Silver Stripe Blog

One of the cool things about Silver Catalyst (which is a Django app) is that you can start using it right out of the box. I didn’t want the team working their way around Apache and MSSQL configurations, Python version incompatibilities, database access issues and deployment hassles. The final solution was a simple executable, which when run would start everything required to get going.

In this post, I’ll explain how that was achieved.

Continue reading ‘Deploying a Django app on the desktop’ »

Yesterday I wrote about the times when you need an agile tool. Today I’ll look at the opposite case: Situations where you do not need an agile tool.

Continue reading ‘When do you NOT need an agile tool?’ »

Why do you want to use a scrum tool? I’ll hazard a guess and say that you have a distributed team. At least, thats the reason Silver Catalyst was written. Co-located teams can use index cards and information radiators, but distributed teams need a better way to communicate (see the pm story).

Continue reading ‘Why do you need a Scrum tool?’ »

I was in Bangalore to check out the ThoughtWorks Master Class. They had a stall with a demo of Mingle at the venue, so I took the opportunity to have a look at it. Since it was open to the public, I’m assuming I can blog about it. There are still a couple of weeks to go before the tool hits the market (June 2007 according to the website).

The demo was both interesting and surprising.

Continue reading ‘Mingle Impressions’ »

Prioritizing your backlog tasks is an important step. A core component of agile planning is that you deliver the most important features first. Important in this case, is whatever is valuable to the customer. It could be features with high business value, or features that are required to get a system into production, or perhaps features required to meet some regulation and so on. In order to be able to do this, you need a prioritized backlog. That way, the dev team can take the most important features and work on them first.

The most obvious way of prioritization is on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 as most important and 1 as least important (sometimes the other way around). The problem with a numeric scale like this is that it is very difficult to decide on the number for a given feature. Is it a 3 or a 4? Maybe it’s a 5?

That’s where MoSCoW prioritization comes into the picture. In MoSCoW prioritization, instead of using numbers for indicating priority, we use labels: Must, Should, Could, Wont (hence the acronym MoSCoW)

Continue reading ‘MoSCoW as a prioritization and planning tool’ »