Month: January 2007

Project RMR, you are go!

After 6 months of concepts, estimating, planning, prototyping, designing and hiring, one project is put on the shelf for 6 months, while the other, RMR, has just ramped up to full development. I've spent three weeks setting up the development environment, build scripts, source control, as well as written guide lines for the new project members. I've also spend time implementing some stubs for the services which our client will call, to allow the GUI part of the team to get moving, so they don't wait for us to finish the DB and service implementation. Today the first features were assigned, and very importantly, the integration token was built! Here it is: We're developing using something akin to Feature Driven Development, which is an agile methodology. To enable this, we create branches in our source control and each develop a feature at a time, independently of others in the team. The integration token is used to ensure that only one person merges their branch back into the trunk/head at a time. If you have the token on your desk you can merge. If you don't have it and you do a merge, you run the risk of having to do merges for a whole week as a lesson not to do it again! If your'e wondering what happend to "manager", well it's still being developed, and were actually using it on the project to manage the feature allocation. One nice feature that I built last week is the service locator.…

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Open Plan Noise

I moved into a new open plan office this week, and its still being refurbished. At each entrance, there is a dispenser like this one: I assumed it was there because of the building work noise, but today I saw people wandering around with ear plugs in, even though no workmen were present. It became clear that these are not available due to the refurbishment work, rather due to the fact its an open plan office!  

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