Manicprogrammer

Chipotle has the fastest service of any fast food vendor I go to. Rush hour, takes five minutes max. Go in when they're nearly empty and I can be out in under a minute. Feels faster than the best McDonald's times, even if it's not really. Why is this? Chipotle does Kanban! Why do I say this?  Their customer-facing staff are all ...

I’m typing this in the car on my way to Ohio to see the in-laws because I just finished having an incredibly compelling discussion with my wife. My wife is an educator and has a masters of education specialized in adult online learning with a minor in curriculum design. We were discussing her frustration with some of the course authors and ...

First, I'll repeat the news that's all over: Microsoft has released the ''final'' version of Silverlight 2.0 to the world! This is a major step for .NET developers, because it means we can do really incredible things on the web without massive injections of AJAX or having to learn Flash. For example, take a look at what we've done with Inkubook. ...

It was rather nice. For a few minutes earlier today, I was able to experience the designer's perspective of Blend. We had a bug filed on one of our common controls' visual appearance, and a designer and a developer were pairing on cleaning it up. They asked me how to structure something, and I was able to completely restructure the UI model of ...

Every few months something triggers a series of thoughts in my head about overtime practices, behaviours, and incentives. Every time I think about it, my thoughts come back to a question of the relative incentives in the way our software development system. On many teams, the management group has the authority, while the developers have the ...

There is no need to attempt to determine the net effect of cities on costs in general. First of all, there is no such thing as costs in general. There are particular costs that matter differently to particular individuals and enterprises, and those individuals and enterprises can weigh for themselves the various costs and benefits that affect ...

Wow, so much I probably should talk about, but I don't even know where to start. Massive amounts of networking, information, realization, and even contribution going on, and I can't unravel it at all right now. I think there's a lot of potential for transforming this into real, meaningful changes in my current environment, but I need to be ...

Wow - it's been over thirty days since my last post. What's changed since then? First, we've put http://inkubook.com into production. I'm very proud of the work I've done and that my team has done on this one. We killed ourselves getting it done, but this is the product of just six months of work of the team. We took a new technology, started ...

Our team has decided to take a step back towards scrum and away from our previous semi-Kanban approach. I think that it's a good plan at this time, although I also suspect that many of the benefits of our earlier approach will continue to show through. Why did we do this? Here's some of my thoughts. They do not at all reflect the thoughts of ...

The concepts surrounding batch size have been floating around my head again in recent days. My current assignment is a rather large batch of work with Silverlight 2.0, but it's one that I've been able to subdivide into a number of small batches that rapidly build on each other. Thus, each one of my check ins to my private branch are able to show ...

Thursday, after the main IndyNDA event, I performed my first public presentation. I've presented to teams, classrooms, and my company before, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity to present to an uncontrolled group of my professional peers. It turned out that I only had three people there, but I can't complain since it's very hard ...

I rarely repost, but this single, fairly short article seems to hit many of the high points in a very condensed format. If I were in a southern church hearing this read i would expect a constant stream of ''Amen'' echoing around me.  Read it. Think about it. Read it again. Then, compare this to what you're ...

http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2008/02/19/5-keys-to-improving-your-reading-speed.aspx I like it - I use a lot of these techniques when I'm reading technical books for specifics... less so when I'm looking for an overall introduction to a new technology, since I don't know what all the questions are when I start. I do tend to shift half-way ...

Read this today, and it's something that I've known for a long time, but have never really articulated. Kanban smooths out the aggregate, but the individual work request may still vary widely.-- Corey Ladas, here.The entire thread (2 posts currently) is worth a read, but the main point does boil down to that quote... There is nothing that ...

(Metaphor: groups of explorers seeking a fabled place)  Agile and Lean are indeed different. They are two different paths taken by different groups in an effort to arrive at the same place. We do not yet know what that place is, nor what it will look like when we're there. However, both groups are getting closer to that place. Both ...

Subject: ''Today's scrums will be held in front of the kanban board.'' Yes, it was followed with:  ''That’s the one with all of the post-its.'' But, this is a huge step towards better flow, which has been an issue for months.  

I don't like to call out individual blame, but sometimes a bit o' shame is what it takes... this query, when run against the (2008 version) version control database in TFS will give you a nice summary and detail pair that can be dropped into excel, or whatever.   select     i.DisplayName Person,    COUNT( ...

Well, Bernardo got a new job, I got a new role. I've been officially promoted to Software Architect here at Authorhouse, effective immediately. This role change led me to think more about what the role of architect really means, and I've come to really think that its meaning is VERY specific to the culture and context of the company in which it's ...

Run them directly against the TfsVersionControl database, I don't see this data in the cube anywhere. Don't forget in SSMS you can copy from the output grid directly into excel with no problems. ' Summary:select     id.DisplayName as Account,    COUNT( id.DisplayName ) [Number of offenses]from tbl_PolicyOverride ...

Had my first ever sprint wrap-up meeting. I knew it wouldn't be too bad, but I've been wanting to get some sort of recycle on project phases for a couple different positions now, and was glad to see how one was run, especially since I'm in the middle of it. Four main questions are asked:Did we achieve our objectives?What are we not doing that we ...

SEP, my previous employer, has graciously released their Code Review Support Tool to the community under the New BSD license. It's currently up at CodePlex and is a fully functioning (version 3-5!) release. Matt and I are currently gathering ideas about ''what's next'' and will be putting together a development roadmap in the near future. The ...

It's much easier to tell somebody why they're wrong than it is to tell them how to do it right. Thus, build something quick and dirty (even as a thought exercise), and THEN figure out what's ''right''. Prototypes. Agile. RAD. Models. Alphas. Betas. Every Microsoft product until version 3. Isn't that obvious? duh! Then why do we still do SO ...

I'm back to Vault (and DevTrack) at my new job... it's not so bad, even though I do love the many integration possibilities that Team Foundation offers between the different components. That said, since I've had a lot of experience with Vault in the past, I was immediately tagged as ''the'' Vault administrator (through a rather humorous ...

It was very nice this morning to have a daily stand-up be the first thing of my first day at the office. It gave me a great feel for what the various team members were up to and how they were going about the project, and this was before I even really knew what the project was about... go team!     

Great analysis by Corey at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/LeanSoftwareEngineering/~3/142106190/ This part especially hits home with how I feel about things I've seen (emphasis mine): ''Software methodology’s understanding of the meaning of quality, reliability, and customer utility is positively retarded in comparison to the understanding of ...