Silver Stripe Blog

It’s been just three weeks since the previous release. Frequent releases — thats the agile way So what are you waiting for? Get it from the download page.

Silver Stripe Software is the startup of the month at Startup Venture Links, a new site to aggregate information about startup companies in India.

I gave a presentation at DCamp on the design of programmer spaces. With Agile processes emphasizing the social aspects of software development, this is a topic that has come into focus once more.

We spend a lot of time on improving productivity through better languages, tools and processes. How often do we look at the environment in which the team works? Cubicles are probably the worst environment for programmers because they are poor when you want peace and quiet to work alone and poor when you want to work collaboratively as a pair or group. In this talk we’ll look at some environmental factors that impact teams and how we can design better programmer spaces.

Continue reading ‘Design of Programmer Spaces - My DCamp Presentation’ »

Diana Larsen points to an interesting statistic — in a recent agile survey, only 39% of survey participants said that they do retrospectives. Given that retrospectives are a cornerstone of improving the process, it is surprising that so few do them. Retrospectives are important because its the way teams evolve the process for their project.

Not surprisingly, most agile process has a retrospective component to the process, although it is called by different names in various processes. For instance, Crystal Clear, a minimal agile process has only three core properties and the retrospective (called the reflection meeting) is one of the three.

The retrospective is very important to an agile process, so if you aren’t doing it, it might be a good idea to just give it a try for a couple of iterations.

Agile Chennai 2007 is a two day introductory conference for agile software development and agile project management. The Agile Software Community of India organises at least one such conference every year and this year it will be held at Anna University in Chennai.

The conference will be held on October 4 (thats next month), so if you are in India and are interested in agile software development, you should try and make it for the conference. Apart from the scheduled program (the keynote will be given by Jeff Patton this time), the conference is also a good way to meet practitioners of agile software development in India.

Registration for the conference has opened, so head over to the site and register.