July 14th, 2009
Most of us who already work 40hrs a week cannot work any harder (that’s a lie but you need to fit family, hobby and the rest of it in somewhere). I’d say you need to be more focused. Focus in my experience can boost productivity 2 to 3 times. It is easier said than done but there are several strategies available to you:
1. To-do List: I use this a lot. It helps me to focus on what is the most important thing right now.
2. Notepad: A notepad can be used to draw diagrams, gather thoughts and keeping progress. If you find that you often get interrupted and find it difficult to get back to what you were doing before, this can help you out by jotting down where you are up to before you jump to something else.
3. Take regular digression: You cannot totally focus without a bit of lax in between. It also helps ease the pressure built up in eyes and other parts of the body. I would opt for getting out of my desk, perhaps take a walk or make a drink, etc.
4. Find and eliminate sources of distraction: If you are sitting at a windows seat and you can’t stop perving at people walking by, pull down the blind when you need to. If it is the background gossip that you can’t get away from get a headphone. Hunt down those source of distraction and improve your focus.
5. Gauge your progress: If you can tell by some metrics that by being more focused you are more productive than it does ease the adjusting pain.
The above are what I find most helpful to me, but you may have a bit of get-ahead of your own. Feel free to share them in the comments.
Posted in Rambling | 1 Comment »
June 30th, 2009
My project is moving to WPF! Yay! To minimize the pain I had a critical part of the UI migrated to WPF already using ElementHost from the System.Windows.Forms.Integration namespace. That went pretty smooth and now the rest is going through. Since I have not done a complete WPF project before I created a new WPF project and to my surprise there isn’t a Program.cs file in the project. I copy the App.xaml, Windows1.xaml and their .cs counterparts over to my winform project and tries to compile. The compiler spits the dummy as the project now has two main entry points. The WPF app.xaml implements Application, which if you look under it has Run(), which is what I use to start my winform main window in my original main method. I then comment out the main method thinking it would start from app.xaml instead. It turns out that you need to add couple of lines to your .csproj file like:
<ApplicationDefinition Include="App.xaml">
<Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>
<SubType>Designer</SubType>
</ApplicationDefinition>
Change “App.xaml” to what you are using and voila!
Tags: .Net, Windows form, WPF
Posted in Devs | No Comments »
May 18th, 2009
The team consists of me (also the Scrum master), Mark the tester, Dave the documentation manager/product guru closed off the first sprint in my group last Friday. I must say, to work just one user story to the “done” criteria is not easy. All of us are working hard to pull through the transition, which is typically 3~4 sprints in literature. I manage to really stick to the Scrum material and only vary the process if we need to work with the external processes (alpha, beta and release processes).
What worked:
- The done criteria is very solid. Having completed a user story with all the items in the criteria checked off really boosts the confidence for both developers and testers.
- The team worked together well and more focused on task, which the progress is easier to gauge than working directly off the whole spec.
What didn’t work:
- User stories are too big. The amount of work involved is not clearly understood resulting in bad estimation.
- Many one-off jobs are not documented as they came in mid sprint and have higher priority than the other sprint backlog items
Overall the team work is fantastic. On record we only completed one user story in the whole sprint (we targeted three) and the perfect hour estimate is so off that the resultant chart did very little in gauging our velocity in the last sprint.
Lots of work left to be done but I’m glad I implemented the process. It has got the rest of the group involved in the project and development decisions are getting made. I’m certainly doing more work but I find it much more interesting now as I’m not coding away in the dark and have limited feedback on what I do.
Tags: Scrum
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