Project Management Lessons from NASA

Here is very interesting list of project management lessons from NASA.

Project Management Truisms - Part 1

Interesting list of project management truisms. Although it should be sarcastic, unfortunately in some cases it is reality. Link to the original post is here.

Instantly Become a Better Programmer (then worry about learning TDD)

These days TDD is very often considered as the most important practice you need when developing software. But will TDD help you if you do not have basics? What if you are missing basic knowledge about patterns, about design? In that case TDD will not be of big help. Very interesting article about this problem and what steps to perform before going to TDD is here.

Filling the product backlog

Interesting blog with short story how to create product backlog for product you are going to create. Original story is here.

Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last

Very interesting comparison of doctor with 20 years of experience and what is a difference having long years of experience and being professional. Read the article here.

Agile Failures

To be able to learn how to avoid common pitfalls it is not enough to read about agile success. Even maybe more important is to read abut agile failures. Only when you know what happened on other projects, what went wrong, and how this situation could be avoided you can really improve your agile skills. On Scrum Alliance wiki there is place to document Agile/Scrum failures. Link to the page is here.

10 Principles of Agile Project Time Management

Just excellent post. All 10 points are excellent. You should really read this from time to time. Original link is here.

Another reason to try agile development

Read a very interesting blog and very interesting reasoning why it was decided in waterfall company to start using agile process. Original post is here.

Affinity Estimating: A How-To

If you need an advice how to estimate size (not effort) of the project following post is very interesting. You will learn how to estimate rougher and make even finer size estimation. Have a look at the original post.

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

What “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.” in agile means?

One of the principles of Agile, mostly related to design and architecture, is “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.” This is sometimes interpreted as “take every shortcut” or “slap something together.” But that is not the intention. A better way to express it would probably be something like “The Simplest Solution That Could Possibly Satisfy Your Requirements.” For instance, if you have a requirement to create the back end for a web site like amazon.com, then while a perl/cgi solution on a single core machine could possibly “work,” it doesn’t work from the point of view of high availability, fast response time, or reliability. Continue reading on http://damonpoole.blogspot.com/2008/07/simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work.html

Agile: Is, Is Not, May Be

Very interesting thought on Agile, what agile is and what it can became if we are not careful. Can you really be agile if you are doing detailed design upfront, or do UI specification before project is started. Have a look at this post and opinion about it http://xprogramming.com/xpmag/jatAgileIsIsNotMayBe.htm

How can we map use cases to stories?

As many has noted use cases and user stories are very similar but described in different manner. Have a look at this post which describes how it is possible to map use case to user story. http://agilefaq.net/2008/06/18/how-can-we-map-use-cases-to-stories/

Minimally Agile

Being agile does not necessary means that you must follow all the strict rules. Sometimes if you are agile fundamentalist you will discard some practices as agile because they are not following all the "strict" agile rules. One view is posted here http://www.notesfromatooluser.com/2008/06/minimally-agile.html

Top 20 Best Agile Development Books

In linked post you can find a list of top 20 agile books. The original link is http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/top-20-best-agile-development-books

Pinky and The Brain

Have a look at cartoon heroes that are making similar mistakes as are done during software development.

See while nor too simple but nor too sophisticated solution need to be the best one.

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/97-pinky-and-the-brain-

Two Tips to Help Product Owners with Release Planning

Release planning is one of the hardest parts of agile software development. Although there is lot of books about agile release planning you must gain experience to be able to really do it good (if you have luck). Here are two useful tips that can provide some help.

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/96-two-tips-to-help-product-owners-with-release-planning

Watch Out For These Common Problems

Here's some things to keep an eye on as you go forward with agile and scrum:

http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Watch-Out-For-These-Common-Problems.html

Copy-Paste Reasoning

These days as agile is becoming more and more popular there is lot of consultants, companies and books claiming that they are selling you agile cookbook. Just exactly follow the steps explained in those cookbooks and you are doing agile best possible way. Does these cookbooks remained you to something? Waterfall maybe? CMMI? Strict procedures to produce the best software on the world?

For those who are using real agile, who have feeling about agile, not applying it by some book, it is clear that there will never be agile cookbook. Very nice and short article explaining this is http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/copypaste-reasoning

10 ways to screw up scrum

Have a link to interesting PDF document describing 10 smells when doing Scrum. You will be surprised how many "agile" companies are doing at least some of mentioned mistakes.

Check your self http://agilefaq.net/2008/05/27/10-ways-to-screw-up-scrum/

Making Documents Lean

You are on agile project but anyway you need to deliver documentation.

Read short summary and if you have time read the original post linked from this summarized post.

The Best Agile Practices to Implement Now

There are some agile practices that can significantly improve productivity of team and you can introduce those practices at almost no cost.
Those practices (list is for sure not complete) are:

• A proper team room
• Short iterations
• Test driven development

Original post you can read here.

Hibernate cannot dereference scalar collection element

Hibernate cannot dereference scalar collection element or how to query property that is of Set type of mapped class with hibernate.

My problem seemed simple. I had following class:

class Subordinate {
String id;
Set superiors;
}

This class was mapped with two tables. All I needed is to get all subordinates of superior with some id. When reading documentation it turn out to be easy if my set of superiors was not set of simple types. And I have spent some time on this until I found exact answer on this blog: http://jdwyah.blogspot.com/2006/09/hibernate-cannot-dereference-scalar.html

Ten Common Mistakes of Going Agile

Have a look at ten common mistakes when companies introducing agile methodologies. Complete link is here.

Agile Project Management

In agile software development everything is specified how to produce software reliably with minimum number of bugs.
But what about agile project management. Delivering software has nothing with project management. Is project management only legacy of the old development styles or we need project management also for agile projects. What is you opinion. Original post is: http://www.agile-software-development.com/2008/05/agile-project-management.html

View Public Stats for Thousands of Web Sites

http://www.seologs.com/web-analytics/view-public-stats-for-thousands-of-web-sites/

SCRUM Quickly!

Very short introduction of Scrum for those can want to find out what Scrum is. At the end of post there are links that can provide much more details for those interested. The link to the real post is http://www.jroller.com/vtatai/entry/an_introduction_to_scrum

Keeping Sight of the Bigger Picture

As we know heart of the agile software development are small iterations, user stories, unit testing, delivering small parts of functionalities. When everything is so small you can easily forget big picture. So for sure you must take care about big picture.
Mored details you can find in this blog post Keeping Sight of the Bigger Picture.

How Agile Works in a Nutshell

Very nice comparison how one imaginary project would run on classical waterfall methodology and how it would run on agile methodology.

It is nice not long description but hits the point. Full post is here.

You Arent Gonna Need It

You Arent Gonna Need it is the philosophy that can be very useful during software development. So to find out what it is about have a look at this link http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html

Grails and Simple AJAX

To find out some default support incorporated into grails just visit this post http://jan-so.blogspot.com/2008/04/grails-and-simple-ajax.html

Book: User Stories Applied

Review of the book following with posts about main attributes of user stories. Full link to the post is here http://jan-so.blogspot.com/2008/01/book-user-stories-applied.html.

Advantages of the “As a user, I want” user story template

It is well known that a form of user story should be "As a user, I want, so". Very nice description why this is the best approach can be found here.

Example of template and taglib with grails

Blog post explaining how grails templates and taglibs can be used to make code easier to understand and maintain. The ling to the full blog post is Example of template and taglib with grails.

What is this about

I read lot of blogs about software development, scrum, agile methodologies, java, grails.... The most of them are within my Google Reader but the main problem appear when I find some very interesting blog and I don't want to forget it. Then I mark it with star, make a bookmark to it. Then I come out with the idea why not put other blogs that are interesting for me to my own blog so they are here and I can view them easy.