Magic Estimation

In Boris Gloger's "Estimation in Depth" deep dive at the South African Scrum Gathering he introduced us to Magic estimation. Intro Boris introduced it a little something like this: So you've got a backlog of about 100-200 items and you have a backlog estimation meeting. First thing to do is put a numerical estimate on everything in the backlog. Using...

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Open Space @ CPT Gathering

The open space marketplace in action this morning at the Cape Town Scrum Gathering. Fun being part of a complex dynamic system. Sessions I convened today: Agile contracting Job swapping (bus 2 bus) for cross pollination Sessions I attended, paraphrased: Extreme public openness; what (code, practice) should we share? Team psychology Wildcard ad-hoc...

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Cape Town Scrum Gathering

Cape Town gathering day 1 concluded in a networking event where I caught a few moments of Henrik's improv on the baby grand at the Westin Grand. Before I plunge into day 2, a sketch of what stood out on day 1. Henrik's KeynoteHenrik Kniberg's keynote was excellent, setting the tone for the gathering. He revisited the core scrum values (not the agile...

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Requirements Management

Mohamed Bray Sugsa August 2010 This month's sugsa was a cross-talk from the Business Analysis community. The Talk Mohamed described an iterative process as just multiple quick failures (wagile, thanks Karen), if we decide to skimp on requirements. His stat was that 70% of defects are injected during the requirements phase. After gathering, the challenge becomes requirements management and communication. This communication is difficult because the audience is broad and diverse. Requirements communication should have a few characteristics. connect:...

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Intellisense: Re-show info

Complete Word A long while back I included the "Complete Word" shortcut: Ctrl-Space in my coding practice, avoiding the tricks I had developed to prompt the visual studio intellisense back into giving me suggestions for word completion. This saves a lot of "micro-time" and improves flow. Parameter Info Another time when I found myself coaching...

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SQL XML Element contents from varchar column

The problem Stored in a varchar column, payload_xml, we have xml that looks something like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <ReceiveMoneyParameters xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> ... <PaymentArrangementExternalReference> JT00009084 </PaymentArrangementExternalReference> ... </ReceiveMoneyParameters> I need to return the underlined section as a varchar. The solution With the help of Tim Chapman's article...

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Fitnesse - MyFirstTest

Last night I ran through a basic tutorial on Fitnesse and .net. It went a little something like this. Download and run Fitnesse Download, double-click. And then...Huh? I double clicked the jar file, got a question about enabling network comms, and nothing else happened. What had actually happened was some files were extracted and the server started...

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DOS Copy file aggregation

Just learned something new about the DOS copy command from this comment on a keyboard ninja article. copy /a *.txt aggregate.txt Will aggregate the contents of all the .txt files into aggregate.txt. This is useful to me for .csv files. (to disambiguate: 1.txt contains "one one one" &c.) So cool; not often I find out something new about D...

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