Story Mapping
Again not so much time this week to look around into the web-sphere. My reading queue is growing, the video one is worse. Not to mention podcasts, since I couldn’t run this week for a severe back pain. I decided to report on the few things I was able to collect a summary about.
The most interesting of the week
I realized I was using this organizational pattern for user stories already. The new user story backlog is a map collect stories, epics and tasks on a permanent board. Instead of having only the current iteration (or sprint) board, all stories are organized permanently on another huge board where relationships and context can be maintained. I’ve seen this in practice working as a consultant for a project managed by ThoughtWorkers. As the article clearly stated this is nothing new but just a pattern emerging from multiple places. After I heard about minimum marketable features from naked planning this is the time of “minimum viable product”. They mirror the same thing. Epic is another synonym. The important point in this approach is that stories belonging to different epics are worked together to release a product which is “epic-complete” but maybe not story-complete. Stories are prioritized, epics really aren’t.
This Week’s Highlights
Podcast #50 - Blog - Stack Overflow - Steve Yegge… It sounds like at Google are creating an standardized support layer which adds language specific features to IDEs. If you take for example IntelliJ and Eclipse they provide the same quality Java support features like autocompletion, inline help or compile as you write kind of stuff. The same happens for other IDEs and languages: they are implementing the same functionalities over and over again. As a developer for example I’d like to have autocompletion in TextMate but that’s not enough for me to move to Aptana. My understanding is that they started from JavaScript support to create the framework, supporting their internal type system for the most important IDEs. Of course they have to support also other languages to go public with the framework. Maybe one day we’ll be able to command+space in vi and have autocompletion :)
Stefano’s Linotype - On Twitter… Mmmh. Stefano thinks that when information is just so not-digested is difficult to understand the ROI of the effort required to follow. It’s like reading reddit, infoq, tuaw etc. every day. All wonderful sources of information but those news are so “new” that they can turn completely useless in just minutes. It’s like gambling: in this case the risk is to waste time. He talks about Twitter specifically. But for me Twitter is not the place for news. What I’m mostly interested in is what are other people habits, what they do during the day, how they can so productive, what extra-job activities they have and when. For me it’s a source of completely new information, nothing to do with IRC or blogs where personal habits are completely out of scope. Before Twitter I couldn’t really know what software geniuses were up to or in which way they tackle a problem during their everyday life at work. Twitter is for me inspiring 90% of the time. No gambling.
Industry Misinterpretations 133: Smalltalk and FPGAs… Enjoyed some history of the Squeak community. Squeak users somehow self-organized to avoid a community split when squeakers with different ideas wanted to create their on branch. Sad fact: SmallTalk was too young to be used in the early eighties when memory consumption was an issue and people were choosing C++ for that. SmallTalk is now considered too old without having spent a period as a mainstream language. It looks like there is a lot of interested about hardware implementation of languages for specific business on FPGA and GPU. The first reason is of course the always decreasing price of such a devices. In this podcast an FPGA implementing smalltalk instructions is only running as a simulation but soon to be “printed” in hardware. There is a one-to-ten ratio for a transistor implemented as FPGA over the actual number of transistors actually used. Still a good ratio considering ad-hoc hardware design on one side and generic CPU like Intel’s on the other.
7 months ago