Silver Stripe Blog

I’ve said before that more than practices or techniques, agile is often about a mindset. It is about understanding the values and principles behind the practices that really enable you to be ‘agile’.

I often discuss Silver Catalyst with managers who are interested in an agile tool, and often there are some feature requests. Some feature requests are holes in the functionality of the tool and these are carefully noted down and scheduled for a future release. Some features, however, stem from bringing in a traditional mindset to an agile project.

Continue reading ‘Getting into the agile mindset’ »

Mike Griffiths has a fantastic three part blog series on how to adopt agile methods in an organization. As can be expected, there is a lot of emphasis on managing change in the organisation (the number one stumbling block in my experience)

• Part 1: Why, Who, What, When, Where
• Part 2: Why change is difficult, why people naturally resist change, and when people do accept changes
• Part 3: A change framework to effectively implement agile methods

Through the three parts, he points out 16 mistakes that are often made while implementing a change program for agile adoption. These include mistakes like Mistake #8: Underestimating the resistance to change, Mistake #9: Think people will want to adopt agile because it is better and Mistake #14: Not explaining that things will feel uncomfortable to begin with.

If you are leading the change effort for agile adoption in your organisation, then you owe it to yourself to check out the posts.

I was discussing estimation of software projects, when it hit me that in many unfortunate organizations, estimates are not about reality, but about politics. Really, how often have you seen a discussion like this -

Manager: How long will the whole thing take?
Dev: Depends on the requirements and if they change. We’ll estimate on a 2 week basis. That way we can keep the plan close to reality and also adjust easily if requirements change.
Manager: We need to give the board a date
Dev: We can go through the requirements, but the final date will be very uncertain at this point
Manager: Doesn’t matter, lets just fix a date

<do some estimation and come up with some date>

Manager: We cant have that date, the board wants to have it done by the end of the year. Lets just cut the estimate to fit it in.
Dev:

<after one week>

Client: We’ve had some project changes here, so use this new requirements document
Manager: Sure.
Dev: We need to restimate all over again
Manager: Lets not, I’ve already committed the date to the board. I’m sure you guys can do it.

<at the end of the year>

Manager: So are we done?
Dev: No, we are about 40% there
Manager: What?? Your estimating sucks. What do I tell the board now? That you screwed up?

Amazing isn’t it? We’ve all been in situations where managers are more interested that the date be something that makes them look good than they are in having the date be realistic. If that is the aim of the estimate, then who can complain when the estimates are missed?

Scoble calls Django the hot new development framework. Not sure about the new part. It’s been around for a few years. But definitely hot. When I first started working on Silver Catalyst, I wondered whether it was the right decision to build it in Python and Django. It doesn’t trouble me anymore.

Continue reading ‘Scoble on Django’ »

If you visited the Silver Catalyst download page in the last day you would have noticed that a new version of Silver Catalyst is now available. Silver Catalyst v1.2 has been released. As posted earlier, this version introduces wiki integration (Not sure what a wiki is? Click here). What this means is that if you have an existing wiki, you can integrate Silver Catalyst with it. If you don’t use a wiki already, choose from one of the various wikis available and set it up. See here and here for a list of available wiki software and a comparison between them.

Why integrate with a wiki? Many agile teams use a wiki to manage information and documentation about the project. It is common practice to create a wiki page for each feature and put any documentation about the project, acceptance test cases and other files relating to that feature on that wiki page. Apart from that, you would also put project documentation, design documentation, screenshots, diagrams on the wiki. A wiki is an easily editable, lightweight information management system that is popular with agile teams.

That’s why it is important that the project management tool integrates with a wiki. By clicking a task, you should be able to go straight to the wiki page for that task and view the requirements, tests and other documentation. That is exactly what this new version of Silver Catalyst allows you to do.

Continue reading ‘Silver Catalyst v1.2 Released’ »