When To Work On Technical Debt

link -> When To Work On Technical Debt

One problem I encounter constantly is this: "We don't have time to address our technical debt!"Every company I've ever worked for has had this problem to some degree. The development team realizes that there are some parts of the system that need to be cleaned up, but for a wide variety of different reasons, they feel like they don't have the time to actually work on improving those areas of the system.

A Better Team: Arrogance And Accepting Your Own Strengths

link -> A Better Team: Arrogance And Accepting Your Own Strengths

I’ve spent years fighting my own arrogance. I constantly struggle with it. I have to make concious efforts to recognize that every person I come in contact with is more experienced and more intelligent than I am given the right scenario.

Bet my wife would appreciate me thinking about this before I respond. :)

Comic for July 16, 2011

link -> Comic for July 16, 2011

I know I have never seen the results of one

Using NHibernate With Stored Procedures - Ayende @ Rahien

link -> Using NHibernate With Stored Procedures - Ayende @ Rahien

I wonder if you could use something like this to do shift collation. The advantage being that another entity could map a PunchedShift as a reference instead of just a PunchedShiftID. I would rather it let me write code instead of SQL though.

A Sample Format for a Spreadsheet-Based Product Backlog

link -> A Sample Format for a Spreadsheet-Based Product Backlog

I want to show a real easy way to put user stories in a spreadsheet-based product backlog. I wrote this after seeing someone tweet a screen capture of a product backlog I made 9 years ago and thought to myself, “Yikes, that’s out of date for how I do it today…”

As you probably know I’m a big fan of writing the product backlog in the form of user stories and of writing user stories in the form, “As a , I so that .” An example being, “As a frequent flyer, I really want to be able to connect to the internet while flying so that I can update my blog while traveling rather than having to save this as a text file and updating my blog later.” (Can you guess where I am while writing this?)

What I’ve found makes a user story in this format very easy to work with in a spreadsheet is to take the boilerplate parts and put them into column headings. So we’ll have column headings like “As a” and “I” and “so that”. The meat of each story is then clearly visible in each row. Additional columns can be added for things like a unique identifier, notes, status and such. In this example, I’ve also included a column for the theme or grouping of which the story is a part. You can see this in the screen capture below. You can click the image for a larger view.

It is nice the way it groups who the story is for. Unless of course all the stories are for the same person.