Thursday, March 22, 2007

Koders.com Honored with 2007 Jolt Productivity Award

Last night, Koders.com was honored with a Jolt Productivity Award in the Websites category. Having worked on the development of the site personally for more than 3 years, recognition like this is a great honor. The entire Koders engineering team wants to thank our users, the judges and SDWest/CMP Media for their support. This represents another great milestone for Koders.com, and the best is yet to come - after all Koders.com is built by developers, for developers.

In addition to the excitement of the awards ceremony, the show itself was a great opportunity to connect with existing Koders and a few new fans. The announcement of the Koders Pro Edition was well received, and developers are anxious to bring code search into their enterprise to share with their teams.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Scrum Show & Tell

Alternate Title: Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Software Project Management, I Learned in First Grade

Continuous process improvement is a primary objective for the software engineering team at Koders. They have done a fantastic job of adopting many Agile/XP practises including pair programming, test driven development (TDD), and most recently Scrum.

One of the challenges of scrum has been finding the best format for our daily scrum meetings. Our team has found that the rapid-fire, standing, 15 minute scrums are good for clarifying blocking issues and improving team collaboration, but don't necessarily provide management with enough detail on the true progress of specific tasks.

To help compensate for this shortcoming, our team has adopted Show & Tell sessions which are conducted 2-3 times per week. Koders Show & Tell sessions follow this format:

  • 2-3 developers are selected to show their most recent projects
  • each demo may include a user-facing demo, code review, and/or test results
  • the demo is conducted with text chat and a screen sharing application, so other stakeholders can easily participate

The demos have proved invaluable for our team. Some of the most visible beneficial improvements include:

  • better visibility of engineering progress
  • virtual elimination of 'ivory tower' engineering tendencies
  • multiple opportunities for management and team feedback before task completion
  • inaccurate estimates and incorrect task scoping is identified early

Is your agile development team using frequent demos or show & tell sessions? How is it working for you? What format are you using?

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Monday, February 26, 2007

Improving Web Quality Assurance

More than 10 years after the web browser was invented, and after almost as much time spent creating standards, designing web applications with consistent display across different web browsers is still more art than science. Some products deal with this issue by limiting their 'supported' browsers to one or two, but this limits consumer choice, and defeats many of the reasons for building web-based applications in the first place.

For mainstream web based applications, compatibility with a variety of browsers, on many operating systems is a requirement. Yet testing against these systems - especially as product release dates approach, can require a massive amount of manpower. Your Web QA team needs automation!

The Koders team recently shared with me a fantastic tool for web-based look & feel QA: BrowserCam. Browser cam is a very clever web-based application, simply enter a public URL, select the operating systems and browsers you'd like to see the page displayed in, and you're off. In just a couple of minutes, BrowserCam will load your page on many target systems and post all the screenshots for your review.

This tool is more than worth its nominal fees for any team that is faced with pre-launch anxiety, post-launch headaches, and the general fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) caused by (sometimes very small) CSS changes.

BrowserCam is a great tool to help accelerate look & feel inconsistencies, but doesn't deal with web application workflow - another troubling area primed for automation tools. Stay tuned for a future post tackling this topic.