Ah, the one thing Agile and Scrum seek to avoid has struck once more!

Yet again we have a coding task blocking us from moving forward, we thought we had avoided this problem by better defining our tasks however it would appear not. We cannot write code for calculating the residual nitrogen until we have an idea of how the tables are going to be represented and store. Perhaps this should have been designed better but then we have different levels of skill and ability in the group so that is one of those “Oh, we should have thought of that” type problems.

Anyway, while Alan and Stacey were working away on that Rory and I moved on to the third user story and actually managed to take care of a number of the tasks (design and GUI implementation). Was quite nice to see the chart start to go downward on the next story, gave a nice feeling of concurrency (or perhaps that is just John Arnott’s Computer Architecture lectures going to my head!).

The pair programming seems to be going more smoothly this time around, all three teams working hard on their tasks, was a very nice atmosphere.

A couple of quotes from today that made us all smile (after seeing a comic strip about the upcoming Lego online game):

“Learn to build n00b”

“Can I haz ur bricks?”

The Refactor Tractor has been beaten….by Lego!

Technically an off day for the agile project however Paul and Martyn researched the residual nitrogen calculations and came to a rather disturbing truth that all of the data from the PADI tables is going to have to be computerised.

While the research was going on there were some more problems with the source control however most of it is due to the team having to pick up an entirely new concept, let alone a new system. All seems to have smoothed out however, just got to keep reminding people of the steps the need to take in order to check files in and out.

Scrum master for the week is Stacey.

As I pointed out yesterday we had a large HCI hand-in today and really the entire team needed to focus on collating all of our material together into the report.

To start our day off there were numerous problems with the source control and continuous integration server, documents were not checking out properly etc. But after a little bit of jiggling everything sorted itself out. As I have said before, it would have been great to have had source control right from the start but due to the nature of the module and the learning curve being so steep to begin with, there is just no way you could have students trying to understand everything at once.

On the subject of source control, I really have started to dislike Team Foundation Server. Huge, bloated over-powered behemoth of a system that when you only need a fraction of it’s features actually wastes more time than it saves. Doesn’t meant I won’t ever use it and it has been useful to get some hands on experience using another type of source control but it most definitely wont be my first choice.

Subversion is lightweight, portable and entirely cross-platform. It doesn’t need a huge hulking backend server or advanced configuration, all you need is a web server, the pre-compiled SVN modules and the Subversion command line client. There is even a free deployable server for windows that you can install and have a working SVN repository in minutes (Check out VisualSVN Server). There are GUI’s for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux and there are even plug-ins for many of the major IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.)

Why do I love Subversion (apart from the above)? It’s simplicity! You can make your repository as simple or as complicated as your project demands and changes can be made easily. I carry around the svn client on a pen drive and I keep the majority of my projects (university, business and personal) stored in online SVN repositories I can access from almost any computer with an internet connection.

Anyway, I just needed to get that off my chest

As for the meeting with Janet today, not much to say on that, another paper to look at and report back on, we just have to get the finger out next week on the agile.

With another major hand-in tomorrow (HCI) we didn’t actually get much done today beyond a short scrum meeting. This is something that has really begun to bother me this semester and there is no real solution to it. We have so much coursework that overlaps despite having spaced out hand-in deadlines that it gets very hard to balance them all.

Group work is a very hard thing to manage on it’s own, however when you have multiple projects all vying for attention it makes the tasks even harder. I would like nothing more to devote 6 whole weeks to nothing but Agile however we have no such luxury in university. A shame, but such is life.

I wasn’t in today simply because I put off a meeting with a business contact for 3 weeks in order to do group work and yes I know I am supposed to be in University for group work and such, however we have 2 labs on a Wednesday and no lectures, during the labs we all work on group work anyway and I was not about to let my client down 4 weeks on the trot, not when there is business at stake.

As far as the project goes, well I managed to put everything into source control this evening, just got to hope everyone knows how it all works and doesn’t give the team hassle with Check Out/In locks (which are so much fun when the person who locked the code has gone home for the night).

Team seems to be getting on okay and to a point I am trying to take a little bit of a back seat from the programming tasks.