jon torresdal - Comments

Comment by Elisabeth Hendrickson on "Book Review: The Art of Agile Development"

suppressed@unknown.org (Elisabeth Hendrickson) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:01:28 GMT

Thanks for your kind words on my Exploratory Testing chapter! Glad you liked it. And I'm glad you like the book as a whole. I do to. It's an honor to be associated with it.

Posted by: Elisabeth Hendrickson

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Book Review: The Art of Agile Development"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:07:14 GMT

Just to clearify. When I said:

I'm still waiting for the Lean book by the Poppendieck's

What I really meant was:

I'm still waiting to get the Lean book by the Poppendieck's that I ordered

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Book Review: The Art of Agile Development"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:36:07 GMT

Without knowing too much about the term "Value Stream Mapping" (I'm still waiting for the Lean book by the Poppendieck's) I would suggest that the retrospective meeting after every iteration in Scrum and XP is a good candidate. In Contiki we also use release retrospective where we go through the complete release process step by step (from user story planning to actual release of the product) and evaluate what we did good and where we can improve. This might be closer to what Lean thinks of as "flow of materials"?. This let us add improvements to the process after every release, and sometimes even add complete new steps to the process that we found important. The best is of course to be able to improve by removing steps that has become redundant (eliminate waste?). One of the steps in our current "flow of materials" is bug fixing and stabilization at the end of the release. This is one of the steps we're trying to eliminate by having zero bugs in the sprints. During sprints we try to focus on our definition of Done Done. Did we manage to be Done Done on all stories in the sprint? If not why? How can we make sure this does not happen again? Did we get better at any of the improvement items we came up with in last retrospective? Where there many unplanned tasks we had to take care of? Why were there unplanned tasks? What can we do to prevent this in the next sprint? And so on... Could this be a NNUG talk? Sure. However, I would rather like to see an agile panel with different people from different companies in Bergen discussing their view. Spice this with questions from the audience and I think we could have an interesting debate. Actually we could need an agile user group in Bergen...

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Thomas Eyde on "Book Review: The Art of Agile Development"

suppressed@unknown.org (Thomas Eyde) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:07:13 GMT

I recently read an interesting piece on "Value in Value Stream Mapping": http://gotboondoggle.blogspot.com/2008/06/value-in-value-stream-mapping.html It seams like Improving the Process, Eliminate Waste and Deliver Value are interconnected. If we don't know our value stream, then our improvements boils down to cost reduction. What are your experience with value stream mapping or similar exercises? If you, or your company are willing to share these experiences, that would be something for an NNUG zip-talk, don't you think?

Posted by: Thomas Eyde

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Exposed as agile"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:10:39 GMT

Actually my burgers got a bit too done. Probably because I had to go in and out so many times :-) But that can be compared to another XP/Agile "rule". Don't be Done, but Done Done! ;-)

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Brad Storm on "Exposed as agile"

suppressed@unknown.org (Brad Storm) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:36:49 GMT

I think you're right. And most people I know usually fix problems recently identified instead of "planning" through problems. That's why Big Planning Up Front seems artificial and fails. However, sticking with a common known plan brings another benefit over "break and fix" mentality: it communicates the state of the system. Where you are and where you're going so everyone gets on the same page. I believe the balance between planning, adjusting through feedback, and communicating the updates to all stakeholders is a golden rule to follow. And lastly, I've never tasted your burgers so I wouldn't know the success from this approach ;) B-)

Posted by: Brad Storm

Comment by Scott Fletcher on "More comics"

suppressed@unknown.org (Scott Fletcher) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:45:55 GMT

Hee-hee. Don't get too used to those graphics! Some of them will look just one level above scribbles. :)

Posted by: Scott Fletcher

Comment by SelArom on "Http redirect on IIS7"

suppressed@unknown.org (SelArom) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:02:10 GMT

Thank you very much for posting this! I've been ripping my hair out wondering why the hell the damn thing won't redirect when it's because the damn redirect feature wasn't installed. DUH. you're right. an error message, or a suggestion, or SOMETHING FOR GOD'S SAKE would have been nice. thanks again!

Posted by: SelArom

Comment by Trond Aarø on "Theory is one thing..."

suppressed@unknown.org (Trond Aarø) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:54:43 GMT

... about the book... you need to register... that's why the link fails... of course...

Posted by: Trond Aarø

Comment by Trond Aarø on "Theory is one thing..."

suppressed@unknown.org (Trond Aarø) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:53:13 GMT

It's always interesting to read your blogposts Jon Arild! The link you provided to "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" failed; this one however works: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches Thanks again!

Posted by: Trond Aarø

Comment by Torbjørn on "Vista SP1 - Where is my contextual search?"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:38:40 GMT

"...but what I didn't like however, is that they changed the default functionality. Why not just keep it as it was, but in addition allow for other search vendors to plug in their technology." I agree, that is just stupid! Or maybe they wanted to be difficult after the antitrust case :)

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Vista SP1 - Where is my contextual search?"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:35:24 GMT

Related to desktop search I guess it's because there are other providers of the same technology (or search apps). I agree that Windows should not restrict their access points for search (Windows Start, context menues etc.) to only their own search engine, but make it configurable so that others can link their search engine to this "shortcut". Which is exactly what they did, but what I didn't like however, is that they changed the default functionality. Why not just keep it as it was, but in addition allow for other search vendors to plug in their technology.

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Torbjørn on "Vista SP1 - Where is my contextual search?"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:20:00 GMT

Competition law is basically a good thing, and making sure that the biggest software vendors don't tie in one product into the sale of another product makes sense to me. But it seams like it is going too far when they define the desktop search as not being a part of the operating system. The developments are worrying - this can be taken too far. Because the windows OS (or any OS) can be viewed as a bunch of small applications tied together, and in principle any part of it could be delivered by a different vendor. Should everything then be made pluggable? Pluggable architectures are nice for developers, but not necessarily for the product.

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by gøran on "Support incident from the 90’s"

suppressed@unknown.org (gøran) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:46:50 GMT

haha:) utrolig bra! Har hør lignende historier.. Helt utrolig:)

Posted by: gøran

Comment by Marc Freedman on "NNUG @ LinkedIn"

suppressed@unknown.org (Marc Freedman) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:26:22 GMT

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Posted by: Marc Freedman

Comment by Cavan on "Http redirect on IIS7"

suppressed@unknown.org (Cavan) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:49:19 GMT

Nice catch! You prob just saved me a couple of hours troubleshooting Cavan

Posted by: Cavan

Comment by Torbjørn on "Developer conference in Bergen?"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:24:47 GMT

Well, I would come :) I might even volunteer to participate in making it a reality. And I am also shocked about the current state of the .net developer community in Bergen. We would all benefit from more developers taking an active part, and maybe we could make that happen with a conference. Some big names could draw out the crowd. But if it doesn't it would be embarrassing :/

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by Torbjørn on "Øredev conference – Day 1"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:52:14 GMT

Very nice summary, Jon. At TechEd I listened to Joe Duffy's talk about Dealing with Concurrency and Multi-Core CPUs with Today's Development Technologies and also the related session called Parallel and Asynchronous Functional Programming on .NET with F# by Microsoft researcher Done Syme. They didn't talk too much about ParallelFX (just what it's going to be), but the topic of parallelism is a very interesting one, and I think it's an area where we can't expect the framework to do the job for us anytime soon. Pat Hellands talk about the future of software and architecture also implies that this topic will be one of the most important ones in the coming years. This stuff can't kick in when needed (yet), so we should really start thinking about this stuff.

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by Torbjørn on "General specialist instead of specialist, revisited"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:55:56 GMT

I agree! ;D A principle I have always liked, but never managed to incorporate in my own or my teams work is that THE PERSON MOST SUITABLE TO DO A TASK SHOULD NEVER BE THE ONE DOING IT. He can and should be a mentor on the task - the person to consult on the design of the solution - but not the responsible one. That way you ensure that knowledge is spread around, but it might take some extra time to get the task implemented, and because of this it is almost never done. This is in the same category as Pair Programming, unit testing and so on.., if there is an extra cost at the beginning it's extremely difficult to make it happen. I guess that's why they call it eXtreme Programming :)

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by Torbjørn on "General specialist instead of specialist"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 07:17:13 GMT

I have kind of a different take on this... The problem with specialists is strongest when you have a small team. But as you grow you need more and more specialization - or else you will not improve and be able to utilize the number of team members. If you have 15 developers, and three of them are database specialists, that is not a big problem.., if one is hit by the buss the other two still comes to work in the morning :) If you have 100 developers and five of them is a specialist on the application specific messenger system, that's the same, no problem. So I think this has more to do with scaling. If you have a single developer he has to know everything, but if you have two developers they can't split the knowledge in two.., and that's basically what you are saying.., like a great football team (Brann) you need good backup on all positions. But as you grow as a team I feel it's might be a mistake not to split knowledge on the architectural layers. Nobody can be an expert of everything, and I feel that a feature will be implemented best by a UI designer, communications expert, domain model expert and database expert working as a team than a single developer having to know everything. Sharing knowledge should be a given, but sadly we have no good culture for doing this in Norway at least - too little focus is given to it by everyone, including management and the developers themselves. The only point speaking against specialists in my opinion is the need to know the whole in order to come up with the right design decisions. In my world that is where the architect comes into play, but in a strict agile environment you're not supposed to have that, are you?!

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by Torbjørn on "Typing"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:55:11 GMT

Number of words typed: 125 Test duration: 3 min Speed: 41.8 words/min. (209 keystrokes/min.) Error penalty: 4 Accuracy: 96.8% So I'm slower but better ;) Did this on a cold Monday morning.., should be able to type faster.

Posted by: Torbjørn

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Google Reader with support for search"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:40:17 GMT

Depending on how many blogs you subscribe to, 60 hits may not be much. Let’s say you want to find blog posts about LINQ, you'll probably get more than 60 hits (at least I do). This reminds me of a how people do searches in Google. You have 2 groups of search readers. Group 1 has configured Google to display 10 hits per page, and group 2 has 100 per page. I belong to the second group and I would guess you belong to the first.

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Halvard on "Google Reader with support for search"

suppressed@unknown.org (Halvard) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:39:26 GMT

If you get more than 60 hits, maybe you should consider changing the search criteria?

Posted by: Halvard

Comment by trond aarø on "TV Program Guide - LINQ"

suppressed@unknown.org (trond aarø) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:23:33 GMT

Nice work! I guess this is the start of a tv-on-demand project....? Can't wait to see the silerlight-app!

Posted by: trond aarø

Comment by Bård Strøm on "Honeymoon!"

suppressed@unknown.org (Bård Strøm) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 08:38:07 GMT

Grattis så mye. Så helt fantastisk ut. Og velkommen til "vi giftet oss i 2007" klassen :-)

Posted by: Bård Strøm

Comment by Jarle on "Going to a .Net devcon in 2007?"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jarle) — Thu, 24 May 2007 13:01:48 GMT

A dew of us in the office went to DevWeek2007 (http://www.devweek.com/), pretty good event in London.

Posted by: Jarle

Comment by bizz on "Google Apps"

suppressed@unknown.org (bizz) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:45:54 GMT

ive been using apps for a little while now - its awesome. i have a little side business i run and it has saved me a bunch of cash cause i just use cal - mail - docs instead of buying ms office. if you want a cool program that works with apps check out calgoo. www.calgoo.com - ive been using it since it hit beta and its has some nice bonus features that make the google cal better. bizz

Posted by: bizz

Comment by Trond Aarø on "Microsoft Silverlight code name “WPF/E”"

suppressed@unknown.org (Trond Aarø) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:45:09 GMT

I liked the MWPFEIGUI, but i should be MWPFEIGUI/E of course :-)

Posted by: Trond Aarø

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "Microsoft Silverlight code name “WPF/E”"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:35:46 GMT

Actually, Sparkle is the codename for Microsofts Expression Interactive Designer tool.., my bad! Still, that's also part of Microsoft strategy to kill of Flash, and probably what you'll use to create design elements for your Silverlight web apps :|

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "Microsoft Silverlight code name “WPF/E”"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:51:51 GMT

Actually it's even funnier: Microsoft's internal codename for WPF/E - now Silverlight - is actually Sparkle!!! That's a synonym for flash :)

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø

Comment by John on "New features in C# Orcas"

suppressed@unknown.org (John ) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:56:02 GMT

Don't forget to point out that most of those are changes in the compiler, not in the runtime, so they work if you are cross-compiling to 2.0 :) J

Posted by: John

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "Microsoft is testing message recalls in Outlook"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 06:06:04 GMT

Funny :)

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø

Comment by Trond AarÃ¸ on "Office RoundTable"

suppressed@unknown.org (Trond AarÃ¸) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:13:50 GMT

Nice !!!

Posted by: Trond AarÃ¸

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "Logging bandwidth and referers on IIS 7"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:06:15 GMT

I find it really strange that Microsoft hasn't employed 10 "monkeys" to produce the GUI required to do all the settings in IIS. They should be able to do this in no time at all (relative to how long we are wainting for stuff from that company). You might argue that they don't want to do this until the configuration schema has been stabilized, but come on(!), the 10 monkeys can do it again and again and again. GUI to change config settings is probably the easiest programming task you have. I know the development process and life cycle at M$ is kindo of heavy and bloated, but I really don't get this!

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø

Comment by Jarle Nygård on "What have I done!"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jarle Nygård) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:40:14 GMT

Why choose? I believe the "ultimate" office setting is one where the team is in a big room and there are several smaller offices surrounding it, where one can go to get some privacy/quiet. I hope we can have such an arrangement next year, when we're moving. :)

Posted by: Jarle Nygård

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "What have I done!"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:07:42 GMT

I don't know what to say. This is a perplexing problem - I don't seam able to think logically and decisively about this issue. I want an office. I don't want an office. I want an office. When I look for the arguments they all swim away from me... Anyway, nice article. We're going to miss you!

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø

Comment by Jarle Nygård on "Scrum and office landscape"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jarle Nygård) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:44:16 GMT

I was one of the attendants at the meeting and I enjoyed a few beers after the meet with Jon Arild. We're currently stuck in our own offices, but most of us are eager to try an open office setting. BTW: We're using a mix of scrum and MSF Agile to do our dev., in our first iteration on our new version now! Looking good! :)

Posted by: Jarle Nygård

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Scrum and office landscape"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 11:29:21 GMT

Ok. I've just started a little experiment. I have now moved myself into an office! I'll have to emphasize that this is temporary! :) I'll let you know how it goes. My biggest concern is missing out on something (decision made without me being involved), or that people will avoid to ask me a question or that I will avoid asking others questions, because I'm sitting in an office down the hall. As an architect I like being part of the small decisions that is made every day (which is not always that small). I’ve also cleaned up my desk, so the next office picture you’ll see will be much better :)

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "Scrum and office landscape"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:51:18 GMT

Trond, if you get distracted by other people talking while you code, you really CAN multitask your brain! When I put my headset on, I enter The Zone, where only me, my machine and my code exists. If someone needs to disturb me in my Zone, they need to use messenger.

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø

Comment by Trond Aarø on "Scrum and office landscape"

suppressed@unknown.org (Trond Aarø) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:14:33 GMT

What a disturbing picture! I don't think this is a good place to create good ideas! ( I know you do(despite), so... :-) ). I'm quite sure that this is a place where there are ongoing flow of interupts. Developers should be sheilded from interupts, this is the other way around! Noise is not good, neither audioal nor visual. To put a headset on to get a quiet moment, - what a terrible idea. People are different, I know. Some find it cool that remainings of yesterdays pizza is still on the desk, - I don't. Some like to listen to music while they work, - I don't. Some get energy from the apperance of others, I get energy from quiet and an interesting problem. Some people can multitasking their brain, I can't (according to my wife). Good communication is important, but it can be done otherwise. I would prefered good meetingpoints outside the "thinkingboxes". At least: Tidy up boys! Cover the wires in some way. Do you think that any woman would like to work at your place?

Posted by: Trond Aarø

Comment by Jon Arild Tørresdal on "Scrum and office landscape"

suppressed@unknown.org (Jon Arild Tørresdal) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:03:45 GMT

Our developers have yet to see their own office, so they have not yet placed a value on that :) But we did an anonymous poll after sitting like this for 1 year and asked if they wanted their own office? Everybody answered NO! Today we actually have quite a few vacant offices, previously used by sales people who are now working from Oslo, but no one wants them. About privacy and phone calls we use vacant meeting rooms or one of the offices for this. There are still times though when you need to concentrate extra on the task at hand. We then often put on our headset and listen to some music or go to a meeting room or an office.

Posted by: Jon Arild Tørresdal

Comment by Katie Playfair on "Scrum and office landscape"

suppressed@unknown.org (Katie Playfair) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:23:48 GMT

Yes indeed the physical layout of a workspace can do wonders for promoting good communication. Teaching teams how to set up "team rooms" is one of the many things we'll do if we're new to an organization that wants to implement Scrum. But what do you think this does to the high value some people place on private offices? What have you done in your space to allow people to make private phone calls or handle conversations during the day that can't take place in a team room? I still have a private office but I keep the door open so I can talk to my teammate outside the door. I have to admit that it's nice to close the door to make client calls though. We often have one private office with a phone and computer so folks can take care of any personal communication that must happen during the workday. What do you do?

Posted by: Katie Playfair

Comment by Halvard on "It's official"

suppressed@unknown.org (Halvard) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:35:00 GMT

Just keep that pizza coming ...

Posted by: Halvard

Comment by Trond on "Joel Spolsky refuse bribe from Microsoft, but needs new hot tub"

suppressed@unknown.org (Trond) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:49:52 GMT

You can borrow my Ferrai (and my Ferrari laptop), if you promise to not say anytime unfavourable about me on your blog! trond

Posted by: Trond

Comment by Torbjørn Marø on "My new DasBlog site is here!"

suppressed@unknown.org (Torbjørn Marø) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 08:32:33 GMT

Your new graphics are cool!!! ;D

Posted by: Torbjørn Marø