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Agile Software Development with Rally

chris — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:52:09 +0000

Some time back, I whined about not having a good agile project tool. Times have changed: four years and two jobs later I’m happily doing Scrum development using Rally.

It didn’t happen overnight. Red Hat is a big consumer of Bugzilla and in the beginning of our project, we agreed that rather than adopt the existing tool-du-jour (XPlanner) in addition to Bugzilla, we’d stick with what we knew well and build a process around that.

It worked, sorta, but we quickly became hindered by Bugzilla’s lack of anything resembling a workflow. We’d file user stories as bugs but since the tool is so cumbersome to use, we’d rarely task them out properly. Some things would slip and other things would take scrum team members by surprise. I’m no fan of Bugzilla, but in Mozilla’s defense, they aren’t really trying to do agile.

We decided as a team to adopt Rally since we already had some seats set aside for it. I’m happy to report that thus far (half a sprint in), we’re pretty pleased. It steps up in all the places Bugzilla falls over:

Dead simple creation of tasks per story
Resource management
Implicit grouping of tasks under a story such that hours/progress are aggregated meaningfully
Quick in-place editing (BZ languishes in web 1.0)
Built-in workflow & reporting designed for agile development
Useful dashboard that displays rich information about the current sprint (tasks, defects, blockers, burndown)

We’re still deciding what to do with our large Bugzilla backlog, but it turns out there may be a plugin we can use. If we go that route, I hope to have time to blog about it in a future posting.

IETab Firefox Plugin

chris — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:28:26 +0000

Not much else to say about this sweet plugin.Â It lets you view any webpage using IE without leaving Firefox.Â Kickass.

CSS Layout Gala

chris — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:33:26 +0000

This is just too freakin sweet not to pass along. I’m not a regular del.icio.us user, but I happend to stop by today only to be greeted with this gem:

Layout Gala

I had to give this treasure its own line because it embodies everything that is good and right in the field of web design. Pure, compatible, solid layouts that don’t rely on hacks. They’re all there, kids. Two-column, three-column, liquid, static — many even support any-order columns. Squirt.

My First Rail

chris — Tue, 02 May 2006 12:58:43 +0000

I finally got a little time last night to check out Ruby on Rails. I have been hearing the hype now for over a year and I was pretty certain it would live up, and I’m here to tell you that it does. As a J2EE developer I respect OO design and and well thought-out conventions. Ruby embraces both and delivers a slick little setup that lets you get a data-connected webapp running in minutes.

The nice part is that with one install, you get the Ruby language along with Gems, the package manager. Gems works a lot like Yum does for linux, and with one gem command, you get the complete rails package, including a little webserver called WEBrick. RoR passes the 10-minute test with flying colors.

I followed along with one of the recommended tutorials before I hit the sack, and I found myself lying in bed running through use cases for my new score. Damn I’m a geek.