New Home for Explain PMT

The new home for explainPMT is at google code.

It took me a while to find it so, this may help others get there quicker.

Posted: Fri Apr 18 17:20:00 UTC 2008

Lean Software Development

The Problem is that software projects still deliver an unacceptable level of quality and responsiveness. Part of the reason for this is the industrial-era Scientific Management approach. Part of the reason for this is the progamming culture that grows up around a language.

Lean software development provides information-era Lean management: Reduce Cycle-time and start expecting zero defects.

But the cultural issues and organizational structures remain extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Some hope may be appearing in a new programming language (and more importantly programming culture) Ruby. Ruby at it's core includes an agile way of development. Agile was not merely added onto Ruby after the fact like it was for J2EE (and .NET).

The promise of applying Lean-Thinking to Software development is available now. It consists of a Lean Business Model, combined with Agile Processes like Scrum and ExtremeProgramming (XP) , and a deeply Object Oriented environment and culture. All these parts are currently available.

Beating the competition only requires putting them all together.

Posted: Sun Feb 24 15:47:00 UTC 2008

CART Feb 2008 Presentations

Here are the presentations I gave at C-ART in Feb 2008.

Xp-Scrum Comparison

Focuses on XP, where another presentation focused on Scrum

Lean Software Development

A quick overview

Golden Road of Agile

Proposal for uniting various approaches to create the Golden Road of Agile.
Includes: Unix, Ruby, Rails, XP, Scrum, Lean Software Development, Thoughput Accounting.
The feedback I got from the group was that it needs a better definition of the problem that it is addressing. So that is now on my TODO list.

Posted: Tue Feb 12 15:47:00 UTC 2008

Mountain Goat Software, site upgrade

Rails Studio constructed site gets an upgrade.

Mountain Goat Software is a Colorado, USA-based process and project management consultancy and training firm. Through its Certified ScrumMaster™, agile estimating and planning, user story, Certified Scurm Product Owner™, and other courses Mountain Goat Software founder Mike Cohn helps companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques in order to build extremely high performance development organizations.

Posted: Fri Oct 19 20:26:00 UTC 2007

Plugin: selection_options_for

Many selection lists in an application do not change and so the quickest way to code them is to put the list in the code itself. For example:

Child, Adult, or Senior.
Male or Female.
Yes or No.

selection_options_for manages static selection lists. If you selection lists are dynamically generated this is not the answer.

selection_options_for allows you to

keep the display labels in the model
store a 1 character flag in the DB
test the value with methods in the code

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  selection_options_for :file_type_option,
    [ :pdf, 'PDF'],
    [ :hmlt, 'HTML'],
    [ :text, 'X', 'Textfile']
end # class

Then you can do stuff like ....

  assert   file_type_option_pdf?

   <%= select :article, :file_type_option, Article.file_type_options %>

More examples are in the README file. Code available here ... or use ...

svn export --username anonymous http://railsstudio.com/svn/pub/plugins/selection_options_for/trunk selection_options_for

Thanks to Scott Barron for code review and tips on tightening up the code.

Multi-select lists boxes in Rails

Posted: Fri Mar 16 16:04:53 UTC 2007

New Live Site: Scrum Alliance

Yet another site built by Rails Studio enters production.

The Scrum Alliance is a non-profit organization committed to delivering facilities, stories, courses, and other materials that will help Scrum users be successful.

The Scrum Alliance's mission is to promote increased awareness and understanding of Scrum, provide resources to individuals and organizations using Scrum, and support the iterative improvement of the software development profession.

The Scrum Alliance founders are: Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn, and Esther Derby.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration

Posted: Mon Feb 12 00:09:00 UTC 2007

New Live Site: Agile Alliance

A new Rails Studio constructed site enters production.

The Agile Alliance is a non-profit organization that supports individuals and organizations who use agile approaches to develop software. Driven by the simple priorities articulated in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, agile development approaches deliver value to organizations and end users faster and with higher quality.

Posted: Tue Jan 02 16:33:00 UTC 2007