Edge of Chaos

Cool ideas about project status indication. Ever use Lava Lamp or ambient ORB for that? I don’t, but we should try them to grab teams’ attention. Well, this is really rocks.

Just one more related link:

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/pa/pa.html

Guys from JetBrains have created really fascinating product – ReSharper.

It provides many very useful features, but this is not a case by the way. The most important thing for me is an instantaneous feedback. When you are doing something, feedback helps you. And quick feedback helps ten times better.

Really. Just let’s check why Extreme Programming so successful.

• TDD gives you quick feedback about code (within minutes). Push button – see results.
• Continuous integration provides info about project correctness several times a day
• Acceptance tests give notion about system functionality every day

So quick feedback significantly improves our performance as developers, and greatly affects overall project success. And any tool, that can provide instantaneous feedback, will be the king of the market.

ReSharper reads assemblies and able to give you real-time info about errors, dependencies, etc. (compiler gives feedback within a minute or so). I just compile rare. I love it.

Some thoughts about user stories and tasks. I think tasks are bad in most cases. Disadvantages are clear:

• It is an additional level of refinement
• Break down user stories into tasks isn’t a pain, but it takes time
• It is less comfortable to measure project progress

Solution? Just create user stories from 1 to 3 ideal days of effort. Sure, for really big systems and large teams this can be extremely hard. But for small to average size projects short user stories are better than user stories + tasks.