malvasia bianca

Anybody have any good podcast recommendations? I’ve been listening to them for a few months now; the only ones that have stuck are agile toolkit, which can be very interesting but which doesn’t get updated very often, and the Mercury News video game podcast, which I enjoy but might well not listen to if I […]

For months, I’ve wanted my team to try actual XP/Scrum-style release planning; yesterday and today, we actually did it. I’m glad we did; if nothing else, it was quite interesting, and I think/hope it was productive. This planning is for a “release” at the end of the month that we’ll use for demos and trials […]

I’ve subscribed to my first podcasts: Agile Toolkit and The Sound of Vision. It really is nice that I can enter the URL for an RSS feed into iTunes and it will go and fetch new shows for me. And the iPod is definitely the right place for this sort of thing: if the podcasts […]

I was unhappy with the result of our pair programming meeting for various reasons: we were all unhappy with how things were going, I was pretty sure that we were doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. We’d adopted short-term measures to ease some of the pains, but I didn’t see them […]

About three months ago, my team started seriously experimenting with pair programming. It’s been more than long enough since then for us to take stock, so we had a meeting three or so weeks ago to talk about our experiences. The results were mixed, and really hard for me to get a grip on. Some […]

Ever since I read Refactoring to Patterns, I’ve been thinking that I should use Compose Method more. (I should really reread Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns to see what other low-level patterns I’ve missed.) But I’m too timid to perform quite that drastic surgery to the thicket of code that I’m working on. I just finished […]

As I mentioned recently, my group has been experimenting with some XP-inspired agile planning. Now that that’s stabilized, the question is: where next? It’s still my plan for the group to end up at full XP, if possible. (Asuming our experiments with it continue to turn out well, of course.) It’s also still my plan […]

At the Sun Engineering Conference a couple of months ago, I went to a workshop by Ron Jeffries on agile planning. That inspired me to try out the (XP) technique that he was proposing: the idea is to plan all work in terms of “stories” that you estimate will take between 1 and 3 “points” […]

(This is a lightly edited version of a post on an internal Sun mailing list on extreme programming). I just finished reading the Quality Software Management series, by Gerald Weinberg (which I learned about from the XP bibliography), and I heartily recommend it to anybody interested in XP, or for that matter other agile practices. […]

I was hoping that I’d be using Fedora Core 3 the next time I wrote an entry here, but ’twas not to be: I can’t get the damn CD’s written. I’ve eliminated all variables, using two different CD writers, two different CD readers, two different sources of blank CDs, two different downloads of the images […]