Posted in agile on January 14th, 2010 by Georges – 7 Comments
This is a following post to the series on Agile development at Songbird. As covered previously, we’ve created in-house tools to help with the planning and tracking of our release trains. The tool works off of Bugzilla and extracts meaningful information for project tracking. As it was originally meant to periodically generate an email status, it became apparent that it was too static for daily project tracking needs.
Songbird Release Trains
We concluded that a dashboard that was more dynamic and worked in real time with Bugzilla would provide a more accurate picture of development progress. This is an overview of the couple of extensions we added to the tool.
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Posted in agile on December 15th, 2008 by Georges – Comments Off
This is a repost of a series of article I originally published on Songbird’s blog
In the previous two installments of this series on Agile development at Songbird, I’ve covered our move from waterfall to Agile and provided an in-depth look at some actual release cycles. In this last post, I’m going to introduce a tool – which I gave the uninspiring name sdpbot – built internally to help facilitate the tracking of our releases.
Wrestling Bugzilla into shape
Because so much of our existing workflow occurred in Bugzilla, we’ve decided to use it as a central database to drive our process. Every actionable project artifact lives in Bugzilla, a Feature, Story, Task or Bug. From a release standpoint, the only actionable items are Story, Tasks or Bug and hence, we only track these. Here is how we’ve organized our bugzilla.songbirdnest.com to help us track each release.
Release train
Every release train has a name and is used to create a target milestone in Bugzilla. This allows us to put items in release buckets. See some examples of what was included in the Fugazi and Genesis releases.
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Posted in cycling on October 22nd, 2008 by Georges – 2 Comments
Why do people climb mountains? Because it’s there. When it comes to mountain, Haleakala is not your average hill. It’s a dormant volcano and you can ride it from sea level to summit, 10,023 feet (3′055 m) of elevation gain in one uninterrupted climb. Some claim it’s the highest paved road on earth. Here’s my account of attempting such climb.
I rented a bike from South Maui Bike. They now feature Trek 5000, all carbon for $250/week. You can call in advance to reserve it and make sure you get the proper frame size. The bike was in decent condition, but don’t expect too much. I started from Paia as planned, and got rolling shortly after 6:30 am. Plenty of daylight at that time of the year. Baldwin Beach Park is the perfect location to take a picture and a toe dip in the water before starting the ascent.
Baldwin Beach Park, Paia HI
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