This is a question that arises very soon or sometime even before you start doing work with a board; Scrum, Kanban or Scrum-but.

Where should the status be? Or more often – “let’s use TFS” (and keep the work items in TFS/SharePoint/Excel and then make copies of them to use on the wall).

A variant of the question is; “we are a distributed team – can we still use the same board?”

Well of course there is not a yes or no answer to that but here is my take on it:

Low tech rules

First I think that no electronic system will ever beat the flexibility, simplicity and agileness of a board. See this for some examples. There are some that have come close but a low tech board communicates so much information with the added flexibility to move things around very...

Together with Joakim Sundén and Christophe Achouiantz I’ve been doing some talks on Kanban. We have included some practicality in the talk – Build your own Kanban-board sort of.

For the first few talks I tried to draw as fast as Joakim (in that case) talked. Not an easy task – try it. And also my drawings were not always optimal.

So Joakim and I did some stop-motion-action and created slides for this part instead. It took the better part of a complete day… But the result was alright I think.

Here are the slides with some short comments to illustrate what we talk about.

Kanbanboards

View more presentations from Marcus Hammarberg.

The last week has really been something extra. Last Friday, early morning, we got some signs that the twins were on their way.

And 11 hours later, they had arrived.

Since then, Gustav (twin 2) has been sick. The short story is that being born too early, his lungs had not developed fully. But he’s getting better and is on his way to a full recovery. We’re hoping to be back home with the twins at the beginning of next week.

Arvid (twin 1, born about 30 minutes earlier) is a very calm and peaceful person so far. Gustav has a bit more temper, but they are both quite easy-going. Gustav looks a lot like me, and Arvid is a bit thinner in his looks.

I...

I have been chasing this for quite some time now, about 4 days on and off. But now I have nailed it, thanks to Christer Cederborg – my Unity beacon in the dependency injection mist.

OK – the problem is as follows; I have an object factory that encapsulates the calls to Unity for registration and resolving. This is done because I want to control if the resolved objects should be wrapped with PolicyInjection or not.

However I ran into problem when I created test for my code. In the top most layer an resolved started to fail for the layers beneath them. I started to get an error which basically said:

Ambiguous match found. (Strategy type Instance Interception Strategy…

As often, I didn’t understand the error message and started to chase down the wrong things. I first thought that this had to do...

I have heard a lot about REST and RESTful services but never have had the opportunity to work in project that uses that architectural style of working. So sadly I haven’t learned it.

Here is a short and sweet introduction to the subject that explains REST in a good way.

So – as I understand it – it’s just HTTP. The way HTTP is meant to be (URL to each resource, stateless, hyperlinks between resources and usages of the HTTP verbs). I like the simplicity.

I have looked so long for this; a short and sweet description on how to compact Virtual PC images. Here it is: http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1902.entry

1. Clear out the machine of filler.
   1. I recommend installing CCleaner from http://ccleaner.com which. deletes all temporary files from the Windows installation, Internet. Explorer cache, the Recycle Bin, and any number of other. “garbage”/”temp” directories in the VPC.
2. Disable hibernation
   1. If you have hibernation turned on, there’s a colossal sized file called hiberfil.sys in the root of the .VHD.  Go into Power options in Control Panel and disable hibernation to get rid of this file.
3. Capture the Virtual Disk Precompactor .ISO
   1. In the menu of Virtual PC windows for your machine, capture the Virtual Disk Precompactor .ISO file which is located at: c:\program files\microsoft virtual pc\virtual machine additions\virtual disk precompactor.iso
4. Run the Precompactor.
   1. Go to My...

Last Thursday I facilitated a Elevate-workshop, Avega on BDD with SpecFlow. It was, as always, a very nice learning experience for me, and hopefully also for the participants.

I wanted to take some time to put down my thoughts and findings about the framework, BDD in general and some other stuff I have ran into.

BDD – behavior driven design

I don’t want to go into explaining BDD since it’s been done several times before (I can really recommend the last Steven Sandersson post – excellent!) in a much better ways than I could ever do. Go on and read them if you want – I’ll wait right here.

But I can share some aha-moments and experiences that has surfaced for me when preparing and doing the workshop.

It’s not in the tool

First, as a colleague told me yesterday: “It’s...

After my last post I cannot withhold you from this nugget. It’s a guy (Todd) that have created some MSBuild targets to call SOAPUi from a build script. I am about to try it out… I’ll get back to you if I run into problems.

[UPDATED] Yup - it worked! Great! Thanks Todd.

Still have some issues in that the switch /endpoint will override all the endpoints in the SOAPUi project… But I’m on it…

[UPDATED AGAIN]

See this on how to solve the endpoint problem.

I have already blogged about SOAPUi but then it was more me thinking and seeing it was a good idea to use SOAPUi to do testing of service.

Now I have actually done this – and I love it so far. In the last project where we our deliverable was a service I think we spent about 30% of our time creating and maintaining the test client.

Not to speak about all the time we had to spend explaining for the client that “no this is NOT the GUI you will see later on”.

So the thought of a general test client for SOAP services is very compelling. And SOAPUi has done a great job making your job easy and fun… Almost all of the time.

They have an amazing amount of documentation. I guarantee that everything I am about to tell...

I have once again been forced into using VB.NET which I am not very fond of.

My points up to now has been that the language in itself is not that bad. But the support (refactoring etc.) in Visual Studio is much worse than for C#. Also, there is a culture in the VB.NET community (as I understand) to hide complex stuff from your user. So for example you cannot see the references you have in your project until you hit “Show all files”. Another example for the sub-par support you get when using VB.NET.

My final point up to now is that the most common reason to chose VB.NET over C# is that you have VB6-programmers that is to be converted into VB.NET programmers. The problem is that VB.NET automatically (yeah, you can and SHOULD turn it off) include the Microsoft.VisualBasic in all new projects....