July, 2009

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15
Jul 09

Justifying an Estimate

A non-technical approach to justifying an estimate:

“The minute when I start justifying my estimate or explaining why I have to change a lot of things, I’ve lost. [...] So I have found that the way out of this situation IS NOT to go technical and start explaining how code works. They’re NEVER going to say gee, now that you gave me a quick tutorial in web application design, and then you explained how you’ll need to rewrite the permissions decorators to use a new state factory, I guess your estimate makes sense.

Instead, this approach works OK for me:

Me: I think it is a great idea and it won’t require a lot of research and development, but it’s going to take a while. So based on that estimate, should we put into the queue or not?”

[via Matt Wilson's blog, via Ester Derby ]

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12
Jul 09

The Wrong Manifesto

I’m all for the Agile Manifesto, but it occurred to me that someone might have written a spoof. It didn’t take long to find the Waterfall Manifesto:

“After participating in and observing many software development projects in recent years, we have reached the sad conclusion that there will never be better ways of developing software on this planet. While the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development may look appealing for inexperienced developers, serious professionals know that the real world is not similar to the “Little House on the Prairie”"

A dry, and humorous read. I disagree with it 100%.

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10
Jul 09

Going to Chicago in August? #Agile2009

I’m looking to meet any of you Minnesotans going to the Agile 2009 conference – if you’re going, please comment on the post or message me @pedstrom I’d love to meet you!

If you’re not going, but might be interested, be sure to check out the program - there are lots of great sessions!

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9
Jul 09

Best Buy and Open Source

Best Buy is one of those companies that loves Microsoft.  So I was particularly happy when I saw this announcement come across about Best Buy Idea X:

“a website where you can share, vote for, and discuss ideas that will help make Best Buy a better company. The site is built using Ruby on Rails and runs in Amazon’s Compute Cloud.”

Maybe open source and cloud computing isn’t so bad, ‘eh? Beautiful looking site too.

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5
Jul 09

Planning is only a Guess

Matt writes The only plan is to learn as you go:

“Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Unless you’re a fortune teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.”

This is a great article. Predicting the future is an eductated guess at best.

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