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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Posted in agile on September 4th, 2008 by Georges – Comments Off
This is a repost of a series of article I originally published on Songbird’s blog
Previously, we’ve examined the new development practices that the Songbird team adopted to plan and track a release. Everyone on the team was very eager to put them to the test. Unfortunately, at the time, we were still in the middle of the 0.3 release cycle and new work could only be started once that release was completed. During the 0.3 release, everything was still treated as a bug, but in fact, many bugs were stories and tasks in disguise. We decided to apply some of the newly defined tracking principle to help us guide and finish the cycle, so we could start fresh with our next release as soon as possible.
Cuánto es?
The first step was to add cost to everything. We introduced a new cost field in Bugzilla and put a cost value on everything according to our new scale of 1, 2 and 3 points. With costing in place, we were in a position to compute how much points the team was able to complete in a typical work week. That total, normalized per work day became our team velocity.
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