Communauté d'utilisateurs .NET et Agile de Québec

The Wisdom of Experience

lpcarignan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:22:00 GMT

Alan Cooper a donné une présentation à la fin de la conférence Agile intitulée "The Wisdon of Experience". Il ne parlait pas d'expérience en termes d'ancienneté. Plutôt, il parlait de "user experience" où comment fabrique-t-on nos logiciels pour que l'expérience entre ces derniers et l'utilisateur soit agréable. Très intéressant à regarder et à lire les notes à droite pendant que les images défilent.

Cooper a lu son texte comparativement aux deux autres présentateurs. Il explique pourquoi ici.

Comment faire pour avoir une chance de gagner un abonnement d'un an à MSDN PREMIUM

gaulu1 — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Qu'est-ce qu'un abonnement MSDN PREMIUM?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/subscriptions/aa718661.aspx

Pour avoir une chance de gagner, il suffit de soumettre un sujet de présentation au CUNQ (www.cunq.org) et si le sujet est retenu, de venir le présenter.

Le tirage aura lieu en juin prochain.

Chaque présentation donnera droit à une chance de gagner.

Soumettre votre sujet de présentation via le formulaire Contactez nous sur le site du CUNQ en précisant le titre de la présentation, une description et quand vous seriez en mesure de le présenter.

State of Agile Survey Results

lpcarignan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:56:00 GMT

Depuis 3 ans, VersionOne publie un sondage qui donne un aperçu des méthodologies Agile utilisées dans l'industrie.

Je trouve que le sondage de cette année est 100 fois meilleur que l'année précédente. Entre autre, on y retrouve des questions suivantes:

What are/were the organization's greatest concerns regarding the adoption of Agile development?
What are the barriers to further adoption of Agile in your current organization?
Which of the following do you employ within your Agile methods? (différence entre 2007 et 2008)
What do you think was the leading cause of failed (unsuccessful) Agile projects?

IPWRCCCEF

lpcarignan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:14:00 GMT

How do you remember the Agile Manifesto?

I Party with Rowdy Criminals 2 C Exciting Fights

= IPWRCCCEF

= Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools; Working software over Comprehensive documentation; Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation; Embracing change over Following a plan.

Blue Screen Of Death ... at the Olympics

lpcarignan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:46:00 GMT

Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow

lpcarignan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:47:00 GMT

Fameuse phrase du livre The Mythical Man-Month de Fred Brooks, je trouve qu'elle colle très bien à la méthode scientifique de Lean.

Il commence le chapitre "Plan to Throw One Away", par l'exemple suivant:

Chemical engineers learned long ago hat a process that works in the laboratory cannot be implemented in a factory in only one step. An intermediate step called the pilot plan is necessary to give experience in scaling quantities up and operating in nonprotective environments.

Why time sheets are lame...

lpcarignan — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:51:00 GMT

Good post on Jeff Sutherland blog about the purpose of time sheets.

To sum it up:

They demotivate developers
10-15% loss of productivity is the minimum
Developers have to fake the time to fill them out properly
Erroneous data is used for reporting and management makes bad decisions
Customers are deceived
They have nothing to do with quality code production
They focus the whole organization on phony data instead of production

Even better, take a look at its graph. High quality work are on the X axis and number of hours worked during a week are on the Y axis. Even if your people work 20 hours a week, you get the same quality score as those putting 40 hours per week.

High-Performance...

lpcarignan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:05:00 GMT

This seems like the buzzword at the Agile conference this year. I've heard it many many times throughout the conference. We can put any word at the end of this buzzword, honest:

High-performance teams
High-performance organizations
High-performance processes
High-performance servers
High-performance <insert your word here>

With words like these, I guess the gap between Agilists and business people is finally closing!

Speaking about business, there was an excellent session about the gap between Agile and upper management: What Are They Doing - What a CIO Wants To Know From An Agile Development Team. I strongly suggest looking at the presentation (included in the link) and if you're an engineer, focus on the slide of being helpful rather than right!

Wisdom

lpcarignan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:04:00 GMT

Code or code not

There is no try

Automating your documentation in a .NET project

lpcarignan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:36:00 GMT

We use Sandcastle and Sandcastle Help File Builder (SHFB) to generate the SDK of our project. It's really neat but I always wondered if SHFB could do more. It's GUI has some plugins and properties that I never really explored. Dunno why. Never took the time until last Friday afternoon.

I finally convinced myself that I should click on some of those unknown features. How come it took me so long to do this? SHFB supports MAML, Microsoft new online help technology. In a nutshell, MAML separates the content from the presentation. Technology wise, it means you write conceptual topics in an XML format based on a schema. Then, XSLT is applied to your XML document with the help of the Sandcastle engine. The result is a very nicely formatted Html document. Pretty nice hey!

What is a conceptual topic? Well, it can be a glossary, a whitepaper, a how to, a walktrough, etc. Each topic has its own schema. The neat thing with SHFB is that you can edit your topic and preview it on the fly. Personally, the glossary and walk trough topics are my favourites. SHFB then assembles those topics together and produces a .chm file with all of them. This .chm file can then be called from your application with a help provider.

DocProject does the same thing as SHFB but it embeds itself in VS .NET. I tried it out but it wasn't intuitive. I was lost and didn't know how to produce a conceptual topic on the fly. Thank God DocProject has good documentation on how to get you started. But I was still lost with all those folders created for me in my project. It made me feel like in Visual Studio 6 where all this code was created and I had no idea what it did. And to create your .chm file with DocProject, you have to compile your project. Which is a bit weird if you ask me. And you can't preview it like SHFB. But with all this bitching, I still have to raise my hat to Dave Sexton for managing this project.

Overall, if you are looking for a tool to leverage your documentation, and I'm not talking about the SDK, check out Sandcastle Help Filder Builder, its definitely worth the time.

Oh, and be sure to download the Sandcastle Styles. They are need to have the latest styles when generating conceptual topics.

What is software engineering?

lpcarignan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:20:00 GMT

That's a very good question if you ask me? Well, Mary Poppendieck brought some very good points about this at a session during the Agile 2008 conference.

She looked at her bookshelf and browse her old software books to understand what we've been doing in software engineering for the past 40 years. Interestingly enough, some things that used to be popular (and are coming back) used to exist in the 60s and 70s. For example:

Continuous Integration
Designed-in Quality
Refactoring
Information Hiding
Respect for Complexity
Skilled Technical Leaders
Learnings Cycles
No seperation of design from implementation

These techniques are no silver bullets but they seem to have stood the test of time. Could these techniques be defining software engineering after all those years?

You can get Mary's presentation on her website.

Lean at the Agile 2008 conference

lpcarignan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:59:00 GMT

I attented the Agile 2007 conference. Their were 4 sessions about Lean:

At the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, this number double to 8:

I'm really glad to see more experience reports about Lean, especially the pull system as I think this is just revolutionary. After presenting Lean to lots of people in my company, the main feeling was that this stuff was pretty neat but nobody knew how to set it up. Well, people have figured it out and, hopefully, we can learn from their experience.

Acceptance Test Engineering

lpcarignan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:48:00 GMT

Les tests unitaires sont très populaires auprès de la communauté Agile mais qu'en est-il des tests d'acceptation? Ces tests semblent encore flous pour la communauté. Les outils existants (Fit, Fitnesse, Selenium) ne semblent pas répondre aux besoins de tous.

Quelques membres du groupe Patterns & Practices de Microsoft préparent un livre sur le sujet pour tenter de jeter les bases d'une définition claire des tests d'acceptation. On peut suivre leur progrès sur le site http://www.codeplex.com/TestingGuidance.

J'aime leur idée de définir ce qu'est les tests d'acceptation et comment s'en servir pour savoir si on peut livrer le produit au client. Les auteurs proposent un modèle qui, à mon avis, fonctionne dans presque tous les cas. Au bas complètement de la page d'accueil, il y a un sondage pour connaître votre définition des tests d'acceptation.

Being Agile is our favourite thing

kmetivier — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:40:58 GMT

Qu'est-ce qui arrive lorsque l'on mélange l'agilité avec la comédie musicale... Amusant, n'est-ce pas ?...(read more)

Outils pour l'agilité

kmetivier — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:43:09 GMT

Kent Beck, l'un des fondateurs du XP Programming, a écrit récemment un article, " Tools for Agility ", sur l'importance des outils avec les méthodologies agiles. Voici un petit résumé de ses propos: Dans le manifeste agile on parle entre autre de miser davantage sur les individus et les interactions que sur les outils et les processus de développement lourds. Mais cela ne veut pas dire qu'on n'a pas besoin d'outils. On ne parle pas ici de retourner à l'âge...(read more)

PDC 2008

gaulu1 — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:41:43 GMT

http://www.microsoftpdc.com

Ça y est. Mon inscription pour LA conférence de Microsoft est maintenant faite.

J'y serai du 26 au 31 octobre 2008 et je séjournerai au WESTIN (http://www.starwoodhotels.com/westin/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1004)

Maitenant, il me reste qu'à compter les dodos.

See you there...

Sql Injection Nerd Joke

lpcarignan — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:50:00 GMT

Most Respected Companies in 2008

lpcarignan — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Reputation Institute in New York, USA list the most respected companies each year. Global results for 2008 are in. Guess who finishes first...

http://www.reputationinstitute.com/knowledge-center/hall-of-fame#global_winners

Forbes has a slideshow of the top 10 companies.

Commerce Server 2007 SP2 disponible

gaulu1 — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:29:50 GMT

Commerce Server 2007 Starter Site Release 2

Commerce Server 2007 Service Pack 2 – Standard Edition (SP2)

Commerce Server 2007 Service Pack 2 – Enterprise Edition (SP2)

Commerce Server 2007 Service Pack 2 – Developer Edition (SP2) - prendre le même que pour Enterprise Edition

Commerce Server 2007 Service Pack 2 – Documentation Refresh

Commerce Server 2007 SP2 Partner Software Development Kit (SDK)

À vos marques, prêts, PDC

gaulu1 — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:20:30 GMT

L' inscription pour la conférence PDC de Microsoft, qui se tiendra du 26 au 30 octobre 2008, est maintenant ouverte: www.microsoftpdc.com

Sondage sur les tests d'acceptations

kmetivier — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:15:22 GMT

Grigori Melnik , que j’ai rencontré au Patterns and Practice Summit l’autre fois, m’a parlé d’un projet qu’il a commencé portant sur les tests d’acceptions. D’ici à ce que son lui et son équipe produisent les documents de « guidance », il a fait un petit sondage pour l’aider à voir où mettre le focus sur les choses qui NOUS concerne. Il m’a demandé de faire parvenir ce lien aux personnes que cela...(read more)

Bugzilla C# API + continuous integration

lpcarignan — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:43:00 GMT

I found this API to access Bugzilla through C#. It goes through XML-RPC .Net to access the web services of Bugzilla. While the web service is pretty limited (and experimental), it still gives you the ability to fetch the list of closed and opened bugs for a release (or iteration or milestone). You'll have to dig a little bit to find all the information you need about a bug (look at data member internals in BugInfo).

Imagine pluging this in your continuous integration. It could generate your list of bugs automatically without changing any reports in Bugzilla. One more thing you can automate!

Présentation de Grigori Melnik

agileqc — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:32:54 GMT

Voici le lien pour avoir le PDF de la présentation que Grigori Melnik a donné à la Communauté Agile de Québec la semaine passée:

Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond : Empirical Evidence of Agile Methods: ce que nous savons, ce que nous pensons savoir et ce que nous voulons savoir

Poka yoke

lpcarignan — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:46:00 GMT

Un collègue au travail m'a envoyé 2 liens vers "Poka yoke" (mistake proofing).

Vraiment intéressant, surtout le premier lien:

http://gojko.net/2007/05/09/the-poka-yoke-principle-and-how-to-write-better-software/

http://www.mistakeproofing.com/software.html

Graphique Agile

lpcarignan — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:03:00 GMT

Mon boss m'a envoyé ce vidéo YouTube qui compare graphiquement agile à l'approche traditionnelle. Une image vaut mille mots!