Year: 2008

Categories
Development

Agile a thousand years ago

I went on a trip with three mates to see the western part of Norway this summer. You know, where the fjords and the mountains are. On one of the ferries I came across a poster with the Viking Laws on it. The authenticity could probably be disputed, but they fit nicely into agile software development. Agile isn’t all that new I guess. 😉 Here they are:

Be brave and aggressive

  • Be direct
  • Grab all opportunities
  • Using varying methods of attack
  • Be versatile and agile
  • Attack one target at a time
  • Don’t plan everything in detail
  • Use top quality weapons

Be prepared

  • Keep weapons in good condition
  • Keep in shape
  • Find good battle comrades
  • Agree on important points
  • Choose one chief

Be a good merchant

  • Find out what the market needs
  • Don’t make promises that you can’t keep
  • Don’t demand overpayment
  • Arrange things so that you can return

Keep the camp in order

  • Keep things tidy and organized
  • Arrange enjoyable activities which strengthen the group
  • Make sure everyone does useful work
  • Consult all members of the group for advice

So now we can feel a bit rutheless and barbaric when trying to be agile. A good poster in any agile team’s room. 🙂

Categories
Web

Synced again

Ever since I upgraded to Firefox 3 I have been missing the good old Google browser sync extenstion for Firefox. Google decided to discontinue development of it, so there will never be a version that supports F3.

Enter Mozilla Weave. It basically does the same as Google Browser Sync, but is especially useful in F3 because of the search in history, bookmarks and bookmark tags. I can now usually get back to somewhere I have been through searching in the location bar.

Initially it worked just fine, but after the word spread their servers has had way too much load. This has resulted in syncs just hanging or in best case taking a loooong time. So after a little mess I started doing some research and found that you can configure your own weave server. All it takes is basically WebDAV and password protection.

With Dreamhost being my primary provider it was really easy. The following steps were taken:

  • Create a new subdomain (ex: sync.mydomain.com)
  • Create a folder called user/myusername. Weave always looks in a user subfolder
  • Click goodies -> webdav and set password and enable webdav for the user/myusername folder

That’s just about all it took and my syncs are againg working with a much better speed. Because of the loads they’re not taking on new users, so setting up your own server is also a way to test the extension for new users.

Update: The newest version of Weave tries to do some sort of bookmark/link exchange between users. This fails as it requires some kind of script on the server, which I naturally don’t have. It manifests itself as a warning on the lower bar, but can safely be ignored. To get completely rid of it, just create an empty file under api/share/get.php . It won’t enable the feature, but at least you get rid of the warnings.

Categories
Development

Agile smells

There’s a scrum alliance wiki that has a list of known scrum smells (think like code smells).

Via Mark Levison.