SCRUM at Guidewire

A month ago, I have joined guidwire, a local start-up building insurance products.

At guidwire, we are using SCRUM. So every new hire will get a book of "Agile Software Development with SCRUM". Somehow I missed it but I found it soon enough and got a copy right away.

I don't know why I never got a chance to read this book and I am really glad that I did. SCRUM is very much like the project management part of what I have been doing for the last several years. This includes the details like format of SCRUM meeting (daily stand-ups), feature backlog (master story list), goal driven team development.

On google video, there is a presentation done by Ken himself: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011&q=ken+scrum.
In it, he talked about SCRUM and XP complements each other. I didn't understand it before, and now I think it is really true.

Typing Contest : Dvorak vs. QWERT

After switching to Dvorak for almost a year, I decided to switch back to QERTY, for two reasons.

• I was pairing at least 6 hours a day and was driving everyone mad with the layout switching
• I wanted to see how fast I was with QWERTY.

Before I switched back, I timed myself in typing out the page "Dvorak Follow-Up". Now that I am fluent with QWERTY again (I should have done that earlier but I was too lazy), I just typed the page again using QWERTY.

And the result is...(drum...)...

DVORAK!

Time used with Dvorak: 9:28minutes.
Time used with QERWT: 9:55 minutes

I cannot say that I am not surprised. After all, I have been typing QWERTY almost my entire life and I only used Dvorak for a year. But here you go.

On the other side, 30 second is very small. I could just be tired tonight.

I also finished the "Joy and Pain with Fitnesse" in 29:30 minutes using QWERTY. If I ever switch to Dvorak again, I might do another contest.

Scrum et al. at Google Vedio

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011

I thought it was interesting on the part that SCRUM works with XP. I always thought SCRUM was too much on the management side, and now I think I know why.

Too bad most of the guys on agilechina cannot see it. Copyright issue I suppose.

Code Snippet, with Color!

I did it!

Now build master can grab code snippet from another file and apply syntax highlighting using syntax.

Next step is to figure out a way to specify the snippet validations.

I am dead tired right now and I have a 9am meeting tomorrow. So I just updated two (actually one and half) pages to show it off.

• http://buildmaster.rubyforge.org/getting-started.html
• http://buildmaster.rubyforge.org/docs/tag-references.html

I also fixed the document source and history link at the end of each page so you should be able to see the source file now.