MostEffectiveStepsICanTakeForIntroducingXPToAnOrganisation

The most effective thing I did was to get CruiseControl system up and running. It has introduced the notion of a tight feedback loop to all of the developers, giving frequent big picture views of the project changes, and most importantly provided a home for unit tests to live and run. All this is made highly visible by the servlet web page that is generated for the build. -NeilThorne

OliBye agrees as CruiseControl forces the project to have a build script, and a build machine independent of any developers. I think because Kent came from the shared smalltalk repository world, he got some of this for free. 1 CVS or your favourite source code control system. 2 Ant 3 CruiseControl 4 Put in your gumsheild 5 Now we might be able to start some XP!

It can also highlight anyone with something to hide. I have so far been shouted down everytime I've raised the suggestion of using CruiseControl. I think fear of discovery may have something to do with it. --DarrenHobbs

PS. Does anyone know a way of linking CC on a Solaris Box to VisualSourceSafe? on an NT machine?

-- Darren, I believe you need a VSS client for Unix. I'm not sure that exists. I take it your development machine is a Unix box? If not just set up CC on your own. Why do you need anyone's permission? Is your environment highly policed? You could just start running it on your own PC (if you have one). All you really need is Apache, Tomcat, CC and a SourceSafe client. --NeilThorne

NeilThorne also tried getting everyone to start recording estimated and actual time to calculate some ProjectVelocity but could not convince them or my manager. So instead I started to record MY VELOCITY in my weekly progress reports to my boss. He laughed at the term at first, but didn't mind me introducing it. It also seemed silly for the first two weeks. But after two months I now have an interesting graph. I also try to record the reasons why I think my velocity was high or low.

After 2 months some interesting patterns are starting to emerge and I think my boss is actually starting to learn something about how my time is managed. I think the secret is to make sure that you can complete at least 1 task in under a week of calendar time, otherwise at the end of the week you can't record your velocity since you didn't actually complete a single task.

OliBye suggests you need smaller tasks! ³host³³date³April 30, 2002³agent³Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)³MostEffectiveStepsICanTakeForIntroducingXPToAnOrganisation