Comments for Clayton Lengel-Zigich

Comment on Add Some Fun to Your Scrum Board by arttu

arttu — Sat, 05 May 2012 01:27:42 +0000

We just had this very same idea a couple weeks ago and blogged about it yesterday Just went a little futher: http://blog.flowdock.com/2012/05/04/how-to-make-a-scrumkanbanwhatever-magnet-out-of-a-champagne-bottle/

Comment on Probability, Velocity and Re-Estimating User Stories by Clayton Lengel-Zigich

Clayton Lengel-Zigich — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:12:25 +0000

Having collected some data on a number of different sprint teams for about a dozen sprints, I found that the distribution was skewed a little left. I think there is some natural tendency to make a big deal out of the estimates you get wrong in one direction and to not for those in the other direction. Similar to how people who experience bad service from a business are likely to tell a lot of people and those who get better than average service don’t tell the world.

Getting back to your point, I suspect that if you had a large enough sample size to have a statistically meaningful distribution, the team would have moved beyond estimating as a problem and big frying bigger fish.

Comment on Probability, Velocity and Re-Estimating User Stories by Bjarke Freund-Hansen

Bjarke Freund-Hansen — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 07:02:07 +0000

“Again, we should expect that some three point stories will take the same amount of time to complete as some five point stories, but in the end this will even out.”

You make one basic assumption that I do not believe is true. That the probability distribution is gaussian.

I think the real distribution is skewed to the right, like this:
http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/figs/skewed.gif

I.e. either the estimate is about correct, and everything more or less goes as you guess when you made the estimate. Or you run in to some obscure bug or issue that you could not foresee on beforehand, and the user story will take longer than you estimated (possibly several times longer.)

Comment on Agile Principles: Tear Down These Cubes by Beau Frusetta

Beau Frusetta — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:35:26 +0000

Oh – look at you and your fancy word (“tchotchke”).

Comment on Agile Principles: Self-Organizing Teams are Motivated Teams by Clayton Lengel-Zigich

Clayton Lengel-Zigich — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:11:28 +0000

@Jordan What I’m trying to convey is that without a clear vision, the team cannot even begin to feel motivated. That’s not to say that just having a vision is motivating, a crappy vision that focuses on something like “growing quarterly sales” isn’t going to get anyone up in the morning.

Comment on Agile Principles: Self-Organizing Teams are Motivated Teams by Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:40:48 +0000

By “and an understanding of success in order to attain the autonomy and purpose required to feel motivated.”

Does that mean:

1) Just enough understanding to feel motivated

2) Does feeling motivated equate to actual motivation? Or is the feeling of motivation sufficient

3) They can self organize as long as they are following whatever direction they are told?

Jordan

Comment on Agile Principles: Frequently Deliver Working Software by Deryl Doucette

Deryl Doucette — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:33:33 +0000

Came to this article from twitter. I find I needed to read this. The idea of shifting from thinking as a ‘project’ to that of a sellable ‘product’ makes sense. As a ‘project’, even the word suggests the idea of a gigantic undertaking. Think of the expression “Man, that was a project and a half!” or “What a project that was, sheesh!”. ‘Product’ springs the idea to mind that of making something. Creationism or monetary increase, either goal requires something to be built. The effort one invests in ‘creating’ software I surmise would be more ‘joyous’, for lack of a better word, than that invoked by the mental picture of a ‘project’.

To continue that drive, knowing outside of your own idea of where you think you stand continuously, and in rapid succession, is invaluable. We get some of that mental kick from the fact that tests turn green, but feedback from others, I find, seriously helps your focus! Independent of the technologies involved, and your skills with them, the mental focus and your internal picture and assessment of it has such a huge impact on what and how we build.

As an aside to the above idea, I like that you point out that stopping is an actual option. Not all ideas should be implemented. They sound good at the time and so we spend a good portion of time making them come to be only to find later.. maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Whether that be the entire project or just portions within.

Comment on Zero To Tested With Cucumber and Factory Girl by Pritesh

Pritesh — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:24:13 +0000

Awesome post made my day.
Am now Zero To Tested With Cucumber and Factory Girl application owner

Comment on Paperclip and Amazon S3 by Igor Alexandrov

Igor Alexandrov — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:21:30 +0000

I have created storage module for Paperclip that uses official ‘aws-sdk’ gem.
Works well, using it in production projects myself.
https://github.com/igor-alexandrov/paperclip-aws

Comment on How To: Setup RSpec, Cucumber, Webrat, RCov and Autotest on Leopard by Bob

Bob — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 10:33:16 +0000

Possible alternatives given the passage of time since the original post:

RSpec -> still RSpec!
Cucumber -> for rails, maybe Steak (“a minimal extension of RSpec-Rails that adds several conveniences to do acceptance testing of Rails applications using Capybara.”)
Webrat -> maybe Capybara (built to work nicely with Cucumber)
RCov -> use SimpleCov in ruby 1.9
Autotest -> maybe Guard?? haven’t tried it