Tag: agile
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Do Not Push to Red Builds
July 8, 2017
There's a pattern to disasters: When you examine the post mortems, its not just one failure, but a cascade of multiple failures that overwhelm the system's safety features. Pushing to a red build risks piling one failure upon another. -
Wanted: Jaguar Priest
July 7, 2017
My job is to be the dumbest person in the room; I want to work with intelligent, opinionated people who can make the world a little better. Then iterate. -
Guidelines for Using Pivotal Tracker
July 25, 2016
I am often asked about the meaning of things in Pivotal Tracker, such as “What’s the difference between a bug and a chore?” Or, “How can I tell the difference between a bug and a feature?” Another oldie but a goodie is, “What story should I pick from the backlog?” Here are my biased answers.
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When You Need a Rabbit, Spec It
February 7, 2014
On my current project, we're using RabbitMQ. It's a bit of infrastructure that has to be present, and if it isn't, our integration tests will fail with mysterious error messages. We want our tests to be informative, so let's write a test that asserts that we have the requisite infrastructure in place.
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Speed Up Your Integration Tests with a Jig
February 7, 2014
If you've written enough integration tests (with Capybara et al.), you must have noticed how much time your tests spend just logging into your web app. Even if it takes 1 second each time, it starts to add up. Here's a solution that I've written several times, now. I create a test "jig" that allows me to authenticate into my application with a single
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Why Pivotal Labs
May 26, 2013
It is a time-honored tradition for Pivots to blog about their first few months at Pivotal. A typical day at Pivotal is strong work. It’s different from any previous job. It’s exhausting. After six weeks or so, however, the Pivots find their rhythm. I’m not going to write any more about that. I’ll include some links, below, so you can read them for yourself. I’m here to write about the two-years-later; When most developers are itching to move on to the next big thing. I’m still happily learning new stuff every day.
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It's The Volatility That Will Kill You
February 19, 2013
Volatility is what Pivotal Tracker uses to measure the consistency of your team’s work output. You can use that number to help you estimate the first approximation to answer the eternal question, “Will I make the deadline?”
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DropBox + Git Yields Designer Luv
April 5, 2011
One of the thornier problems in our workflow is knowing when assets are delivered from the designer and keeping them in sync with our application as they change. We used to use e-mail, Skype or sticky notes. The trouble is that the designer's file naming and directory structure were never quite the same as the application's
/public/imagesdirectory, so direct comparisons were impossible and we ended with a lot bookkeeping to make sure that we didn't lose any changes. Our solution is to clone the project's git repository into a folder inside a shared Dropbox folder. -
When to do User Acceptance Testing?
November 18, 2010
A former client asked:
"What does Scrum say about User Acceptance Testing? I am wondering if it should best be done within 24 hours of delivery, or at the end of a sprint..."