Summary of a summary on Great Teams

Mike Polen has made a good summary of an hour talk of James Shore on what separates the great teams from the average agile teams.

Note, I recommend listen to James Shores’ own talk. He’s pointed out to me and commented here that there are many misunderstandings. In addition, I both recommend an RSS feed to his blog and reading the book The Art of Agile Development he’s co-editing. However, I will leave the list be (the cause of the “troubles”). It’s up to the reader to reflect on what’s put in it. You try and fail, reflect and learn. There are no universal rule of what a Great Team is, or how to form one, we should all know that by now! See this article on cargo cult agile if you feel like taking the list for a fact.

Summary of the summary (I claim my rights to misunderstand his potential misunderstandings):

Great teams they :

• take time to become great (many months). “Forming-storming-norming-performing”
• sit together. They adapt more of the XP values, especially pair programming. Scrum values as self-organizing teams should also be adapted.
• have no long lived code branches
• focus on preventing defects through TDD and refactoring the code to its intended simplicity.
• deliver features that are truly done, that is, “Done-Done”.
• get real-time feedback on features and priorities.
• avoid technical stories (taking time off to refactor).
• need someone who is passionate about quality and pays attention. This person doesn’t need to be senior but needs courage to speak up when things are going wrong.
• uses agile engineering practices as TDD, continuous design, rigor & mindfulness.
• don’t require A-team members, ordinary people makes great teams with agile engineering.
• deliver often (daily/weekly), short feedback cycles.

maybe… ;)

Note to self: Don’t try more summaries on summaries.

Maven Dependency Hell

Yeah, I knew you’ve felt the same some times! Some developers are suddenly experiencing local problems, while others doesn’t, even as they’re having the same code base. The experienced developer thinks “classpath problem!”, almost as a reflex! And they’re always right, it’s yet another a damned jar that’s been automagically downloaded by maven from an other automagically loaded jar dependency. Anyway, that’s how it feels like for me. It’s often time-consuming to discover the reason, even more time-consuming if “classpath-problem” isn’t your first thought (god, no)! If not, say bye bye to productivity for that day. Been there, done that!

How to avoid it? Eliminate the automagic dependencies. Exclude these dependencies and explicitly define all used dependencies.

Spring’s back

And summer is coming closer! I’ve been sitting on the porch, reading newspapers, enjoying the sun and eating tons of ice cream. Fantastic! Thought this was a post about the Spring Framework? I’ll save that for later. After using Spring, JPA/Hibernate, hsqldb, FitNesse, jetty and oracle db in my last project I’ve got several drafts for this blog. I’m a bit of coward sometimes, postponing to publish my articles until they’re perfect, which is the only thing they’re never gonna be! Soon I’ll post what I’ve been working on about TDD in Spring/Hibernate environments. I think it’ll be valuable writings for the reader, it’s certainly made me a better test-driven developer! I’ve also got drafts about FitNesse, hsqldb, burndown/-up, Continuous Integration Lamp Control script for Bamboo, for some. As always, I’ve got lots of free time and little to do in my projects ;) But as I am posting this I’m committed and there’s now other option than to follow up and deliver!

Yes, spring’s back! This years qualifications for the Norwegian National Championship (NM) in football (soccer) is over. My team, 3.div club Mysen, has qualified and we’ve been so lucky as to draw the top league (eliteserien) team Fredrikstad! Follow updates at www.mysenfotball.no. I’m a winger and this is one of my many dreams coming true. I’ll be playing Raymond Kvisvik, Tarek Elyounoussi, Casey Wehrmann, amongst others! That’s comparable to competing with Jeff Sunderland, Mike Cohn and Tom Gilb in an agile/scrum contest! We’re welcoming Fredrikstad at our home pitch in Mysen, an hour south of Oslo, a small community with about 5600 citizens. Between us and Fredrikstad there are two divisions, 1.div(Adeccoligaen) and 2.div (the lowest division is 8.div). The 1st round of the cup is considered a walk over for the elite-teams meeting 3.div teams, but it’s loads of fun!

MYSEN MØTER FREDRIKSTAD
Sted: Mysen Idrettspark
Dato: Mandag 12. mai
Kampstart: 18:00

This is a real folkefest and you’re all invited to join in! Now my norwegian-english even contains norwegian words ;)