Posted by Geert Bossuyt around lunchtime: September 30th, 2010
The tester is a member of a Scrum team. This is a different mindset from the traditional views on testers in software development. The agile tester focuses on delivering value instead of on testing. The agile tester is responsible for delivering what the business needs instead of just finding bugs. Most importantly: the agile tester is not responsible for testing!
Recently I published an article on testing in a Scrum team for the Eurostar 2010 newsletters. It’s about the mindset of an Agile tester. This blog post summarizes the core of that article.
Posted by Gerbrand van Dieijen in the early morning: September 28th, 2010
Last Friday, one week ago, the Software Development Day was at Xebia, the first one for me as I started at Xebia this year. As written by Iwein there was some discussion about the use of Javascript started by yours truly. Should we do all UI related functionality in Javascript? Do we do throw away our knowledge, tools and best practices we know when we start coding Javascript? Why should we code in Javascript using the browser as some sort of Virtual Machine, if in fact we want to create desktop application?
Posted by Geert Bossuyt just before lunchtime: September 24th, 2010
For many of us ‘Inspect & Adapt’ has become a second nature. We love to timebox because we need the feedback to learn from it. ‘Feedback’ about the system we’re building or the process we’re using. Because individuals are to be found more important than processes and tools, we must not forget to give each other good feedback so we can also learn from that. After all, the Team will never grow, if the individuals in the Team don’t grow.
To give good one-on-one feedback is a very difficult thing. It’s hard to keep it save and it’s even harder to do it in a way that really helps the other learning something from it.
I ran into some nice ways of giving feedback :
Posted by Age Mooij late at night: September 20th, 2010
Last week we had one of our infamous tech rallies and we had a lot of fun trying to build our own Posterous clone in a day, i.e. turning emails into blog posts.
The project sources are hosted on Github. We were working on this one-day project with about 20 developers spread over 4 teams and one of the things I noticed is that most of us did not have more than the very basic Git experience. This meant that we ran into a lot of merge conflicts and solving those is not always easy. Below is a little rundown of the Git learning stages we went through in team MongoDB to deal with this.
Posted by Iwein Fuld in the early evening: September 20th, 2010
Sharing knowledge is one of our core values and as lot’s of research confirms knowledge transfer is best done between peers. We have a great knowledge sharing platform at Xebia through bi-weekly evening sessions, where we do some experimental coding and some presentations. Once in a while we take it to the max and organise a tech rally. One of those happened last Friday and it was a total blast. I’ll give you some of the highlights. More detailed posts on the technical details will follow and I’ll update the list below as they do:
Posted by Wilfred Springer mid-morning: September 13th, 2010
Just a heads-up for everyone interested in NoSQL: the next NoSQL Meetup meeting will be held at VPRO’s headquarters, on Tuesday September 21, next week. Nils (VPRO) will talk about the adoption of CouchDB at VPRO, and Paul guide us through the remainder of the Dynamo paper. (So if you haven’t read it yet, check it out here.)
Posted by Marco Mulder just before lunchtime: September 9th, 2010
In this blog, I make a case for what I think is the next step in the evolution of Agile project management. The focus of project management used to be based on managing Tasks that people perform to deliver a piece of software. Agile project management shifted focus to managing the delivery of Features. I believe that the time is ripe for the Agile community to take the next step: move towards Value driven project management.
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Posted by Marnix van Wendel de Joode in the early afternoon: September 2nd, 2010
In Agile, everyone agrees on the concept that continuous improvement is a good thing. In Scrum and also in most Kanban practices we even have a ceremony to support this, namely The Retrospective. This periodically occurring meeting (often every other week) with the entire team plays a vital part in the process and in team dynamics.
In most retrospectives, focus is on improvement. Questions are asked like ‘What is going wrong or could be done better?’, ‘What can we do to improve things?’, ‘Did we actually improve?’. While there is real value in these questions (and they should definitely should be asked), there is another part of a retrospective that is also very important: The Good Things.