Guild Blogs

All Bugzilla instances have been updated to 3.4.4 in order to resolve a security issue announced yesterday.

The Consultants Guild is excited to announce the first of several hosted services.

Our first service is the widely used and extremely popular Bugzilla.

Bugzilla is a "Defect Tracking System" or "Bug-Tracking System". Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively.

Our hosted Bugzilla service will provide you with your own instance of which you will be the administrator. You can then choose whether or not your instance will be public or private, as well as all the standard Bugzilla options.

Pricing is as little as $10/month and there is a 14 day free trial, no credit card required.

devZing.com

2010 Schedule

Twist of the Wrist II Now on DVD

After the Oregon Desert Tour it was definitly time for a new rear tire. My 2001 Ducati ST2 came to me with an inexpensive tire with OK performance and I wanted something like I had on my 1998 ST2. I also wanted to tackle doing the work myself. After spending hours pouring over the internet I ordered a Diablo Strada Rear Tire.

Here is the bike with the tire removed. No big surprises here except the shop manual doesn't say what size the axle nut is (30mm) and I had to go buy one.

Here you can see the end results next to the old tire - definitely time for a change.

Total time to change the tire was about 3 hours. Mostly because I was being careful and it was about 98F. I expect next time it should take me about an hour. The Dyna Beads seem to work great.

Tom DeMarco, arguably one of the key thinkers when it comes to how we develop software has been reflecting.

My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation (Prentice Hall/Yourdon Press, 1982), played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no.

-- http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf

If that doesn't rock you back on your heels, then you need to re-read that paragraph.

Next you need to go read the whole article (2 pages).

As someone who prefers the agile approach I have been pushing the value based approach over the control based one for nearly a decade now. But to see someone like Tom question publicly what he (and we) have been doing for the last 30 years makes me respect Tom even more, and give me hope that as an industry we are heading in the right direction.

Jack Milunksy of Brightspark and AgileBuddy was reacting to a Agile Project Management forum topic on metrics.

Jack was of the opinion that:

the more one spends time tracking metrics, the less time there is for development

While I have some sympathy for this point of view having worked for larger organizations in the past, I have come to realize that you do need some type of metric that is understandable to the rest of the organization. All the other departments in your organization have an overriding single number that describes how they are doing, why not software development?

As I mentioned in my No More Iterations post, throughput is my metric of choice. The cost of collecting this metric is so low that it doesn't matter.

Now I have been asked to provide all sorts of low level metrics in the past not knowing how they were going to be used. I was not inclined to cooperate in those cases since the time required to collect them was never going to be offset by any value coming back to my teams. And this is most likely what Jack is protesting.

I like being proactive and providing a metric I think is useful, rather than waiting for someone who doesn't really understand software development ask me to have my teams track actual effort against estimated effort in units of 0.1 hours (really I have been asked to provide this!).

My talk at the Rose City SPIN last night went very well. We had a small core of dedicated people. Lots of good questions and we could dive into the specifics. Thanks to Rhea for doing a great job organizing the event.

You can find my presentation here.

I also wanted to provide some links to some of the books and sites I referred to during the talk.

• Software by Numbers: Low-Risk, High-Return Development

• Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results (Coad Series)
• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (Agile Software Development Series)

Using Lean for Software Process Improvement

Dates/Times: Thursday, June 11th, 2009; Networking @ 6:00 PM; Seminar @ 7:00 PM
Location: OGI School of Science & Engineering, Paul Clayton Building (building #2 on campus map), Room 401

Abstract

Lean manufacturing concepts have been around a while and have proven successful in the manufacturing and construction industries. Recently the software industry has taken some steps in the lean direction as an outgrowth of the agile software movement. Fundamentally, lean presents a toolkit for process improvement. This presentation will cover what lean software is, how it fits in with the other agile approaches and specifically the software kanban - a lean approach to managing the flow of software from idea to the customer.

Speaker Bio

Wayne Allen is the VP of Software Engineering for Integrated Services, Inc. who is the leading supplier of point of sales solutions for the Quick Lube and Car Wash industry. Wayne has a passion for the craft of software engineering that he has developed in his 20 years as a programmer, consultant, manager, executive and small business owner. This passion has led him to the new crop of "agile" software development processes such as XP and Scrum. Wayne is a regular speaker both nationally and internationally on the topic of agile software development. You can read about Wayne's thoughts on software development at blogs.consultantsguild.com.




A Special Treat from PNSQC

Plan on coming early! In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) the SPIN meeting will have pizza provided by PNSQC beginning at 6:00 pm.

PNSQC is the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, a group of volunteers interested in Software Quality. The Mission of the PNSQC is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. As a non-profit, it seeks to promote software quality by providing education and opportunities for information exchange within the software community.

How to Register

This is a FREE lecture sponsored by the Rose City SPIN. To register, please go to: http://www.cpd.ogi.edu/course.asp?n=09-SPIN-0610

The seminar will be held in room 401 of the Paul Clayton Building on the OGI campus. The Paul Clayton Building is Building #2 on the OGI Campus Map.

Rose City SPIN

The Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) is a monthly forum for networking, mutual support, and promotion of effective software practices. We exchange practical experiences, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and war stories about the technical, business, and human facets of software process improvement. The Rose City SPIN serves the software development community of the Portland/Vancouver metro area. Whether you work for a large company or a small one, corporate or self-employed, industrial or academic setting, you are welcome at the Rose City SPIN.