Monthly Archives: October 2009

Moving Day

By Tom Vaughan in Uncategorized | October 30, 2009
We officially out-grew our Rosslyn space today and moved in to a new space right next to the Court House metro stop.

Slides on Improving Your Agile Development Process

By Dave Copeland in Code, Development, Workflow | October 29, 2009
Dead last, after the headline act, and after Joel Spolsky told everyone to go home, I did a lightning talk at DC's recent DevDays (A StackOverflow production) on how we have used process metrics from our bug tracker to improve our process. Improving your Agile Process View more documents from David Copeland. Continue reading ...

Tweaking the Agile Calendar

By Tom Vaughan in Development, Workflow | October 15, 2009
For the first five iterations, the dev team had been following this schedule:
  • Iteration N, Week 1 = Design for iteration N and 2nd week of QA for iteration N-1
  • Iteration N, Week 2 = Development
  • Iteration N, Week 3 = Development
  • Iteration N, Week 4 = 1st week of QA for iteration N
  • Iteration N, Week 5 / Iteration N +1, Week 1 = 2nd week of QA for iteration N, design for iteration N + 1
We started to notice a couple things that have caused us to try out a new schedule in our upcoming 6th iteration.

Agile impressions, 5 iterations in…

By Tom Vaughan in Development, Workflow | October 15, 2009
I'm assuming from the amount of hype out there that if a development team isn't using "Agile" right now, they probably feel like the one kid on the block who didn't have a Nintendo (with the Duck Hunt option, of course). duckhuntWell, we here at OPOWER loved our Duck Hunt, so we've been attempting to use "Agile" for the last 5 months or so. Agile means a lot of things to a lot of people, so I'll spell out what it means for us and then reflect on some of the pros, cons, and room-for-improvement in our practice.