If you must collect metrics, here is what I would consider.

Running Tested Purchased Features – Ron Jeffries is famous the metric Running Tested Features (RTF). I suggest that you consider taking it one step further until you’ve sold the feature to the customer you don’t know if they value it or not. For most product organizations this is a bit of stretch to measure in which case stick with Ron’s advice.

Questions to ask:

• What would you like to change?
• If you had the information the metric provided what action would you take? Can you take that action now without the proof of the metric?
• Your key measure (i.e. RTF), should measure your widest span of control – Sold Features > Deployed > Automated Acceptance Tests > …
• Measure Cycle Time – i.e. how long it takes to get something done and not people.
• Other measures can be used: i.e. test coverage from Unit Tests, but be careful they might measure what you think they mean.
• Measures can be gamed/fooled (intentionally or otherwise): For example test coverage measures whether or not a line of code has been visited. It doesn’t measure if there its meaningfully tested. If you must use a measure like this pay attention to the trend and not the absolute number. In this case a large jump might indicate someone having written a not very useful test of the outside api of your application.
• Metrics have best before dates. Eventually you will stop getting real value from them. At that stage throw them away.
• Ask can I get this information by walking around, observing and asking questions.

Alright you made it this far you deserve some options:

Martin Fowler says: CannotMeasureProductivity. Dave Nicolette presented on this at Agile 2009 (this article links to heaps of others). I wrote this for InfoQ last year:  What is a Good Agile Metric?. InfoQ also has: Metrics in an Agile World.

The following tools will help you measure, but please remember they often have many bad measures (comments?) turned with the good ones. Think carefully when choosing your rulesets:

• Sonar – has a bunch of interesting measures: Cyclomatic Complexity, Duplicated code, … . While there are other plugins, its of most use in the Java world.
• JDepend – helps you spot good vs. bad dependencies.
• PMD, FindBugs, JLint – see a comparison of all three (pdf). Some of these tools check some pointless things: method name too short or too long? missing Javadoc comments? Please configure these with the help of a grown adult. But they can also be configured to spot methods (> 30-40 lines) and classes (>300-400 lines) that are too long.
• NDepend like JDepend and heaps more measures. Again please be careful configure only with an adults help :-) Caveat Emptor I’ve been given a free copy of NDepend (that I’ve never had a chance to use).
• Sonar for C# – yes according to StackOverflow.

When paying attention to measures of the code, what matters is the trend and not the absolute numbers. Finally just because a tool can measure it doesn’t mean its worth measuring, conversely some of the best measures don’t have tools to measure them. In this case note that none of the above tools measure cycle time.

Updated to make clear the point that you shouldn’t measure people and the limitations of tools.

Please try the Movie Example (git hub browseable, zip file) and see how far you can get with some simple refactorings.

References:

• The Art of Unit Testing: with Examples in .NET (Amazon.ca) – Roy Osherove (.NET and soon a Java version)
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Amazon.ca) – Martin Fowler
• Refactoring to Patterns (Amazon.ca) – Joshua Kerievsky
• xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (Amazon.ca) – Gerard Meszaros
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit(Amazon.ca) – Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit (Amazon.ca) – Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

BTW David Koontz did the hard work of typing in Martin Fowler’s Movie sample – I just modernized it (Java 1.2 –> 1.6).

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

Last year I did the Agile 2008 Post Roundup, so I thought it might be fun to do this again this year. As usual, InfoQ has a number of items, including presentations and now MP3 downloads.

Retrospectives

A Personal Retrospective on the Agile 2009 Conference – Johanna Rothman’s notes on running and surviving the conference.

Agile2009 Drawing to a Close – Steven “Doc” List

Reflections on #Agile2009 – Karl Scotland

Thoughts on #Agile2009 – Mike Cottmeyer

Agile 2009: Appreciations, Agile 2009: A Retrospective – Portia Tung

Agile 2009: a retrospective – Pascal Van Cauwenberghe – see also:

      Agile 2009 report: Monday , Tuesday , Wednesday, Thursday , Thursday afternoon

Looking back at Agile 2009 – George Dinwiddie – The comments include a good discussion about ways to improve session selection.

Agile2009 – A buffet of Agile, Agile2009 Day 2 – The Festival Continuous  , Agile2009 – Day 3 Program – Martin Olesen

My Agile 2009 Summary – Adam Goucher

Agile2009 Trip Report – Mike Jones of OutSystems

Why Bother Going to Agile 2009 or Agile 2010?? – Damon Poole

Agile 2009 Chicago – Xavier Quesada Allue

My Agile 2009 Personal Perspective – James Martin

Agile 2009 trip report – Dave Nicolette

Agile 2009 Reflections – Eduardo Scoz

Feeding the Agile Beast – Dennis Stevens

Group posts from KlocTalk: Agile 2009…Day 1, Agile 2009…Day 2, Agile 2009…Day 3, Agile 2009… Day 4

Agile 2009 – Mark Mansour

Agile 2009 summary – Kenrick Chien

Agile2009 Conference Debriefing – Wojciech Seliga

Agile2009 Take Aways – Slawomir Ginter

My #Agile2009 Conference Thoughts, Some enjoyable quotes from #agile2009 – Peter Edstrom

Agile 2009 Roundup – my own effort

Agile2009 Recap – Fitzgerald Steele

Agile 2009 – Jason Fox UX Designer

Agile 2009: Product Management/Ownership and Business Agility – Luke Hohmann

Agile 2009 Experience Report – Brandon Raines

Agile 2009… Thank You All – Jurgen Appelo

Agile 2009: Looking back – Tom Hume

Agile 2009 Report – Renzo Borgatti

Reflections on Agile 2009 – Brian Bozzuto

Agile 2009 – The General Highlights – Jesse Fewell

Agile 2009 wrapup – Michael Longin

Thoughts on Agile 2009 Tom Grant and Dave West

Reflections on Agile 2009 Dennis Stevens

Why big Agile Conferences don’t have anything New? – Naresh Jain – I don’t agree with Naresh’s thesis but it’s still thought provoking.

Specific Sessions

What I Learned Programming With the Stars and Building a Learning Culture on Agile Teams (Slides) – Declan Whelan

Leadership Game @ Agile2009 Chicago, Rally Chalk Talk: The daily meeting – Yves Hanoulle

How to Create Rapport with your Customer, The Responsibility Model Revisited, Mapping the Agile Enablement Battlefield, Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns, The Bottleneck Game – Portia Tung

Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Workshop – 3, Esther and Diana’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures, Selenium Open Jam at Agile2009 – Adam Goucher – and many more see: his Agile summary for all related posts. Adam where do you find the time?

Powerful Questions and Powerful Requests and Agile Team Start-up: one of the first agile adoption activities, Build your team’s collaboration muscle – Lyssa Adkins

Prioritizing Your Product Backlog by Mike Cohn -  Martin Olesen

Scrum intro, A3 Problem Solving template and example – Henrik Kniberg

Balanced Software Development – Karl Scotland

The importance of identity and vision to UX designers on agile projects – Johanna Kollmann

Visual Management Workshop at Agile 2009

Create a Vision and Reward Failures #agile2009 – Peter Edstrom

Coaching Workshop – my own effort

User Stories, Mission Possible, Guerilla Research Methods  – Fitzgerald Steele

New Approaches to Risk – David Anderson

Agile Infrastructure – Agile 2009 – Andrew Shafer

Herding Cats – Managing Large Test Suites, Agile UX Design Emergent Practices, Ambassadors & Carrier Pigeons – Tom Hume – BTW Tom has written posts for many more of the sessions he attended.

Agile for Families – David Starr – While I wasn’t able to attend – it was on my stage and I love to see Agile outside of software.

Agile 2009 Session Results Posted , Day 3 , Day 2 , Day 1 , Patrick Kau

Agile 2009 – AA-FTT Workshop & more – Lisa Crispin

Day 1, Day 2 – Shannon Cornish

Notes from Keynote at Agile 2009 – Keith Swenson

The Scrum Bestiary, A Behavioral Taxonomy – Ade Miller

The impact of Agile Architect Teams in Scaling Enterprise Efforts – Mike Dwyer

Irrational Loss Aversion Slides – Brian Bozzuto

Agile2009: Mapping the Change Battlefield – Giora Morein

Agile 2009 and PMI – Jesse Fewell

The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile (slides and handouts), Cuke4Nuke: Cucumber for .NET Teams (born at the pre-conference Functional Test Tools Workshop) – Richard Lawrence

Coding Dojo: Kake format at Open Jam – Danilo Sato

Selenium Open Space, Applying modern software development techniques to automating the web UI, day 4, The test step sweet spot – Michael Longin – Michael has a number of other posts from the conference that are well worth reading.

Agile Coaching Roles – Notes from OpenJam,  Top 10 tips for coaches, Taking Responsibility to Learn and Grow – Michael Sahota – Michael is another writer a great set of posts.

inspiration, trends, thoughts – Mads Troels Hansen

A look back at Day 1, A look back at Day 2 », A look back at Day 3, A look back at Day 4 » – Kevin Minnick

Micro-Interval Exercise with Alistair Cockburn – Bruce Onder

Interviewed by François Beauregard – Eric Lefevre-Ardant

Agile in the Very Large – Sam Guckenheimer – David Starr

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Applying Game Theory to Agile Contracting

Where Does Developer Testing End and Tester Testing Begin? Abby Fichtner, Nate Oster

Agile 2009 Notes – Thursday, Wednesday,Tuesday, Monday Scott Duncan

Videos

Apple’s view of the future as seen in the 8o’ties – the video that Jared Spool shared with us during his keynote.

Paired Juggling – Declan Whelan and Uncle Bob

A funny but true thought about how developers act when solving problem – Patrick Welsh

Agile2009 Developer Jam: Ugly Code vs Clean Code – Patrick Welsh

User Story Mapping – David Hussman and Jeff Patton

More videos: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=52E5DFBB0E317163

I hope you have as fun reading this as I did. If I missed your post, sorry. I scanned through the top 200 Google hits and a number of Twitter references, but in the end there is only so much I can read.

One last thought – it was difficult to find proper names for everyone I quoted. Please make it easier – your name should be featured on the main page of your blog; if not there, then at least on the about page. Also, if you want to make your blog easy to quote, check if post titles can be easily selected. Do they link back to themselves, or do I have to get the link as well?

Monday Morning

9:00–11:00:  will likely be open jam time for me. Come find me there and let’s talk.

11:00–12:30

Kanban adoption at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP) Chris Shinkle (45 minutes) – “In 2004, SEP tried adopting Agile practices. However, Agile failed to have the desired lasting impact across the entire organization. Things changed in 2007, when SEP implemented Kanban for the first time.”

The Agile Playground Tobias Mayer (90 minutes) – “Agility in Action… This session will introduce five interactive games that a facilitator can add to their toolkit for team and management training. The games all illustrate the principles and dynamics that support Agility. The rationale for this session is that people learn best by embodying the learning, rather than just receiving knowledge at a head level. All participants will be immersed in the games; there are no observers. At the end of the session the participants will have a set of games they can introduce into their own organization to enhance their own Agile adoption process.” From my own recent experience: Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain, I can say that games are a very useful way to integrate knowledge.

Using the Agile Testing Quadrants to Plan Your Testing Efforts Janet Gregory (90 minutes) – “Different testing approaches are needed because quality has many aspects besides functional requirements, such as making sure the code is reliable and secure. How do you know you’ve done the kinds of testing and quality processes are necessary for your product, especially on an agile project?”

My choice: Tobias “Agile Playground” Caveat: Tobias said he wants at least 16–24 for this workshop, so please don’t overwhelm him based on my recommendation.

Monday Afternoon

14:00–15:30

Help! Already too many amazing options. First a bunch of experience reports:

Enterprise Agile Transformation: The Two Year Wall Chuck Maples; Weaponized Scrum Michael Marchi; Accidental Adoption – The Story of Scrum at Amazon.com Alan Atlas; The Amazing Team Race – A Team-Based Agile Adoption Gabino Roche, Jr., Belkis Vasquez; The Covert Agilist Ken Howard; Descending from the Architect’s Ivory Tower Andrew Rendell. I’m interested in all of these, but they have some stiff competition:

In the end, it’s coming down to three options:

When it just *has* to work: Agile Development in Safety-Critical Environments Brian Shoemaker, Nancy Van Schooenderwoert

What Does an Agile Coach Do? Liz Sedley, Rachel Davies – They’ve just written the book on the subject.

Creating Agile Simulations and Games for Coaches and Consultants Elisabeth Hendrickson, Chris Sims (3 hours). This one is on the Manifesting Stage, for which I was a reviewer, and I championed the presentation. I love the idea of learning how to create games. I’m really hoping that Elisabeth and Chris distill their knowledge into an InfoQ article.

My choice: I’m torn between Rachel and Liz—What Does an Agile Coach Do? I’ve got to work on this a bit myself and Creating Agile Simulations and Games.

16:00–17:30 I may be meeting with Linda in this time slot, so I will play this one by ear.

Team Start-up: one of the first Agile Adoption activities Lyssa Adkins (90 minutes): “Starting up an Agile team is one of the first things you might be asked to do when a company wants to “go Agile.” What do you need to know before starting up a team? In the start-up, how much do teams need to know about Agile before they “go”? What do they need to know about each other…what the project is all about…who they will become as a team? These and other questions are answered as we walk through good ways to start-up Agile teams.”

Giving and receiving effective feedback Elizabeth Keogh (45 minutes) – “Find out why we give personal feedback, how to provide effective feedback, what makes feedback ineffective and how to deal with poorly phrased feedback. Learning what makes feedback effective helps you to seek your own feedback and improve, whilst being able to support the people around you.”—echoes of “Giving an Taking Design Criticism with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock”

10 Temptations of an Agile Coach (new or experienced) Stevie Borne (45 minutes): “Regardless of your coaching experience, there are a wide variety of temptations you can fall into that affect the quality of your coaching”

Effective code reviews in agile teams Wojciech Seliga, Slawomir Ginter – I was tempted by this one, but as I read the description it feels a bit like a vendor talk. “The session includes a demo on how Atlassian Crucible integrated with leading IDEs via Atlassian IDE Connector facilitates the whole process”  Not interested. To be clear I like Atlassian and their tools, but it feels like the talk has less value without their tools $$$. See the exchange in the comments below.

My Choice: Team Start-up: one of the first Agile Adoption activities—Lyssa Adkins

Twitter is fun, c2.com is almost dead, and blogs have a lot of great ideas, but the best discussions about Agile still occur on the mailing list. Yet, I keep coming across people interested in learning about Agile but who don’t know about the mailing lists.

What follows are the mailing lists I know of (most of which I subscribe to). BTW I don’t recommend subscribing to this many mailing lists, as your mail volume will be insane (mine is about 300–400 messages a day). I can only handle it because gmail collapses long conversations into a single thread.

Basics

Scrum Development, ~6800 members, 500–700 messages a month. Description: “For updates and interchange between the users of Scrum and those just beginning to use Scrum. Restricted to those who want to build products and software using Scrum. For discussion on how to do so.” This list is a very good place to get started It was my first Agile mailing list.

Scrum  Alliance community discussion group: “All healthy discussion is welcome. Differences in opinion and thought are encouraged. Spam, abusive language and direct advertisements/attacks aimed at splintering the community’s energy are prohibited and violators will be warned/banned. Heated debate, differences of opinion, methods other than Scrum or desire for a different SA community group are all open topics. Please be respectful of each other and be mindful that email is often toneless and can therefore be easily taken wrong.” My take—this is a good place to discuss issues that would get you kicked off ScrumDev.

Extreme Programming,  ~9200 members, 800–1000 message a month. Description: “The purpose of the list is civilized discussion of questions, issues, problems, and topics in Extreme Programming, Agile Methods, software development practices, and related topics.” I don’t participate in this list because I don’t have the time.

Agile Project Management, ~3600 members, 100–200 messages a month. Description: “Agile Project Management (APM) is a group to discuss and promote techniques for the management of agile projects. APM seeks to provide managers with a forum to share practical advice, experiences and insights from the application of agile methodologies like eXtreme Programming (XP), SCRUM, Feature Driven Development (FDD) and DSDM.” I like this list part because it attracts a different crowd than Scrum Development: Sanjiv Augustine, David Schmaltz, Hillel Glazer.

Crystal Clear, ~200 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “Discussion of the Crystal Methodologies (Alistair Cockburn).” Low volume, high quality; most posts are of interest.

Lean, Kanban and the Edge

Lean Software Development, ~1400 members, 100–200 messages a month, Description: The name says it all.

Lean Agile, ~1400 members, 200–300 messages a month, Description: “For discussing how to learn, apply and evangelicize Lean-Agile Software Development and/or Scrum, TDD, TOC, Kanban, … within the context of Lean.” Started originally as LeanAgileScrum by Allan Shalloway after he was kicked off the ScrumDevelopment mailing list. Very similar discussions to “Lean Software Development.” It strikes me  as odd that the two haven’t merged.

Kanban, ~700 members, 200–400 messages a month, Description: “An opportunity to discuss and learn more about the use of virtual Kanban systems in software development. Kanban has become popular throughout 2008. The main proponents are David Anderson, Corey Ladas, Karl Scotland, Aaron Sanders, Kenji Hiranabe (and with his Naked Planning approach) Arlo Belshee. Kanban started with David J. Anderson and his work at Microsoft and Corbis in Seattle. See Kanban in Action and From Worst to Best in 9 Months for further details. Corey Ladas has also published extensively at his Lean Software Enginnering blog.” A small group with lots of very interesting discussion.

Real Options, ~100 members, <100 messages a month, Description: “Discussion of the application of options outside the world of finance. Whether people realise it or not, “freedom to choose” is the underlying principle behind many of the Agile practices. We call this principle Real Options. An understanding of Real Options allows us to develop and refine new agile practices and take agile into directions it hasn’t gone before. Real Options also helps us understand why some people resist some of the practices.”

Agile Business, ~50 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “This group is a place for people interested in the business side of Agile. It is for customers, Product Owners, business analysts, Product Management, Product Development, executives, marketing and all those interested in those concerns (which should also include everyone doing Lean or Agile).Agile and Lean are interpreted broadly (i.e., the scope is much broader than just agile software development). Examples of breadth: How to get my car repair shop more agile, what would it mean to have lean delivery in a church, can non-SW projects use an agile approach; what does that mean”. This is a brand-new group.

Agile Beyond Software, ~80 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “This is a group for people who are interested in sharing stories, experiences, practices, and questions about applying agile beyond software. This could be in management, marketing, engineering, small business, personal life, community groups, or any other areas where you think it might be worth trying!!!”. Still trying to sort out the difference between this and Agile Business, although both Joe and Mishkin insist they do differ.

Solo Scrum, ~50 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “Group for investigating and sharing agile approaches (lean, scrum, etc) and engineering practices for better developing software on your own.” I only just joined the group.

Agile Articles, 570 members, < 20 messages a month, Description: “The Agile Articles group was founded in order to gather links to: online papers, recommended books, agile websites, open source tools.”

Techniques

Agile Testing,  ~5400 members, 200–300 messages a month, Description: “In this group, we discuss how to test software in projects that are using an Agile style of development.
We expect most members of the group to be independent testers working on an agile team. However, we’re open to discussions of other types of agile testing: developer testing, customer acceptance testing, and so forth.” I like the group’s practical focus, leaving the majority of the philosophical debate to other lists.

Retrospectives, ~370 members, <100 members a month, Description: “Retrospective Facilitators Community.” Low volume, very insightful.

Software Craftsmanship, ~660 members, ~100–400 messages a month, Description: “Discuss what Software Craftsmanship is and how to promote it. Effectively a response of Uncle Bob’s Crap Code keynote at Agile 2008.”

Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools, ~300 members,  < 100 messages a month. Description: “This discussion group is for discussions related to advances in functional testing tools for Agile projects … The good news is that tool support for automated functional tests has grown significantly in recent years. There is a large variety of commercial and open source testing tools/frameworks available that support Agile development practices. … However, we believe that it’s time for another significant boost to the state of the art. We’ll discuss those advances here.”

Test Driven Development, ~4500 members, 200–300 messages a month. The name says it all.

Test First User Interfaces, ~700 members, few postings in the past few years, Description: “discuss writing Graphic User Interfaces using Test Driven Development techniques.” Come by and restart the conversation.

Refactoring, ~3900 members, < 100 messages a month, Description: “This is a forum for discussions about Refactoring, including tools associated with Refactoring. It is a place to share and discuss new and old refactorings in a variety of software languages.” Hard to believe a forum I’m not subscribed to.

Lean Programming, ~300 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “This group is a place for all conversations relating to the production of code – including test, code and design. Topics such as test-driven-development, emergent design, design patterns, code quality, and anything related are welcome. This user group was formed by several technical trainers and coaches of Net Objectives who are active on the site, however, it is open to all.” Another one I didn’t know about until I started this post.

Agile Embedded, ~190 members, < 20 messages a month, Description: “The Agile Embedded group is interested in using agile techniques such as extreme programming and scrum to develop embedded software.” Another mailing list I didn’t know.

Tools

There are a lot more lists related to tools than I mention here, but these are just the tools I use today. There are lots of other tool-related mailing lists out there.

JUnit, ~7600 members, 100–200 messages a month, Description—just like the name says.

NUnit, ~270 members, 100–300 messages a month. Description: “The primary support list for NUnit as well as the place where we discuss new approaches, features and bugs. As such, it replaces the previous nunit-users and nunit-developers lists on SourceForge.”

Fitnesse, ~2900 members, 200–300 messages a month, Description: “FIT (Framework for Integration Testing) fit.c2.com; FitNesse—a collaborative testing tool based upon fit. http://fitnesse.org.”

CCNET, ~1380 members, 300–400 messages a month, Description: “Mailling list for users of CruiseControl.NET.  Please submit support requests to this list.”

Win Tech Off Topic, ~1700 members, 100–200 messages a month, Description: “This mailing list is for all the Off Topic messages from all of the other Windows-centric technical mailing lists I belong to, i.e., ATL, DCOM, DOTNET and GENX. These messages are typically marked [OT], [OOT], [VERY OT], or whatever. Sometimes this seems like most of the content on these lists, and often the most interesting, but since it’s “off topic,” folks are often flamed for their posts.” This list doesn’t have an Agile focus but is still one of the best places to ask technical windows programming questions.

Jobs and Announcements

Agile Announcements, 600 members,  < 100 messages a month. Description: “This group is for Agile Announcements. The announcements can be about user groups meetings, job postings, service offerings, course, or whatever. And any discussion about announcements posted. The geographic scope is worldwide.” Oddly enough, reading user group announcements from around the world is interesting. It gives me great ideas for Agile Ottawa.

Agile Jobs, ~250 members, <20 messages a month.

XP Jobs – ~1700 members, <20 messages a month.

Local

There are over a hundred local Agile mailing lists, I’m located in Ottawa so I will only mention these two: Agile Ottawa, Agile Programming Ottawa – for some strange reason we have two Agile Ottawa mailing lists. Nuts.

Other

Mailing lists for all of my personal productivity tools.

My Life Organized, ~2320 members, 200-300 messages a month, Description: “A tree based task management tool that generates to do lists for you”. I reviewed this tool nearly three years ago now.

Do It Tomorrow, ~680 members, <50 members, Description: “This group was established as an informal place for members of other time management groups, not to mention those new to time management/productivity methods, to discuss the time management methodologies put forward in the books of author and coach Mark Forster.” I’ve tried GTD and failed at it. DIT seems to suit my personal style.

Pomodoro Technique, ~200 members, <50 messages a month, Description: “The aim of this discussion group is to help users of the Pomodoro Technique to get to know it better to use it more effectively. Whether you are new to Pomodoro Technique or a veteran reply to the topic” This is the technique that helps keep me (and many other agilists) focused during the day.

Updated to include the new Scrum Alliance Community Mailing list.

The ccnet config file:

<cruisecontrol>
 <project name="EndManager" webURL="http://localhost/EndManager">
  <intervalTrigger name="continuous" seconds="30"/>
  <sourcecontrol type="vss">
   <project>$/EndorsementManager_Net</project>
   <workingDirectory>C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET</workingDirectory>
   <timeout units="seconds">600</timeout>
   <ssdir>\\vss2\share2\GlobexDotNet</ssdir>
  </sourcecontrol>
  <tasks>
   <devenv solutionfile="C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET\Source\EndorsementMgr.sln" configuration="debug" />
   <nunit path="C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.4.8\bin\nunit-console.exe">
    <assemblies>
     <assembly>C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET\Source\EndmBaLayer\EndmBaComponentUnitTest\bin\Debug\EndmBaComponentUnitTest.dll</assembly>
    </assemblies>
   </nunit>
  </tasks>
 </project>
</cruisecontrol>

This contains the much maligned devenv task, which we use because it’s easier than writing an msbuild script for all of the assemblies. The devenv task trys to do the following on the command line:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.com “C:\GLOBEXDOTNETVSS\ENDORSEMENTMANAGER_NET\Source\EndorsementMgr.sln” /rebuild “debug”

Net result: I get the following wonderfully descriptive error: “the application data folder for visual studio could not be created.” What’s up? Is this an environment variable problem? Shouldn’t having the login credentials of the user mean that we get their environment variables?

Any ideas?

A few good friends have been recently laid off, and I’ve been left thinking what to do after that happens. First up—I don’t have any jobs in my back pocket, and I don’t know anyone hiring right this second. My thoughts are more general than that.

Even if you haven’t been laid off, I would start preparing now. You should start building your profile and be prepared for whatever happens. This is pretty much what I have done the past few years, as I started thinking about moving from day-to-day software development to a full-time Agile Coaching role.

I would recommend building your personal profile so that people will know you and think of you when they have a problem to solve. My approach to achieving that—provide service and value to others—will cause good things to flow from there. So, although the goal is create your personal brand, I think the best way to do it is thinking what other people will find valuable.

My Strategies

1. Get an email address with your own domain name. Having a hotmail/yahoo/gmail address just looks unprofessional. Domain names are cheap, and you can alias your domain to a Google apps or any other account. It just looks better.
2. Start a blog. Don’t use blogger—it looks cheap. Pick something you can control the look and feel. Typepad and wordpress are both great choices. Focus on quality and value, not frequency. BTW Use feedburner from the start if you ever migrate; it will save a ton of hassles.
3. Find your local Agile group (Scrum Community PBwiki has some). Start attending meetings. Ask relevant questions, become known, become a speaker.
4. Find an Agile mailing list (or two) that interests you (Scrum Development, Agile Testing, TDD, …);start answering questions (when you have something of value to add).
5. Start twittering. I’m: http://twitter.com/mlevison. If you look through the list of people I’m following, you will find many interesting people in the Agile community. You can also search on “agile.” You will see interesting conversations float by. I use tweetdeck as my tool.
6. Try LinkedIn—yes, I’ve dissed it before, but you might get something from it. I haven’t. My LinkedIn profile.

Remember your focus is helping other people. Do that and they will pay you back in spades. It may take a while, but eventually it will. In my case, it took about two years, but in the end it helped me land my ideal job: Coaching Agile teams.

Image Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com used under CC license

The Magic Chemistry of Teams – examines some of the characteristics required to build and renew great teams.

Multi Tasking Myth – we’re often trained to believe that multi-tasking is good either in the small: doing email and answering the phone. Or in the the large working on two or more projects. This item from Jeff Atwood demonstrates the falsehood of both. This picture illustrates the problem:

Handling Large Stories in Agile – a short item on approaches to splitting large stories/features so that they can be completed in a single iteration.

Track Velocity, Not Time Spent on Tasks – reminds us that we ship features/stories to customers not task. While tasks are useful in helping the team plan, estimate and organizing itself – it really doesn’t matter how much time is spent on any one task. Instead what matters is whether the stories are getting completed.

I’ve had a nearly an eight year run with a great bunch of people. First at Databeacon and our .NET Rich Client (tip of the hat to Robi, Dave, Marc, Tony, Patrick, Suzanne, Ralph, and briefly Hans) – little did you know how far I would take those crazy ideas around unit testing, milestones, and reflection. Then Cognos for the death of Corinth and rebirth of PMRC (add to the list Sasa , Viktor, Daniel, and Johnathan), PMMT (Brenda, Brian and Steve – aka Chad). Finally IBM and Agile Coaching with too many people to name.

I realized long ago that I was no longer passionate about coding, and that my interests lie in coaching and mentoring Agile Software Development, TDD, etc. Along the way, many of you have given me the chance to do coaching/mentoring work and for that I’m grateful. I’m also grateful to everyone who put up with my all too frequent harangues about why Agile/TDD, etc., was better than what we do today. One of the things I have learned since then is to ask questions, listen, and then harangue.  Thanks to everyone who helped me evolve.

Special thanks to:

• Robi for teaching me a lot about quality and for helping me to get better at writing good code.
• A big thanks to Sasa, who took a chance on Scrum and put up with a someone who was telling him how to organize his team.
• Ralph for giving me a chance to coach and for keeping me through three rounds of layoffs.
• Guillaume (and the whole BUDDI team) for letting me use BUDDI as an occasional test bed for my coaching and facilitation skills.

An interesting side story on the number of people at each company: Databeacon was ~60 people when I joined and ~30 when we were acquired. Cognos was about 3,500 and IBM is about 400,000. So each time I’ve been acquired I’ve joined a company that was 100 times larger than its predecessor.

It’s been great working with everyone and I look forward to crossing paths again.

My permanent email address is mark@mlevison.com. I would be delighted to connect with anyone on LinkedIn (yes, I know I’ve dissed LinkedIn before).

Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters

Teams in large organizations still struggle to adopt TDD. In this article Mark Levison shares problems he uncovered when he surveyed teams, and his own strategy to introduce TDD into an organization.