Ben's Blog

They pass, they slip away across the universe

Mélaine died yesterday, we were in the same year at school together.  I've been reading through her blog   here. I think The Beatles song across the universe sums up how I'm feeling today. You can listen to the song at the bottom of this post.

Preparing for my Second Retrospective

I've been asked to run a retrospective tomorrow. The retrospective is for a team I used to work with a year ago; so I'll be familiar with the attendees, this will be their first retrospective. I've decided run the hour using in the formula my team often uses to great effect. I will be interested to see how the team reacts to this type of meeting.

A Retrospective based on Agile Values

On Wednesday I ran my first retrospective. I decided to focus on some of the positive values that make up a good team: Simplicity, Feedback, Courage, Respect and Communication. The values came from the second edition of Kent Beck's book: Extreme Programming. I also used another great book Agile Retrospectives to help me out. We only have one copy of the book in the office, more are on order, I plan to buy one personally for myself. Being my first retrospective, I was slightly nervous, the format I chose was a little different from our normal agenda. Some of the methods I wanted to try we hadn't used before in our team. Our iterations are weekly, so we find that a one hour morning retrospective is enough time to disccuss and work through the issues of the last week.

Booting Ubuntu without a monitor, VNC access

I just spent a couple of hours configuring /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I have a small Ubuntu machine in my home configured as a media server. It's currently my music server running squeezecenter. I have had Asterisk running on it, but that's not working at the moment. I've been frustrated that when ever I reboot the computer then two annoying things happen. Firstly, the DNS config settings are lost and I have to reset them. Secondly, due to no monitor, VNC starts up at a resolution of 640x480. I fixed the second issue by reading through this post. I'm about to start looking at the first issue.

info corporate - Desenvolvimento para já

I've been published. The interview I gave a couple of months ago has finally been translated and is now in print. It's in Portuguese and well worth a read.

Embraer e Grupo Semco, aqui no Brasil, e BMW, Philips, Bosch e Toyota, no exterior, são alguns exemplos de empresas que estão de olho na criação de soft- ware através de metodologias ágeis de desenvolvimento, o cha- mado Agile Software Develop- ment. Mas é a equipe Agile do grupo britânico de mídia British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) que é considerada uma das mais efi- cientes do mundo no uso dessa técnica. O modo de trabalho con- siste em produzir programas num prazo que varia de uma a seis se- manas, por meio da constante in- teração entre programadores, clientes e executivos de TI. Ben Coombs, Agile Java developer da BSkyB, fala à Info CORPORATE sobre a aplicação da metodologia nas empresas.

Download inc56_lafora.pdf