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Measured Currency by Brooks Elliott

What have I been doing this week? Estimating things.

Estimating potential jobs is critically important to a consulting firm. Estimate too high, and you don’t get the job, estimate too low, and you’re setting yourself up for client disappointment.

Complicating matters, the job is never specified in enough detail, and you really don’t want to spend too much time putting the estimate together, because that’s time spent not coding.

Even if you aren’t estimating potential work, being a good estimator is a very useful skill within the ordinary work of an agile development team. Being able to specify how long your next task will take makes it easier to plan iterations and determine the status of the project as a whole.

So, in the grand tradition of a blogger writing things down in order to force himself into some more systematic thinking, here are some ideas about estimating.

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…and why would we go around doing that when there are perfectly good solutions out there for online spreadsheets? For instance Google Docs in which I still haven’t found a bug or a feature I’m missing.

Spreadsheets are necessary because people use them because they know how to use them. It is a straight forward interface that can yield good in high complexity situations.

Now most people want to use them online. And luckily there are plenty to go around.

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The Chicago JavaScript Meetup Group spurred more than 50 of its members to brave harsh weather Thursday night for the group’s fourth free get-together since its founding last October.

Organizer Vlad Didenko led the charge with an in-depth look at Firebug, while assistant organizer Justin Meyer contributed a discussion of Ajax fundamentals.

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I recently had to work on some deployment tasks and used deprec gem to check out how it can help. deprec is one of the most admired gem outside of pure rails application deployment arena. It is one of the most successful attempts at demonstrating how capistrano can be used as a more generic deployment tool and not just for deploying rails apps.

However, there are a few design choices that I think warrants more thought if I were to continue to use it successfully for all my deployment needs.

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Here is some follow up information from the Flex Camp Chicago ’09 Community Showcase presentation.

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On Beyond Zebra

Previously on Agile Ajax: I wrote about a complicated problem that went beyond ActiveRecord. I resolved to add a database column with pre-generated results to make the search logic easier. Commenters questioned my reluctance to use SQL directly.

I wanted to come back to this topic and talk about the process of creating and maintaining the pre-generated data. To reiterate the problem, I needed a report that would display:

• All individual times for all swimmers within search criteria
• The most recent relay time for a swimmer in each event, but only if the most recent relay matches the critera, otherwise don’t show any relay times

The solution being pursued is to add a “most_recent_relay” field to the database and use that in a two-phase database search to display the report.

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Hamid Shojaee from www.axosoft.com put together a great video to introduce the core concepts of scrum and Agile practices called “Scrum in under 10 minutes“

I really like what he said particularly the focus on the importance and simplicity of the burndown chart which helps to :

• Visually show the hours remaining, and help anyone see “are we there yet?”

• Allows decision-makers to make adjustments if needed

A simple burndown chart quickly shows the impact of some of the most common efficiency killers or blockers

1.    late-breaking requirements changes
2.    waiting for business decision
3.    waiting for tech. partner (ssl keys, ops. vendor, etc)

He mentioned the standup, but didn’t cover the 3 questions (What did you do?, What are you going to do? What do you Need in order to accomplish it?), or the idea that only people that have work can speak (Chickens vs. pigs)

I also liked his take on bugs, that you should plan a sprint to tackle them, and any bugs that come up during a sprint should be tackled immediately.

That’s actually something that a lot of teams struggle with, “How do you plan for and estimate the time necessary to fix bugs?”

I always say Bugs Can’t be estimated. While you may be able to plan how much time you will allocate to working on bugs, you can’t really estimate how long it will take to fix bugs unless you have already looked at them, and have figured out the problem. From my point of view its the “looking at it and figuring out what’s wrong”, that takes the longest, and is the part that needs to be accounted for.

How do you plan for bugs?
Do you let bugs accumulate and then have a final sprint before a Release where you tackle all of the bugs? (How would you know that you can fix all the bugs in time for the release?)

Do you tackle all High-Priority bugs as soon as they come up, and leave the medium and small priority bugs for later?

Do you have a ‘zero-bug’ policy, where you fix any bugs that are opened?

UPDATE: I’ve expanded on this discussion a little more in a new post Bugs Can’t be estimated, and after having some discussions around how best to plan for bugs, I was asked to do a last minute Security Analysis, and I wrote a post about How to avoid the last minute security review, and I think that the planning part can actually apply to how you manage a big list of bugs as well.

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If you use git on windows or cygwin, I am sure you’ve encountered this.

$ git add dir/newfile
fatal: LF would be replaced by CRLF in dir/newfile

While there is much confusion/discussion around how to handle this using core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf config attributes, I have lately settled with this recommendation:

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If File.open(“~/etc/my_config_file”) doesn’t work for you, try File.open(File.expand_path(“~/etc/my_config_file”))

Not sure, why File.open() does not handle this internally?

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One of the most useful features of ActionController is the ability to add filters before, after, or around actions.  This tool is made even more powerful by the ability to chain filters together.  Allowing an AOP approach is indispensable for addressing cross cutting concerns (or simply separating concerns), and is one of the things which makes a framework valuable to a developer (Spring is an excellent example of this).

A while back, I had a requirement to persist a record of which email addresses were sent an email through the system.  I expected to find callback support for ActionMailer, but was surprised to find that it didn’t exist.

I had three options: put the logic inline in each ActionMailer method which is not DRY and muddles concerns, put the logic in the ActionContoller as filters which break encapsulation in terrible ways (and is at the wrong layer), or extend ActionMailler to allow callback methods.

I choose the latter…

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