you to group by topic or theme.

Comment on Cards 0.9 is away by Chuck vdL

Chuck vdL — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:31:26 +0000

I got interested in this when I saw a presentation you did at SeaSPIN a few months back. And my PM’s and such are making the move to story’s and cards and it would be a great time to try and introduce it to them. However

1) totally unsure of where to start, or where to find any docs or instructions on this.
2) while I know ruby a bit, since I use it for Watir and Cucumber work, the rest of the team is .net folks, so we’d need some real basic instructions as to how the PM’ types (who are trying to transition to Product Owners) would make this thing work, like what to install and where to start.

Comment on Agile Grading by Chad Woolley

Chad Woolley — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:41:03 +0000

This sounds like a great approach to grading.

Thoughts on the push vs. pull – even if you go with a pull system, there are still two problems:

1. Everyone must complete all the assignments, which is unlike agile software dev, where you can just leave unfinished stuff in the icebox forever.

2. There will still be pairs that feel “left behind”. This is partially because of #1, and partially because every pair has the same tasks (or at least the same number of tasks) assigned and required (again, unlike normal agile software dev)

These points are interesting in the Montessori context, and it is a bit more relevant (my son is in a Montessori school). Students do go at their own pace, but they are still accountable to eventually get up to speed. If they aren’t, there are negative consequences: no play time, don’t get to go swimming with the class, etc. If they STILL can’t keep up, then something else has to happen – they may have a learning disability and need special consideration, the parents may need to be recruited to help them at home, etc…

– Chad