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I am monitoring a competition where each sprint is scheduled to one hour interval. Each team member should have a count down c'lock on the screen, preferrably on terminal. The c'locks should lauch alarm after 45 minutes, 55 minutes and and 60 minutes.
The enviroment should create a feeling of extreme programming. Is there some ready terminal application for the job?
[Clarification] The teams are using Ubuntus and Macs.
Okay, my first question is "good God, why?" How can you do a sprint in an hour.
But having said that -- I presume it some classroom session or something -- there are a number of applications like that; mentioning the operating system might help narrow it down.
On Macs I'm fond of using Miniteur.
On a UNIX system, it's an ur-simple shell script (bash syntax here):
sleep $((45*60)) && echo "Forty five minutes"
sleep $((10*60)) && echo "FIVE MINUTES LEFT"
sleep $((5*60)) && echo 'TIME IS UP!'
"...The enviroment should create a feeling of extreme programming...", I think this environment will create a feeling of extreme pressure, we're not flipping burgers here, we're doing something creative, give your team a break if they need to know what time it is, and how much of each hour is left they'll use their watches.
BTW has this approach been tried already? If so did it work? What did the team think of it?
WOW
There's one thing I really like while thinking about 1 hour sprints/iterations. If I think of the crazy pace of the sprint, the first thing that popped in my mind (to actually make anything done in this short timebox) is pair programming or even team development. The very essence of XP.
Which made me think. The shorter the sprints the more you start using XP paradigm. You start fast brainstorming within the team, pair program code (the fastest coder does it) and communicate a lot. Perfect XP.
Though in real life this short sprints are a killer to burn-out your team really quick. But you can learn a lot by thinking of it. And adopting results to natural sprint length (1 week).
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I have 5 apps that I want to make right now, but creating them one by one seems inefficient. It seems like a better idea to make them all at approximately the same time in order to share segments of code where applicable. What are your thoughts on the most productive way to create a long list of moderately complex apps? For comparison, let's put them all on the difficulty level of a familiar & simple app - SnapChat.
Even though it sounds more efficient this sounds like a surefire way to either at best waste time or at worst (and most likely) get a lot of half written apps that never get to production. Unless this is a white label app where instead of 5 separate apps there is one app with 5 different skins you will likely never finish one of them let alone five. A 'simple app' like Snapchat still requires a lot of development time and testing, user adoption studies, and most of all focus of your effort.
Based on your question you have a good deal to learn about the development process. That is fine, you can do it, but focus on the best idea and put all your effort into that. It will take a lot more time and work than you expect and you will be happy you aren't worried about four other projects.
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I'm in my first development job out of college and have been handed a (solo) project that is completely outside the range of my skills/experience both in terms of the technologies being used and the sheer scope of the thing.
I've spent the last 6 months or so basically completely retraining myself and then starting to do the thing, and although I did very well at college and I think that I'm on track for delivery, I've had zero feedback on what I've been doing and I'm suddenly starting to feel very much out of my depth.
My direct supervisor, while a nice guy and I think a competent coder, doesn't have the best communication skills and basically told me to "read a book" when I asked him for a bit of guidance, which is not really what I was hoping for!
Am I just being unrealistic about the amount of support I can expect as a junior developer? It seems to me that ignoring the issue and ploughing ahead runs the risk of a failed project which is to no-ones benefit. I could take my request for guidance a step higher to the head of development, but I don't want to sound like I'm saying I can't do the job nor do I want to make my supervisor look bad.
Can anyone suggest a good approach for saying "help!" without making myself or my supervisor look bad?
This is a great question, and I think a fairly common situation. Basically, I think what you're asking for is guidance on how to communicate with your boss, and the other people in your organization.
This might be a good time to look into the scrum framework, and take from it what seems applicable to your environment.
In particular, you mention that you might be in over your head. Or, there is an (implicit) expectation that you'll need to finish this project "tomorrow," when you really don't know how long it will take.
I suggest starting with a list. Write down everything you need to do. Include non-coding activities, like "research technology X for doing Y," and give each task a basic time estimate like "1" for short, "2" for medium, "3" for long. Then put the things in an order that you think makes sense.
Then meet with your boss, once a week, for like 20 minutes, to discuss what you did, and what you're going to do next week. Out of this discussion, you'll both see what's going on, and adjust expectations (and the list) accordingly. When conflicts of expectation come up, talk it out.
Regarding the amount of support to expect as a junior developer, this really depends on your organization, and your supervisor's opinion. As software engineering is still a relatively young profession, there isn't much in the way of industry-standard mentoring programs.
I suggest trying the list + meeting thing for a couple months, and observe how your opinion of the support situation changes. Then, go to a large conference as soon as possible; spend the money if you need to. You'll see who is struggling with similar situations, and also who is not, and you'll create your own, more-informed model of "how the industry is supposed to work."
Regarding a good approach to communicating, I (seriously) suggest The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman, which has a lot of examples of what works and doesn't work when communicating with people.
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While doing planning sessions using Rapid Board what are some reasonable ways to make sure each person on the team has a decent enough amount of work for the length of the sprint?
e.g. if you have 10 people on the team, how can you quickly see if 1 person only has 2 hours worth of work? Are you supposed to wait for them to speak up or can this be done through Greenhopper somehow?
The best way to make sure that everybody has work to do throughout the sprint, is to let them sign up for work every time they complete the previous task. This means that the members will be "pulling" work, rather than having their work "pushed" onto them.
If you conduct a daily scrum - daily - you will find out pretty quickly that someone is not signing up for new work - that he's either stuck on what he has, or not picking new work. Essentially, if you break up your work into small enough tasks, you will know what is going on within a day.
All this will work for you regardless of which software tool you use to track your sprint.
If you are using Jira, (and your project can afford it) I would suggest looking into the add-on "Green Hopper." It is also made by Atlassian and does a lot of what you are asking for. You can view individuals and see how much work they have as well as how much free time is remaining.
You can also drag the stories (Jira issues represented as virtual index cards) into different iterations (sprints) and onto different people. As well, it will help you to run your daily standup (using it as the scrum board), however YMMV.
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Leaving work at my contractual end of play time seems to be a rare event. Usually work has to be done that requires working an hour over the end of the day, or a meeting (time differences are a real pain).
Is there anything I can do to avoid this? I already make sure I don't start a task in for the end of the day (or the end of the next day), which I cannot finish within that time.
Is this a sign of bad project management? Also, how do Project Managers handle time zones (they are a real inconvenience)?
Thanks
Is there anything I can do to avoid
this?
Sure, leave on time. Task not done? Start on it when you arrive on time the next working day.
Manager doesn't like this? That's his (or her) problem. Scheduling tasks, assigning priorities, and managing resources is the managers job. Doing your tasks to the best of your ability within the contractually agreed upon working hours is your job.
Constantly asking you to stay late or work on weekends or holidays is either poor management or lack of company resources (not enough people to do the job). Requiring you to stay beyond the statutory limit without paying overtime is a violation of labor laws.
(Of course this assumes you are an hourly employee.)
It could be that they simply don't have enough people on the job, and there's too much in the role you're doing for one person to get through in a day. That said, I find that I'll often get engaged with something at work, not notice the time, and end up leaving somewhat late. This is more that I'm enjoying it at a given moment, than it is to do with that extra time being strictly necessary. I think this is something that you need to ask yourself about. Is more being asked of you than you can get done in your contract hours? If so, why? Do you really enjoy what you do, and spend time trying to do it as well as possible?
On the time zones thing, they are a nightmare. Sometimes you need to have a conversation with someone who wakes up not long before you want to head home, and someone's going to have to take the awkward time (or more usually, a compromise must be reached). There's no perfect answer to this, since someone is always going to have to be available at a time they rather wouldn't. I think the most important thing is to ensure it's at the least inconvenient time for all parties involved.
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we have a number of functional deliverable planned for 2010 but we also have a technology agenda (architectural refactorings, consolidation, upgrade a platform). any suggestions on the best way to include these in a roadmap to help the business understand why they are important.
one option is just saying trust us as this is the right thing to do to keep everything healthy but i would like some better visualization if possible
Being a bit cynical about it, I would say phrase every thing in terms of money. If you can't re-write your technical agenda in terms of money made or money saved, then why are you doing it at all?
Also, there is an article on "technical debt in financial terms" that I found very useful at:
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx
One of the more interesting points, to me, is "One of the important implications of technical debt is that it must be serviced, i.e., once you incur a debt there will be interest charges."
There is a brief follow up at
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/12/12/technical-debt-decision-making.aspx
Show how support time, time between failures, number of problems should go up if you won't do the change.
Each technology has it's time limits, end of support from the manufacture, and regular life cycle.
Example - if you use MFC - you can show that programming a simple task in MFC is 3 times slower than in winforms. so after x months, the benefit from not upgrading will be lost.
with equipment it is even easier, as the older the equipment gets, the more mal-functions there are and it is easy to show (usually after the 3 years covarage everything starts to break, and I think it's planned like this. it didn't use to be but these days it does).
with infrastructure - again - if you have oracle 7.6 - show how much more time (money) you spend on administration and how less will be spent in 11g.
ect. ect. ect.
eventually manager wants to see ROI... TCO... BLA BLA BLA so you need to give them that.