Showing posts with label Project Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Project Management. Show all posts

Saturday, 29 November 2014

moving forward slowly, but in an agile way...

For a variety of reasons (mostly 2 that are small and under 4 years old) I've not been able to start on the guts of this.  So I've been continuing to look at the tools I'm going to use.
At my work we try to be agile (though not always as successful as we might be we're not doing bad). So having put together a wireframe (see previous post starting on christmas) I'm now looking at sorting out some user stories.  I'm not sure how I'll manage sprints and exciting things like velocity, but I'll try and figure out a way.
If you're not sure what the terms above are all about I'd recommend a couple of interesting books on Agile:
I've just started reading this and I'm finding it really interesting.  I'm not certain I agree with everything but will give it a read.
The other book is:
This is the book our head of development recommended for us to read just as I was joining so I did, I still find it useful to return to it and see how I'm doing.
Both of those links have my special amazon give me money code in them so if you do buy them I end up with some money...

So with all of that in mind I took a look through some sites about writing user stories, it's something that I feel we don't always get right.  Having read about 5 different sites this morning (there are thousands of them) I think my favourite was this:
http://codesqueeze.com/the-easy-way-to-writing-good-user-stories/
The reason is the way it breaks down the acceptance criteria into testable pieces.  The other point, that lots of the sites mentioned was that it used pen and paper something as noted earlier I'm a big fan of.
When I've written a few I'll post them up here.

Wednesday, 26 November 2014

christmas dinner

So I'm cooking Christmas dinner this year for an increasingly large number of folks...
This is going to require a little more planning that a usual roast dinner, so looking for some help I sought out an app to help with the timing.  What I was after was something that I could put in a number of tasks into, how long they would take, when I wanted the last one to finish and it would provide for me a list of when to do everything.
Something like:
Prep Turkey                12:00
Turn Oven on               12:20
Put Turkey in Oven         12:30
etc.

Having searched through the google app store and Apple's and the found nothing that did this (I even looked at some project management things) I thought I'd knock something together in excel (I even looked for existing templates I could steal).

Then I thought well if I'm going to do this, why not have some fun with it...
I've been playing with meteor for a little while and although this isn't really something that it's meant for it's definitely something that could do it.
So that's my plan for the next few evenings or so, build something that I can use to project manage Christmas dinner.

Obviously I'll let you know how it goes.