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The next time someone says to you they follow agile, scratch the surface and find out what that means. Something like:

1. How have you managed stakeholders through your flavour of agile?
   Releasing software every couple of weeks allows you to demonstrate features as they are developed. With the demonstration enabling the stake holder to offer insight and changes which can be discussed and adjusted as easily as possible because its demo’d by the developer and is fresh in his/her mind.
2. Explain how do you release new functionality?
   Working agile involves developing features not modules. Features are approached with the intention of accomplishing a single small task. The by product of a feature approach is that you expect the software to change in the future as more features are included, this can cause regression issues so a strong testing framework which is automated is essential.
3. Explain how do you respond to change?
   Change is the norm so we must get used to it and comfortable with it. Because there isn’t a lengthy analysis, design, code, test, deploy cycle it should be easier to incorporate adjustments. Releasing often and developing features rather than modules enables you to modify the system more easily in the future. Refactoring tools have also come a long way in some languages to support the developer in this task, applies to Java / C#.
4. Explain how do you approach new code integration?
   Expect to hear the phrase ‘continuous integration’, which is the practice of integrating each developers code together on a regularly schedule. Bonus points should be given if they can demonstrate and practice real continuous integration which would require multiple integrations per a day.
5. Which flavour of agile do you use?
   OK I won’t list them hear as its an evolving space, personally I like BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) but I also still have many happy code bases following TDD.

Hopefully this short list of questions will give you a good basis for evaluating if the individual really does agile or just excuses the fact they don’t do documentation, design and/or testing of what they produce.

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I good ideas deserves copying … And so here is my background on the hardware, software and future desires:

The Hardware:

I recently upgraded to a 15″ MacBook Pro - it works great and doesn’t overheat unlike the baby mac I previously had. I used to use a Lenovo T61 – ugly beast but its served me well and worked hard. When I’m near my desk I connected to a 500GB segate drive, 24″ IIyama display and a overpriced but good mighty mouse.

Also at home I like to listen to music from my old Project Debut II turntable and Mission 701 speakers. I love my vinyl even if I have to constantly get up to flip it over. And for pictures I’ve a second hand Canon 40D. Its not that fancy but very robust – I’ve broken far too many digital cameras so I appreciate its metal chasis. Speaking of which I had to succumb to a marware condom for my iPhone for the same reason.

The Software:

Most of the day to day grind involves Chrome, TextMate and the terminal. Our office has moved very successfully to Google Apps for domains so this frees me from Outlook. I use Aptana for some development work, Tweetdeck to keep up with the world and then theres XCode, Skype, Picasa, Axure, Excel & iTunes. On the server side I’m a big fan of Ubuntu but also resort to Redhat on production environments. In these places its vi, bash, mysql, apache, rails, php & subversion.

What would be the dream setup?

I actually think I’m pretty lucky already. Not to much to add, a QNAP media server and playstation 3 would ease the burden of course and a SSD hard drive would make things move faster – always a necessity. Oh and a Fonera_2.0 router, currently on a bogo cheap thing that needs to be regularly rebooted.

Ideally I’d have a moogle device which would be some kind of google for the mind – it would index the stuff I can’t and do forget every day, oh and can it do the research and the work too please.

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Action Plan:

1. Identify the unknowns
   How? Start simply with broad questions. Don’t be too quick to get into the detail as this will be the natural tendency. At this stage understand nothing about the detail but fully comprehending the end user environment or capabilities will give you a greater barometer for detecting where the unknowns are essential or not.
2. Questions everything, assume nothing
   I’ve tripped over this many times, combined with one this is probably the largest probably when scoping, initiating or specify an integration piece of work. I find Excel is my friend in this situation, I can capture questions and responses as the knowledge flows
3. Seek documentation but don’t rely on it.
   Documentation in what ever form is usually well intentioned, but out of date, inaccurate or just plain wrong. Typically the documentation will look grand ‘Technical Specification for X.Y.Z version 1.2′ however what tends to happen is that was written at the outset before a line of code had been written – ask yourself when you last went back and updated a specification at the end of project, yet you want to make key integration decisions based on it?
4. Get a setup of the system as close as possible to the real environment for use during development, verification testing and UAT
5. Commit, integrate and test regularly. Really if your not doing this forget it
6. Use real data not ‘lorem ipsum’ or ‘test account 1′
   Demand this especially if you have translation or localisation considerations to consider.
7. Allow your/encourage your client to come and inspect your work – they may see things your developer mind over looked.
   Coming from a developer mind I’m always surprised how easy it is to be lulled by our perspective on systems.
8. Testing
   Even with all the automated testing, eyeballs and code reviews I’m still amazed by how often I come across developers who see it as acceptable to ship code from their development computer to a production environment without any testing.

Have I overlooked anything you find works best for you? Let me have your comments and I’ll add them in.

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Six Thinking Hats is the concept that innovation, judgement and thought can be better managed and facilitated within a group if the group organises their collective thinking processes around a set of specific areas.

Each hat represents a specific area of consideration or thought and for simplicities sake you often see them represented with different colours. I’ve used this personally over many years and found that with time a. you can become faster but b. it takes time to perfect. The tools are useful for innovation but they can equally be applied to strategy enabling you to flesh out and balance a strategy considering the full range of inputs and therefore logical outputs.

During a recent workshop I attempted to use this model for technical innovation, scoping and design. Much of the work I’m interested in is understanding the real business requirements and desires such that I can translate this into a process and therefore into a software solution. I stress real business requirements because in my experience what I’m presented with at the start often differs from the final needs. In effect there is a part for me to facilitate the discussion and also capturing it as it comes to light.

With any task these days time is money and being swift, focus and accurate are critical during this stage. So using the six thinking hats should work…

Hat 1:

Is concerned with questions and facts. Well that was excellent we started the discussion collecting together the initial facts/needs we had about the solution. The white board was our friend and having allowed our self with 20 minutes we finished feeling like a second pass was necessary but that we’d made a start. The nice experience was the shared concentration, each time something not to do with Hat1 surfaced it was immediately parked.

Hat 2:

Is concerned with the emotional, irrational aspects. This is not so easy simply because of the lack of time we’ve had to work together (kick off meeting) and that its not immediately obvious that this should have a relevance on our task. However after a short pause we did gather to gather our emotions and it was pleasant to find them largely similar. In this case around the desire for success, daunting hill to climb and concerns over failure to bring the essential elements out.

Hat 3:

Is concerned with judgments. Beneficial but challenging was the outcome here. The problem with this stage is that you need to criticise the solution, need, business case to unpick where there may be logical arguments which challenge the need for it. Our discussion unearthed a number of things which in Prince 2 might go onto a risk register. In our case we decided once again to not try to judge the arguments, if we felt they were valid then onto the whiteboard with the desire to return to each and ensure we had a mitigation in place at some stage during the spec phase.

Hat 4:

Is a pleasant stage where we all dust ourselves off from the previous stage and now focus on the positive points. In effect the positive points indicated a range of needs which weren’t focused on in the RFP, some of the more softer aspects such as the user experience, information architecture. As with most software RFP there is typically a lot of focus on the scope of the works with some explanation of the strategy. However its then important to tease out the needs in respect of the structure, and the representation it will take on screen.

Hat 5:

Is concerned with creativity, new thoughts and investigations. In effect this just happens as a outcome from doing each of the other hats. We confirmed in this section that the questions area of the whiteboard captured the unknowns at this point in time and quickly moved on.

Hat 6:

Is concerned with the holistic view. A moment to step back and recheck that the process followed has struct the correct chords and we are moving in the correct direction. Actually it identified that this may well be iterative. With the discussion so far the high-level areas have been considered but there remain holes to fill. Which gave us the drive to create the now and next actions plan. This gave each of us a collection of tasks to go away with and further enable us to cover off some of the more mundane aspects like who is taking on what. Probably not so ‘big picture’ as is intended but given the discussions to date have always been seeking for the big picture this was seen as no bad thing.

Conclusion:

Does it help, yes is the simple answer. More so for it being a new group of people working together and the need to channel constructive energy in a meeting to leverage a brief. However there are pitfalls and gap in terms of facilitating this as a process. Tangents appear which with excited minds can lead to new tunnels being explored which digress from the intention of this structure approach. Would I use it again – definitely given the right group and challenge.

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• Visited the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa
• Visited Luxor to see the Karnak Temples
• Visited Mauritius to see the Black River Gorges
• Visited Rome to see the remains of the Roman Empire
• Visited Venice to get engaged

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Try it for yourself over at http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/JS-909/

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Oh OK perhaps not, since I have absolutely nothing to complain about really. But I would add that perhaps it would be very nice if someone in Apple could try using this interface to traverse massive playlists? With all that spare space around the panel surely it would be trivial to make the selection window bigger?

Just a thought?

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I’ve been using rails for development of applications for what feels like a long time. I wasn’t in the pre 1.0 crowd but I did spend many days hacking around in cgi scripts to make the website run in apache so I do feel like I’ve been here a while.

As brackground I came up through C++ operating systems development (loved it), delphi (blah blah), then on to Java (which I never liked) and into web technologies and scripted languages.

My day job doesn’t allow more than 10-20% of development anymore (by choice). So although I’m still keen the time is not usually available. Interesting this has quite an impact on way you program.

For one thing change is an issue, changing technology requires great investment just to achieve the simplest of tasks. Something I can not afford.

Rails has always been for me about using a good language to enjoy my craft. For a variety of reasons enjoyment does enable better results. Further the rails stack goes all the way through the systems I need to utilise – database, ORM, MVC, and client side (javascript + tempaltes). By understanding one language and leveraging the well written information on Rails I avoid needing to care about most other areas.

However the trade off is that sometimes it just can’t do what you need so some custom javascript or SQL query is required. I’ve never been particularly strong at either. So that usually gets less of my attention. I break the rules at this point and do what needs to be done to get the job done. Many in the community would disagree with this approach. And I applaude them, they are correct but realities/needs/timescales differ. As yet I’ve never had a hard time sleeping at night!

In many cases the Agile method of working is excellent. I was slow to value the testing framework built into the system. For a while I played with Selenium (amazing solution) but I have a regularly changing interface and could never get beyond the issue that tests broke because they were out of date (not the application was broken). Shoulda on the other hand has been very helpful as has rcov.

Of course the testing approach when time constrained is brief in some aspects. And not by design. Its just their is no documentation on how to achieve certain things – e.g. validate a upload dialog can import, parse and process an zip file + manifest. Of course this is domain specific but validation of file uploads is not, and as yet I’ve not found anything on this.

Google is a strong friend when there is trouble. I’ve found many articles and blogs to guide me. Although sometimes in the wrong direction – engines. There coming back and I’m scared I found them confused and difficult the first time around so I wonder (without a name change) who will be listening?

Would I do it all again: yes. In fact I’d do more. Its a fantastic stable platform which has I believe shaken up the entire ‘intelligent’ web development community along with its cousins DJango I’m looking at you. I’m sure that even in these difficult times we’ll continue to see this is a fertile ground with many innovations and improvements yet to come.

Looking to the future I’m very aware of the tiny amount of knowledge I have. I’ve spoken to many in the community who are streets ahead. I wonder if I’ll ever get to where they are? Do I need to perhaps not, if anything I can say that even with a small amount of knowledge and clear understanding of the principles (which you can pick up very quickly) creating the next application is available to almost any developer.

If only rails could create cross platform desktop applications?

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