Active Developer Blog

We're Doing a Build, and This is a Test

guest — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:44:18 GMT

As a Dev Manager I get to test builds in Production. Making sure this posts ok. Hello World.

They Paint the Office Walls in China

guest — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:46:26 GMT

Update: I was wrong in saying they painted the walls white. They actually put murals of atheletes on the walls.

Five of the people on my team work out of our China office in X’ian. Last week they informed me they were taking Monday off for a team building exercise. Each team was given a wall in the office to paint. And they didn’t paint murals. Nope, just a fresh coat of white paint.

On Tuesday they were instructed to work from home to avoid the overwhelming smell of drying paint. So we had our weekly standup meeting on instant messenger (I actually found this to be a rather effective way to communicate with my team there) instead of on the phone.

I love these little cultural differences.

I must say, though, that I’ve never had a team of more enthusiastic, dedicated people than my team in China. They own their work and take personal pride in getting it done the right way. Now if I could only figure out how to do Agile with them…

Agile Development

guest — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:28:02 GMT

We've been experimenting with several development methodologies here within the Consumer Media group at Active (the Consumer Media group is responsible for active.com). Agile methodologies promise increased quality with a renewed focus on testing and collaboration. These methodologies also help with our aggressive release schedule where we push out new features and bug fixes every three weeks.

But "Agile" is hard to do with offshore teams. Some of our development is done locally (in California and Michigan), while the rest of the development team is offshore in China. The China team is best utilized when they have well-detailed Software Requirements Specifications (SRS). Collaboration, a key component of "Agile", is difficult because of A) the time difference and B) the language barrier.

Nonetheless, we're working on creating a hybrid model that incorporates the collaborative aspects of agile development while leveraging our remote resources effectively. I'm not sure what the model and am working with various teams internally to work through it.

In the meantime I wanted to share a little presentation I put together on Scrum. Enjoy.