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.

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.

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.

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

http://ruby-doc.org/ruby-1.9/classes/Array.src/M000751.html

1.8.6 delivers ArgumentError. 1.8.7 appears to have backported it.

Jeremy: when you hoisted Ola’s suggestion into your update, you used [] when you meant ().

How is this supposed to work? I don’t see Array.flatten accepting any arguments on the ruby apy.