Monthly Archives: February 2012

Daily Stand-up is About the Future not the Past

Posted by on 2012/02/28 No comments

In the last couple of weeks, I was thinking a lot about daily stand-up meetings for two particular reasons: first of all, the meeting I was attending was inefficient, and second, something bugged me with the whole concept. We were following the structure introduced by the Scrum framework: every member talks about what she did yesterday, what she’ll do today and what is blocking her from achieving her plans.
What really bothered me was the first question: “what did you do yesterday?“. If one works with a co-located small sized team why should one talk about the past? Talking about the past is a waste of time, or if it is necessary then something is wrong with the organization: people work together and they have no idea what the others are doing. Unfortunately, we talked a lot about the past. Management was interested in the past, so during the last months the whole meeting turned into a sync meeting, where we gave a report about our activities.

The sad thing is that we are always one day behind. Quite recently during a stand-up, a colleague of mine talked about an interesting database change. He implemented a workaround and gave us the highlights during the daily stand-up. I remember clearly that he got very good and usable feedback on a real implementation, not a workaround, but since the change happened in the past and it would have taken too much time to change it back, nothing happened and the workaround stayed. If he had mentioned this before, we wouldn’t have had to live with a workaround which will cause a lot of trouble later. This is the price we’ll pay later for living in the past. Read more »

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Fix ALL The Failing Test Cases

Posted by on 2012/02/11 No comments

I’ve created a meme for those who spend most of their time working with legacy code and fixing test cases, like myself:

:-)

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Learn More About the History of a Line with Git Blame

Posted by on 2012/02/07 No comments

I’m working on an interesting refactoring project at the moment. Today, I found a strange part in the code and I was really curious who implemented it and why, so I run git blame to learn more about it. Since I cannot share code from the customer’s repository, I’ll use the code from one of my repositories. Let’s say that the Munger.java is not working as it is supposed to work, and the test framework reports problem at line 9:

% git blame -L8,+3 src/main/java/com/zsoltfabok/blog/Munger.java
ab7e2b50 (Zsolt 2012-01-25 00:26:17 +0100  8)     public String munge(String word) {
e26fd52f (Zsolt 2012-02-07 20:45:30 +0100  9)       if (word.length() > 2) {
e26fd52f (Zsolt 2012-02-07 20:45:30 +0100 10)           return word;

It seems that the commit e26fd52f affected that line, let’ see what the change is about:

% git show e26fd52f
commit e26fd52f2de26bb087f63fd70458e75e08540a02
Author: Zsolt Fabok
Date:   Tue Feb 7 20:45:30 2012 +0100
 
    Indentation fix
 
     public String munge(String word) {
-        if (word.length() < 2) {
-            return word;
-        } else {
-            StringBuilder temp = new StringBuilder(word);
-            temp = temp.reverse();
-            return switchFirstAndLastCharacters(temp).toString();
-        }
+      if (word.length() < 2) {
+          return word;
+      } else {
+        StringBuilder temp = new StringBuilder(word);
+        temp = temp.reverse();
+        return switchFirstAndLastCharacters(temp).toString();
+      }

This is what I saw during the day: someone did and irrelevant change – indentation fix in this case -, which prevents me from learning about the change that I’m actually interested in. Fortunately, git is the best version control system on the market, and provides some help in cases like this one. Read more »

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Software Passion Summit 2012, 10% Discount for Followers

Posted by on 2012/02/07 No comments

I’m going to talk at Software Passion Summit 2012 about Measuring and Managing Flow in practice and Achieving Maintenance Stabilisation with Agile, Kanban and Lean Thinking. I’ve just received a mail from the event organizer, and the good news is that the blog followers of the speakers who plan to attend the conference can get a 10 percent discount from the current price. If you would like to use this discount, please send me a private message. My contact information is on the right.