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  • Scrum in 5 Minutes

    - by Stephen.Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to explain the basic concepts of Scrum in less than five minutes. You learn how Scrum can help a team of developers to successfully complete a complex software project. Product Backlog and the Product Owner Imagine that you are part of a team which needs to create a new website – for example, an e-commerce website. You have an overwhelming amount of work to do. You need to build (or possibly buy) a shopping cart, install an SSL certificate, create a product catalog, create a Facebook page, and at least a hundred other things that you have not thought of yet. According to Scrum, the first thing you should do is create a list. Place the highest priority items at the top of the list and the lower priority items lower in the list. For example, creating the shopping cart and buying the domain name might be high priority items and creating a Facebook page might be a lower priority item. In Scrum, this list is called the Product Backlog. How do you prioritize the items in the Product Backlog? Different stakeholders in the project might have different priorities. Gary, your division VP, thinks that it is crucial that the e-commerce site has a mobile app. Sally, your direct manager, thinks taking advantage of new HTML5 features is much more important. Multiple people are pulling you in different directions. According to Scrum, it is important that you always designate one person, and only one person, as the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the person who decides what items should be added to the Product Backlog and the priority of the items in the Product Backlog. The Product Owner could be the customer who is paying the bills, the project manager who is responsible for delivering the project, or a customer representative. The critical point is that the Product Owner must always be a single person and that single person has absolute authority over the Product Backlog. Sprints and the Sprint Backlog So now the developer team has a prioritized list of items and they can start work. The team starts implementing the first item in the Backlog — the shopping cart — and the team is making good progress. Unfortunately, however, half-way through the work of implementing the shopping cart, the Product Owner changes his mind. The Product Owner decides that it is much more important to create the product catalog before the shopping cart. With some frustration, the team switches their developmental efforts to focus on implementing the product catalog. However, part way through completing this work, once again the Product Owner changes his mind about the highest priority item. Getting work done when priorities are constantly shifting is frustrating for the developer team and it results in lower productivity. At the same time, however, the Product Owner needs to have absolute authority over the priority of the items which need to get done. Scrum solves this conflict with the concept of Sprints. In Scrum, a developer team works in Sprints. At the beginning of a Sprint the developers and the Product Owner agree on the items from the backlog which they will complete during the Sprint. This subset of items from the Product Backlog becomes the Sprint Backlog. During the Sprint, the Product Owner is not allowed to change the items in the Sprint Backlog. In other words, the Product Owner cannot shift priorities on the developer team during the Sprint. Different teams use Sprints of different lengths such as one month Sprints, two-week Sprints, and one week Sprints. For high-stress, time critical projects, teams typically choose shorter sprints such as one week sprints. For more mature projects, longer one month sprints might be more appropriate. A team can pick whatever Sprint length makes sense for them just as long as the team is consistent. You should pick a Sprint length and stick with it. Daily Scrum During a Sprint, the developer team needs to have meetings to coordinate their work on completing the items in the Sprint Backlog. For example, the team needs to discuss who is working on what and whether any blocking issues have been discovered. Developers hate meetings (well, sane developers hate meetings). Meetings take developers away from their work of actually implementing stuff as opposed to talking about implementing stuff. However, a developer team which never has meetings and never coordinates their work also has problems. For example, Fred might get stuck on a programming problem for days and never reach out for help even though Tom (who sits in the cubicle next to him) has already solved the very same problem. Or, both Ted and Fred might have started working on the same item from the Sprint Backlog at the same time. In Scrum, these conflicting needs – limiting meetings but enabling team coordination – are resolved with the idea of the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a meeting for coordinating the work of the developer team which happens once a day. To keep the meeting short, each developer answers only the following three questions: 1. What have you done since yesterday? 2. What do you plan to do today? 3. Any impediments in your way? During the Daily Scrum, developers are not allowed to talk about issues with their cat, do demos of their latest work, or tell heroic stories of programming problems overcome. The meeting must be kept short — typically about 15 minutes. Issues which come up during the Daily Scrum should be discussed in separate meetings which do not involve the whole developer team. Stories and Tasks Items in the Product or Sprint Backlog – such as building a shopping cart or creating a Facebook page – are often referred to as User Stories or Stories. The Stories are created by the Product Owner and should represent some business need. Unlike the Product Owner, the developer team needs to think about how a Story should be implemented. At the beginning of a Sprint, the developer team takes the Stories from the Sprint Backlog and breaks the stories into tasks. For example, the developer team might take the Create a Shopping Cart story and break it into the following tasks: · Enable users to add and remote items from shopping cart · Persist the shopping cart to database between visits · Redirect user to checkout page when Checkout button is clicked During the Daily Scrum, members of the developer team volunteer to complete the tasks required to implement the next Story in the Sprint Backlog. When a developer talks about what he did yesterday or plans to do tomorrow then the developer should be referring to a task. Stories are owned by the Product Owner and a story is all about business value. In contrast, the tasks are owned by the developer team and a task is all about implementation details. A story might take several days or weeks to complete. A task is something which a developer can complete in less than a day. Some teams get lazy about breaking stories into tasks. Neglecting to break stories into tasks can lead to “Never Ending Stories” If you don’t break a story into tasks, then you can’t know how much of a story has actually been completed because you don’t have a clear idea about the implementation steps required to complete the story. Scrumboard During the Daily Scrum, the developer team uses a Scrumboard to coordinate their work. A Scrumboard contains a list of the stories for the current Sprint, the tasks associated with each Story, and the state of each task. The developer team uses the Scrumboard so everyone on the team can see, at a glance, what everyone is working on. As a developer works on a task, the task moves from state to state and the state of the task is updated on the Scrumboard. Common task states are ToDo, In Progress, and Done. Some teams include additional task states such as Needs Review or Needs Testing. Some teams use a physical Scrumboard. In that case, you use index cards to represent the stories and the tasks and you tack the index cards onto a physical board. Using a physical Scrumboard has several disadvantages. A physical Scrumboard does not work well with a distributed team – for example, it is hard to share the same physical Scrumboard between Boston and Seattle. Also, generating reports from a physical Scrumboard is more difficult than generating reports from an online Scrumboard. Estimating Stories and Tasks Stakeholders in a project, the people investing in a project, need to have an idea of how a project is progressing and when the project will be completed. For example, if you are investing in creating an e-commerce site, you need to know when the site can be launched. It is not enough to just say that “the project will be done when it is done” because the stakeholders almost certainly have a limited budget to devote to the project. The people investing in the project cannot determine the business value of the project unless they can have an estimate of how long it will take to complete the project. Developers hate to give estimates. The reason that developers hate to give estimates is that the estimates are almost always completely made up. For example, you really don’t know how long it takes to build a shopping cart until you finish building a shopping cart, and at that point, the estimate is no longer useful. The problem is that writing code is much more like Finding a Cure for Cancer than Building a Brick Wall. Building a brick wall is very straightforward. After you learn how to add one brick to a wall, you understand everything that is involved in adding a brick to a wall. There is no additional research required and no surprises. If, on the other hand, I assembled a team of scientists and asked them to find a cure for cancer, and estimate exactly how long it will take, they would have no idea. The problem is that there are too many unknowns. I don’t know how to cure cancer, I need to do a lot of research here, so I cannot even begin to estimate how long it will take. So developers hate to provide estimates, but the Product Owner and other product stakeholders, have a legitimate need for estimates. Scrum resolves this conflict by using the idea of Story Points. Different teams use different units to represent Story Points. For example, some teams use shirt sizes such as Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large. Some teams prefer to use Coffee Cup sizes such as Tall, Short, and Grande. Finally, some teams like to use numbers from the Fibonacci series. These alternative units are converted into a Story Point value. Regardless of the type of unit which you use to represent Story Points, the goal is the same. Instead of attempting to estimate a Story in hours (which is doomed to failure), you use a much less fine-grained measure of work. A developer team is much more likely to be able to estimate that a Story is Small or X-Large than the exact number of hours required to complete the story. So you can think of Story Points as a compromise between the needs of the Product Owner and the developer team. When a Sprint starts, the developer team devotes more time to thinking about the Stories in a Sprint and the developer team breaks the Stories into Tasks. In Scrum, you estimate the work required to complete a Story by using Story Points and you estimate the work required to complete a task by using hours. The difference between Stories and Tasks is that you don’t create a task until you are just about ready to start working on a task. A task is something that you should be able to create within a day, so you have a much better chance of providing an accurate estimate of the work required to complete a task than a story. Burndown Charts In Scrum, you use Burndown charts to represent the remaining work on a project. You use Release Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a project and you use Sprint Burndown charts to represent the overall remaining work for a particular Sprint. You create a Release Burndown chart by calculating the remaining number of uncompleted Story Points for the entire Product Backlog every day. The vertical axis represents Story Points and the horizontal axis represents time. A Sprint Burndown chart is similar to a Release Burndown chart, but it focuses on the remaining work for a particular Sprint. There are two different types of Sprint Burndown charts. You can either represent the remaining work in a Sprint with Story Points or with task hours (the following image, taken from Wikipedia, uses hours). When each Product Backlog Story is completed, the Release Burndown chart slopes down. When each Story or task is completed, the Sprint Burndown chart slopes down. Burndown charts typically do not always slope down over time. As new work is added to the Product Backlog, the Release Burndown chart slopes up. If new tasks are discovered during a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart will also slope up. The purpose of a Burndown chart is to give you a way to track team progress over time. If, halfway through a Sprint, the Sprint Burndown chart is still climbing a hill then you know that you are in trouble. Team Velocity Stakeholders in a project always want more work done faster. For example, the Product Owner for the e-commerce site wants the website to launch before tomorrow. Developers tend to be overly optimistic. Rarely do developers acknowledge the physical limitations of reality. So Project stakeholders and the developer team often collude to delude themselves about how much work can be done and how quickly. Too many software projects begin in a state of optimism and end in frustration as deadlines zoom by. In Scrum, this problem is overcome by calculating a number called the Team Velocity. The Team Velocity is a measure of the average number of Story Points which a team has completed in previous Sprints. Knowing the Team Velocity is important during the Sprint Planning meeting when the Product Owner and the developer team work together to determine the number of stories which can be completed in the next Sprint. If you know the Team Velocity then you can avoid committing to do more work than the team has been able to accomplish in the past, and your team is much more likely to complete all of the work required for the next Sprint. Scrum Master There are three roles in Scrum: the Product Owner, the developer team, and the Scrum Master. I’v e already discussed the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the one and only person who maintains the Product Backlog and prioritizes the stories. I’ve also described the role of the developer team. The members of the developer team do the work of implementing the stories by breaking the stories into tasks. The final role, which I have not discussed, is the role of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the team is following the Scrum process. For example, the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure that there is a Daily Scrum meeting and that everyone answers the standard three questions. The Scrum Master is also responsible for removing (non-technical) impediments which the team might encounter. For example, if the team cannot start work until everyone installs the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio then the Scrum Master has the responsibility of working with management to get the latest version of Visual Studio as quickly as possible. The Scrum Master can be a member of the developer team. Furthermore, different people can take on the role of the Scrum Master over time. The Scrum Master, however, cannot be the same person as the Product Owner. Using SonicAgile SonicAgile (SonicAgile.com) is an online tool which you can use to manage your projects using Scrum. You can use the SonicAgile Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of stories. You can estimate the size of the Stories using different Story Point units such as Shirt Sizes and Coffee Cup sizes. You can use SonicAgile during the Sprint Planning meeting to select the Stories that you want to complete during a particular Sprint. You can configure Sprints to be any length of time. SonicAgile calculates Team Velocity automatically and displays a warning when you add too many stories to a Sprint. In other words, it warns you when it thinks you are overcommitting in a Sprint. SonicAgile also includes a Scrumboard which displays the list of Stories selected for a Sprint and the tasks associated with each story. You can drag tasks from one task state to another. Finally, SonicAgile enables you to generate Release Burndown and Sprint Burndown charts. You can use these charts to view the progress of your team. To learn more about SonicAgile, visit SonicAgile.com. Summary In this post, I described many of the basic concepts of Scrum. You learned how a Product Owner uses a Product Backlog to create a prioritized list of tasks. I explained why work is completed in Sprints so the developer team can be more productive. I also explained how a developer team uses the daily scrum to coordinate their work. You learned how the developer team uses a Scrumboard to see, at a glance, who is working on what and the state of each task. I also discussed Burndown charts. You learned how you can use both Release and Sprint Burndown charts to track team progress in completing a project. Finally, I described the crucial role of the Scrum Master – the person who is responsible for ensuring that the rules of Scrum are being followed. My goal was not to describe all of the concepts of Scrum. This post was intended to be an introductory overview. For a comprehensive explanation of Scrum, I recommend reading Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X/ref=la_B001H6ODMC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345224000&sr=1-1

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  • La beta du Feature Pack est disponible pour Team Foundation Server 2010 et Project Server Integration

    La beta du Feature Pack est disponible Pour Team Foundation Server 2010 et Project Server Integration Microsoft vient d'annoncer la disponibilité de la beta du Feature Pack de Team Foundation Server 2010 et Projet Server Integration ce qui marque la fin des CTP(community technical preview). La beta du Feature Pack de Team Foundation Server 2010 et Project Server (TFS-PS) est disponible uniquement pour les abonnées MSDN et sur licence « Go Live », ce qui signifie qu'elle peut déjà être utilisée dans un environnement de production. Pour mémoire, Team Foundation Server est un outil de travail collaboratif accompagnant la suite Visual Studio Team System(VSTS). Il permet la gest...

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  • Must-do activities for a team leader, and time managing them

    - by MeLight
    This is a two part question Part one: I'm leading a small team of developers of mixed skills (juniors and seniors). I'm sometimes feeling that I focus too much on my own code, instead of seeing the big the picture, and managing the team. What would you say the most crucial non-coding activities for a team leader, related to his team members? Part two:Given that I know what other (non-coding stuff) I should be doing, what is a good time division between my own code writing and managing the other team members (code reviews, whiteboarding, meetings etc).

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  • TFS vs. Star Team comparison

    - by ryanabr
    I have a sales call today in which the person that I am talking to is interested in what TFS would give them over Star Team, The first thing I believe that I can say is that TFS is cheaper! Especially if you are doing MSFT development already and your team members have MSDN subscriptions as the CALs for TFS are covered in the MSDN subscription. The other thing that I noticed about Star Team was all of the references to ‘readiness’ and ‘integration’. While that is great, that means that other tools will be needed to provide the features that are already bundled with TFS like, SharePoint integration, as well as Analysis Services and Reporting Services to provide visibility on the web with reports on project health, and team velocity. Below is a quick table that I was able to throw together to answer some high level questions: Feature TFS Star Team Work Items X X Work Item custom Queries X X Customizable Work Items X Web Portal View X X Reporting X Integration Version Control X X Build Management X Integration Integrated Test Suite X Integration Cost Free for first 5 / MSDN Sub covers others $7500 / seat

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  • What Is The Relationship Between Software Architect and Team Member

    - by Steve Peng
    I work for a small company which has less than 100 persons. Several months ago, this company offered me position of SA and I accepted. There are three teams in this company, and I work for one of them. This is the first time I work as a SA. During the past months, I find I don't have any power of management, I even can't let the team member do things (coding-related) in the way which is correct and more efficient. The team members argue with me on very very basic technical questions and I have to explain to them again and again. Though some members did take my advice, other members stubbornly program in their way which frequently proved wrong finally. Recently I feel a little tired and confused. I wonder what is correct relationship between a Software Architect and team members including the team leader? Besides, is software architect also leaded by the Team Leader?

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  • What is a "cross-functional team" actually?

    - by Idsa
    The general meaning of "cross-functional team" is a team which combines specialists in different fields that are required to reach the goal. But it looks like in Agile cross-functionality means not only combining different specialists, but making them mix. Henrik Kniberg defines cross-functional team this way: "Cross-functional just means that the team as a whole has all skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing." But where is the line drawn? Is it normal to ask developers to become testers for an iteration if it is required?

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  • How to manage a growing team?

    - by Andra
    I'm the admin assistant of the CTO and our organization has recently experienced a lot of growth. Within six months, we have merged with another organization and our Dev team has grown from 8 to 16, with another 8 people in QA. What we're dealing with now is a highly technical individual, with little patience, managing a much larger team than he's accustomed to, 40% of which is junior as well as an increase in the number of projects. Needless to say, my boss is being pulled in too many directions at once. How can I help him manage his workload and his team so that the team feels they're getting enough help and support and remain effective? Also, where can I find additional resources on managing a growing team?

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  • What is a "cross-functional team" actually?

    - by Idsa
    The general meaning of "cross-functional team" is a team which combines specialists in different fields that are required to reach the goal. But it looks like in Agile cross-functionality means not only combining different specialists, but making them mix. Henrik Kniberg defines cross-functional team this way: "Cross-functional just means that the team as a whole has all skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing." But where is the line drawn? Is it normal to ask developers to become testers for an iteration if it is required?

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  • Encouraging business and team members to write more code

    - by Aliixx
    I am really interested to hear any ideas or working practices that can be adopted to encourage our team of developers to write more code. A little background here is involves a team of varying disciplines, experience and qualities and the nature of the work has a large focus on bug fixes and business logic / data validation over writing lots of new greenfield code or even refactoring. We are attempting to move to a more Agile philosophy and really what would be great is to hear any ideas that can be sold to the team and / or the business with the aim of: Writing more new code to improve experience, abilities and increase exposure to newer and emerging patterns and practices. Energizing the effort of the team and inspire. Encouraging wider input of new ideas, patterns and practices from the team as a whole. I would be very interested (and grateful) to hear any ideas or examples of ideas that can help here. Thanks!

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  • What should I do when my team leader is unfair for no reason? [closed]

    - by crucified soul
    I'm a new software developer and this is my first job. It's a startup and the CEO and the working environment is just great. I work really hard and I believe that I also do my job well. But recently, I have felt like my team leader is being unfair to me for no reason. It appears that he is nice to my co-workers, but not me. I figure he is mad at me, but I didn't bother to find out why. I really love this company and I really love working there. But if my team leader continues to be unfair then I have no option other than leaving. How can I fix this? EDIT: The other day he called me into his office and wanted to see my work in the afternoon (Yes, in my country, at summer season after 5PM is afternoon. My office begins at 8AM. And I'm not saying I've problems to work after 5PM). At the time I was facing a weird runtime error and I was pretty tired. I explained the situation to him. Then he found a small logical error in my code and asked me why I didn't fix this. I told him I was trying to resolve this runtime error and that I was sure that this logical error had nothing to do with the runtime error. He then proceeded to yell at me. After fixing the logical error that runtime error was still there. This is not the only occasion he has been unfair to me. I'm saying is being unfair because he doesn't do this kind of thing to other developers when they do really silly mistakes.

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  • What actions to take when people leave the team?

    - by finrod
    Recently one of our key engineers resigned. This engineer has co-authored a major component of our application. We are not hitting Truck number yet though, but we're getting close :) Before the guy waltzes off, we want to take actions necessary to recover from this loss as smoothly as possible and eventually 'grow' the rest of the team to competently cover the parts he authored. More about the context: the domain the component covers and the code are no rocket science but still a lot of non-trivial stuff. Some team members can already cover a lot of this but those have a lot on their plates and we want to make sure every. (as I see it): Improve tests and test coverage - especially for the non-trivial stuff, Update high level documents, Document any 'funny stuff' the code does (we had to do some heavy duct-taping), Add / update code documentation - have everything with 'public' visibility documented. Finally the questions: What do you think are the actions to take in this situation? What have you done in such situations? What did or did not work well for you?

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  • Must read books for a programming team leader

    - by takeshin
    As a programming team leader, which books do you recommend? Books about HR, good programming practices etc. I have recently seen PHP Team Development but it is not mind blowing for experienced developers. One of the best I can recommend is Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, which helped me a lot in improving the language and practices of documenting the code.

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  • The cost of Programmer Team Clustering

    - by MarkPearl
    I recently was involved in a conversation about the productivity of programmers and the seemingly wide range in abilities that different programmers have in this industry. Some of the comments made were reiterated a few days later when I came across a chapter in Code Complete (v2) where it says "In programming specifically, many studies have shown order-of-magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of programmers". In line with this is another comment presented by Code Complete when discussing teams - "Good programmers tend to cluster, as do bad programmers". This is something I can personally relate to. I have come across some really good and bad programmers and 99% of the time it turns out the team they work in is the same - really good or really bad. When I have found a mismatch, it hasn't stayed that way for long - the person has moved on, or the team has ejected the individual. Keeping this in mind I would like to comment on the risks an organization faces when forcing teams to remain together regardless of the mix. When you have the situation where someone is not willing to be part of the team but still wants to get a pay check at the end of each month, it presents some interesting challenges and hard decisions to make. First of all, when this occurs you need to give them an opportunity to change - for someone to change, they need to know what the problem is and what is expected. It is unreasonable to expect someone to change but have not indicated what they need to change and the consequences of not changing. If after a reasonable time of an individual being aware of the problem and not making an effort to improve you need to do two things... Follow through with the consequences of not changing. Consider the impact that this behaviour will have on the rest of the team. What is the cost of not following through with the consequences? If there is no follow through, it is often an indication to the individual that they can continue their behaviour. Why should they change if you don't care enough to keep your end of the agreement? In many ways I think it is very similar to the "Broken Windows" principles – if you allow the windows to break and don’t fix them, more will get broken. What is the cost of keeping them on? When keeping a disruptive influence in a team you risk loosing the good in the team. As Code Complete says, good and bad programmers tend to cluster - they have a tendency to keep this balance - if you are not going to help keep the balance they will. The cost of not removing a disruptive influence is that the good in the team will eventually help you maintain the clustering themselves by leaving.

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  • Installing Team Explorer 2008 on Windows Server 2003

    - by BriteShiny
    I am attempting to install Team Explorer 2008 on a Windows Server 2008 box, without success, which is why I am here. The error log reveals the following: [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): d:.\wcu\ppe\vside.exe exited with return value 1 [07/02/10,10:07:03] InstallReturnValue: GFN_MID VS PPE, 0x1 [07/02/10,10:07:03] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): ERRORLOG EVENT : Error code 1 for this component means "Incorrect function. " [07/02/10,10:07:03] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): ERRORLOG EVENT : Component Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode) returned an unexpected value. [07/02/10,10:07:03] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty [07/02/10,10:07:03] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode): ERRORLOG EVENT : Return from system messaging: Incorrect function. Apparently the Team Explorer 2008 is incompatible with Windows Server 2008. If you right click on the setup.exe in the TFS Explorer ISO and run a compatibility check it fails. There is a separate installer package to install the VS2008 Shell that is compatible with Windows 2008, but it fails too. Has anyone else been able to install Team Explorer 2008 on Windows Server 2008?

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  • Best practice- How to team-split a django project while still allowing code reusal

    - by Infinity
    I know this sounds kind of vague, but please let me explain- I'm starting work on a brand new project, it will have two main components: "ACME PRODUCT" (think Gmail, Meebo, etc), and "THE SITE" (help, information, marketing stuff, promotional landing pages, etc lots of marketing-induced cruft). So basically the url /acme/* will load stuff in the uber cool ajaxy application, and every other URI will load stuff in the other site. Problem: "THE SITE" component is out of my hands, and will be handled by a consultants team that will work closely with marketing, And I and my team will work solely on the ACME PRODUCT. Question: How to set up the django project in such a way that we can have: Seperate releases. (They can push new marketing pages and functionality without having to worry about the state of our code. Maybe even separate Subversion "projects") Minimize impact (on our product) of whatever flying-unicorns-hocus-pocus the other team codes into the site. Still allow some code reusal. My main concern is that the ACME product needs to be rock solid, and therefore needs to be somewhat isolated of whatever mistakes/code bloopers the consultants make in their marketing side of the site. How have you handled this? Any ideas? Thanks!

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  • Join our Marketing Intelligence Team in Dublin!

    - by jessica.ebbelaar
    Do you want to work with the brightest minds in the industry? Want to be part of a global team that’s changing the way the world does business? Then Oracle is the place for YOU. Join now as a Marketing Intelligence Representative. You will have the opportunity to develop within the role through working alongside the Business Development, Sales and Marketing teams within Oracle. The Marketing Intelligence Group is viewed as a true talent pool for the Business Development and Sales Teams. Oracle offers a structured training programme for Marketing Intelligence Representatives and Business Development Consultants including our approved sales certified training methodology along with regular product training. Miriam started her career as a Marketing Intelligence Representative six years ago, and shares what she has learned and how her career is progressing. My Career Path at Oracle: June 2005 – October 2005: Profiler in the Marketing Intelligence Team November 2005 - October 2006: Team Leader for MIT November 2006 - February 2008: Business Development Consultant Iberia March 2008 - December 2010: Lead Management Specialist Currently: Sales Program Manager for Iberia & Benelux What did you learn from your role in the Market Intelligence Team Being a Profiler helped me to understand how an organisation works, from the beginning to the end. It is like being in University but being paid! The three key things I learnt in this role are: Knowledge of customers: You are on the phone with over 70 customers daily. Not only does this give you an overview of the IT infrastructure of the customers companies but also how to manage their questions and rejections. Essentially you are learning how to convert their pain and complaints into business opportunities. Knowledge of Oracle: As a Profiler you get an excellent overview of how Oracle works internally, from Marketing to Sales, without forgetting the Operations Team. Knowledge about yourself: As a Profiler I learnt how to work outside of my comfort zone, there is a new challenge almost every day but Oracle are there to support you every step of the way. Oracle really invests in developing the MIT Team and as a Profiler you can expect product and sales training on a monthly basis. How did you progress from MIT to Business Development Group (BDG)? I made sure that my manager knew from the very beginning that I was keen to progress at Oracle and I was set very clear objectives to help me reach my goal.  My manager was very supportive and ensured I received all the training I needed. After I became a Team Leader of Profiling, I moved to an Iberia BDG position. How you feel your experience in MI has helped you in your current role? I truly believe that the MI position gives you a great overview of Oracle and this has really helped me in my current position.  I am the Sales Program Manager for IBERIA & Benelux and in my campaigns I need to target the right companies and the right job specs.  My time in the Market Intelligence team really helped me to understand how to focus and target my campaigns so I know I don’t miss any business opportunities! How would you sum up your Oracle experience? Oracle is a big organisation with big opportunities. With the right skills and with the great training programs that Oracle offer, the only limit is you! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact [email protected] You can find all our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Tags van Technorati: Marketing Intelligence,Benelux,Iberia,Profiler,Business Development,Sales Representatives,BDG,Business Development Group,opportunities,Oracle

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  • boost::spirit::real_p some how round ups the value.

    - by rkbang
    Hello all, I am using the boost::spirit parser. At one point when I use real_p, the value coming out of the parser stack is 38672000 instead of the actual value, 386731500. Some how it is considering it as a float value, I think. Is there anyway to fix this? Do I need to set the precision of real_p, or am using real_p in the wrong context?

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  • Time Tracking on an Agile Team

    - by Stephen.Walther
    What’s the best way to handle time-tracking on an Agile team? Your gut reaction to this question might be to resist any type of time-tracking at all. After all, one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.  Forcing the developers on your team to track the amount of time that they devote to completing stories or tasks might seem like useless bureaucratic red tape: an impediment to getting real work done. I completely understand this reaction. I’ve been required to use time-tracking software in the past to account for each hour of my workday. It made me feel like Fred Flintstone punching in at the quarry mine and not like a professional. Why You Really Do Need Time-Tracking There are, however, legitimate reasons to track time spent on stories even when you are a member of an Agile team.  First, if you are working with an outside client, you might need to track the number of hours spent on different stories for the purposes of billing. There might be no way to avoid time-tracking if you want to get paid. Second, the Product Owner needs to know when the work on a story has gone over the original time estimated for the story. The Product Owner is concerned with Return On Investment. If the team has gone massively overtime on a story, then the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on the story and reconsider the story’s business value. Finally, you might want to track how much time your team spends on different types of stories or tasks. For example, if your team is spending 75% of their time doing testing then you might need to bring in more testers. Or, if 10% of your team’s time is expended performing a software build at the end of each iteration then it is time to consider better ways of automating the build process. Time-Tracking in SonicAgile For these reasons, we added time-tracking as a feature to SonicAgile which is our free Agile Project Management tool. We were heavily influenced by Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) in the way that we implemented time-tracking (see his article http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2007/03/time-tracking-is-anti-scrum-what-do-you.html). In SonicAgile, time-tracking is disabled by default. If you want to use this feature then the project owner must enable time-tracking in Project Settings. You can choose to estimate using either days or hours. If you are estimating at the level of stories then it makes more sense to choose days. Otherwise, if you are estimating at the level of tasks then it makes more sense to use hours. After you enable time-tracking then you can assign three estimates to a story: Original Estimate – This is the estimate that you enter when you first create a story. You don’t change this estimate. Time Spent – This is the amount of time that you have already devoted to the story. You update the time spent on each story during your daily standup meeting. Time Left – This is the amount of time remaining to complete the story. Again, you update the time left during your daily standup meeting. So when you first create a story, you enter an original estimate that becomes the time left. During each daily standup meeting, you update the time spent and time left for each story on the Kanban. If you had perfect predicative power, then the original estimate would always be the same as the sum of the time spent and the time left. For example, if you predict that a story will take 5 days to complete then on day 3, the story should have 3 days spent and 2 days left. Unfortunately, never in the history of mankind has anyone accurately predicted the exact amount of time that it takes to complete a story. For this reason, SonicAgile does not update the time spent and time left automatically. Each day, during the daily standup, your team should update the time spent and time left for each story. For example, the following table shows the history of the time estimates for a story that was originally estimated to take 3 days but, eventually, takes 5 days to complete: Day Original Estimate Time Spent Time Left Day 1 3 days 0 days 3 days Day 2 3 days 1 day 2 days Day 3 3 days 2 days 2 days Day 4 3 days 3 days 2 days Day 5 3 days 4 days 0 days In the table above, everything goes as predicted until you reach day 3. On day 3, the team realizes that the work will require an additional two days. The situation does not improve on day 4. All of the sudden, on day 5, all of the remaining work gets done. Real work often follows this pattern. There are long periods when nothing gets done punctuated by occasional and unpredictable bursts of progress. We designed SonicAgile to make it as easy as possible to track the time spent and time left on a story. Detecting when a Story Goes Over the Original Estimate Sometimes, stories take much longer than originally estimated. There’s a surprise. For example, you discover that a new software component is incompatible with existing software components. Or, you discover that you have to go through a month-long certification process to finish a story. In those cases, the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on a story and re-evaluate the business value of the story. For example, the Product Owner discovers that a story will require weeks to implement instead of days, then the story might not be worth the expense. SonicAgile displays a warning on both the Backlog and the Kanban when the time spent on a story goes over the original estimate. An icon of a clock is displayed. Time-Tracking and Tasks Another optional feature of SonicAgile is tasks. If you enable Tasks in Project Settings then you can break stories into one or more tasks. You can perform time-tracking at the level of a story or at the level of a task. If you don’t break a story into tasks then you can enter the time left and time spent for the story. As soon as you break a story into tasks, then you can no longer enter the time left and time spent at the level of the story. Instead, the time left and time spent for a story is rolled up from its tasks. On the Kanban, you can see how the time left and time spent for each task gets rolled up into each story. The progress bar for the story is rolled up from the progress bars for each task. The original estimate is never rolled up – even when you break a story into tasks. A story’s original estimate is entered separately from the original estimates of each of the story’s tasks. Summary Not every Agile team can avoid time-tracking. You might be forced to track time to get paid, to detect when you are spending too much time on a particular story, or to track the amount of time that you are devoting to different types of tasks. We designed time-tracking in SonicAgile to require the least amount of work to track the information that you need. Time-tracking is an optional feature. If you enable time-tracking then you can track the original estimate, time left, and time spent for each story and task. You can use time-tracking with SonicAgile for free. Register at http://SonicAgile.com.

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  • Team Foundation Server Setup/Access

    - by Angel Brighteyes
    What I need: A TFS 2010 Setup that allows 2 application developers to access the TFS from remote locations. How it is setup: Server 2008 Standard 2g Ram 300g HD space SharePoint Server 2007, using SQL Server 2005 SQL Server 2008 Standard Team Foundation Server 2010 IIS 7 Sharepoint Bindings: TFS.DynAccount.Me:80; TFS:80 TFS Bindings: TFS.DynAccount.Me:8080; TFS:8080 Using DynDNS service to account for the dynamic ip address being used, this is a requirement for the moment until I can get a better isp package. Access using Local Accounts Server is not setup on a domain, or as a domain. Consequently I did not setup AD services. Problem: When logged into TFS using my credentials TFS\AdminUser through the DynDNS account TFS.DynAccount.Me I recieve the 'Red X of Death' on the Documents and Reports folder. When logged into the TFS through the local peer to peer network using the same credentials TFS\AdminUser I do not receive the 'Red X of Death' problem. Further Troubleshooting: When users 'Right Click' the 'TeamProject1' Click 'Show Project Portal' it tries to take them to http://TFS:8080 instead of http://TFS.DynAccount.Me:8080, which doing further research I am assuming that it is because team foundation server was setup with a local name of TFS instead of 'TFS.DynAccount.Me' as specified here in Visual Studio Magazines: The Red X of Death. Users can Access the Team Portal for SharePoint via http://TFS.DynAccount.Me/TeamCollection/TeamProject so it is not like we are dead in the water or anything. However, as most employees/staff are prone to do, they have expressed a great distaste for having to do it this way and just be patient until the current project is finished since we are under a very strict deadline. Is there a way to set this up differently, or change some settings someplace, reinstall it, point a CName record for our domain website to the DynAccount (e.g. TFS.OurDomain.com points to TFS.DynAccount.Me, which consequently does allow access to the http site without issues), or something. I really don't feel like after all the time and effort I have spent into, first the cost, second the bloody install, third learning SharePoint well enough, fourth the hours into days spent on this, fifth more troubleshooting, sixth employee headaches to just let it lay where it is at. I figure in my spare/off time I would keep trying to get this to work. So I really appreciate any help any one can give me. I know this is probably something really stupid simple that I will 'Face Palm' over, but at the moment the stress and frustration just has me beat. Thank you again, this community has always been a great help.

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  • Configuring Team System Code Analysis via a FxCop rules file

    - by Ian G
    Is there anyway to configure the code analysis rules in Visual Studio Team System to match those in an FxCop configuration file and keep them in sync automatically? Not all the developers on the team have TS so keeping the rules we are currently running in an FxCop file is required so everyone can run the same set, but it would nice for those with to be able to run them in the IDE. We're introducing static analysis to an existing project so turning on everything now isn't a useful option. (We are not using Foundation Server for source control, if that makes any difference.)

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  • Automated builds of BizTalk 2009 projects using Team System 2008 Build

    - by Doug
    I'm trying to configure automated build of BizTalk 2009 projects using Team Foundation Server 2008. We have a staging server which has BizTalk 2009 installed. I ran the Team Foundation Server Build Setup on this server, and it can build non-BizTalk projects OK. However, BizTalk projects fail to build. I suspected something was amiss when "Deployment" was not a valid build type! I tried copying various things over from a developer PC which has BizTalk and Visual Studio 2008 installed, but still couldn't get it to work. I don't really want to install Visual Studio on the staging server, but without it the "Developer Tools and SDK" option in the BizTalk install is greyed out. I guess I need this in order for BizTalk projects to compile. So, my question is can a BizTalk 2009 server be used as a TFS build agent to build BizTalk projects without having Visual Studio installed. If the answer is no, what's the smallest part of VS that can be installed to get this to work? Thanks in advance.

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  • Problem building with MSBuild on Team Build

    - by mrwayne
    Hi, I have recently upgraded from TFS2005 to TFS2010 (and sub-sequently the team build server). I used to be able to get a team build on one of my solutions to work pretty easily, (see structure below) Solution |_Web Site | |_Bin | |_Other Files |_Project 1 |_Project 2 |_Project (n) Now, i can no longer get a build working correctly as it doesnt appear to build all my projects any longer (i've had to create a new build definition). Either that, or its not building the projects in such an order that when it hits project X, that a project it depends on (Project A), has not yet been built, and as such fails. I'm just basically trying to build a web site (not web application project), with some Dependant / linked projects. Why must it be so hard! Everything builds fine in the IDE. If i even open the solution copied to the build server under the 'Sources' directory, i am able to build it fine in the IDE on that server. No such luck with MSBuild though. Thoughts?

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