Pyxis’ Blog

• Retro September 2, 2010
  In September 2009, I decided that for the next year, I would concentrate on three goals: Reading (12 books) Blogging (40 posts) Coding (4 projects) What did I learn about setting objectives? What do I need to improve? These questions will be answered in a few moments… and if you care you might even hear […]
  mathieu berube
• Definition of DONE of an Agile Transition. August 31, 2010
  Any questions? […]
  pyxis
• Start doing sprint reviews, not demos August 31, 2010
  There’s a misunderstanding I’ve noticed in quite a few Scrum projects. Teams use Scrum and at the end of their sprint they do what they call a “sprint demo”. It works out like this: They demonstrate their increment of the prod... […]
  pyxis
• I don’t believe in self-organized teams… August 31, 2010
  Imagine my surprise when a candidate for an agile organizational coach role within our organization shared with me his perspective on this topic. “Can you share with me your reasoning?”, I asked him intrigued. The candidate went on to explain that people need direction and that people cannot self-organized without clear objectives and direction. Indeed, [... […]
  martin proulx
• Ayez le Scrum Robuste! August 27, 2010
  Scrum n’imposant rien sur le plan technique, une dérive couramment constatée est un manque de rigueur par rapport aux pratiques d’ingénieries utilisées par les équipes de développement.  Par exemple, l’omission de tests automatisés lors de l’évolution de projets informatiques rend généralement de plus en plus difficile l’atteinte de l’objectif de […]
  gael luisier
• Unit Testing Your Views With Velocity August 27, 2010
  Written in collaboration with Carl Létourneau What’s the problem? Creating software without bugs is hard. Many developers are used to unit test their models. Controllers are also relatively simple to test in many frameworks. Tests often hurt when it comes to Views – many frameworks make it hard, or developers might think it is. Sometimes we just […]
  mathieu berube
• Are We Done, Really Done or Really Really Done ? August 27, 2010
  This week, the first dry-run of the Professional Scrum Developer for Java course was given at Pyxis. For this occasion, 6 Pyxissians were on-site for 5 training days. Here is a sample of the many things we have learned. One of the fundamental aspects that was covered was producing a proper “definition of done”(D.O.D). For most of […]
  nicholas lemay
• Rediscovering ERB (without Rails) August 27, 2010
  Since I discovered Haml for my HTML templates in Rails, I stopped using ERB. Haml is more intuitive and readable to me. I am rediscovering ERB though for something else completely – Java code generation. There is a lot of boilerplate code in most Java projects. A good IDE can help you alleviate some of […]
  mathieu berube
• Between a rock and a hard place – The managers in an agile transition August 26, 2010
  I bumped into Steven last week. Steven is director of application development in a large organization and like most manager in his early forty’s, he looked tired and although he is usually a happy individual, his smile wasn’t radiant this time. In agreement with his teams, Steven initiated an Agile transition a few months ago. I [...] You might be interested […]
  martin proulx
• Where is the turtle heading? August 26, 2010
  Now that the vacations are over and that the 2010 Agile conference has come and gone, Team Urban Turtle is back to work, cooking up another promising release 3.4. With the release of the Scrum template from Microsoft came a Removed state, making it necessary to propose a recycle bin feature to our […]
  dominic danis