IT&T Conference Galway

Ireland seems to be a second home for me at present with a number of clients using my services for migrating to agile practices through partners Neueda Technologies. So it was a pleasure to be back in sunny Galway (in the gaps between the gales!) for this conference at GMIT. My tutorial was on "Agility: driving software projects for value and quality" and apart from giving an overview of agile methods, particularly Scrum, it looked at some of the key issues for scaling agile processes including design, continuous integration and team structures.

Project Home Page

xProcess allows you to define a wiki, blog or other site as your project's home page. If you can see this page from with your project in xProcess you are pointed at the default page. Why not change this to a site where you can add details of your own project and invite team members to contribute.

Some processes are configured to expect a Wiki site rather than a blog. These sites generally allow pages which do not yet exist to be referenced by url. In such processes a reference to a new page is generated when a new task or project is created, allowing the user to create the corresponding page, at the same time as and already linked to the task or project.

New Scrum Process for v3

With the release of xProcess v3 drawing closer here's an overview of some of the improvements that are in the pipeline enabled by new features in the product. In this article we look at the steps to create Scrum projects and the backlog, then to prioritize them and allocate them to Sprints. In subsequent articles we'll consider how you can use the same features used in the Scrum process to tailor development processes for your organisation.

Here's the dialog for a new Scrum project. It shows the parameters used to set up the project including the location where Wiki pages may be created (including a home page for the project) and the Sprint duration which is used when Sprints (the timeboxes of the Scrum process) are created.

As the next screenshot shows there are now more patterns to choose from when you hit the "New" button in the project toolbar. We'll be looking at exactly what all these patterns are for in subsequent articles. For now let's just look at the "backlog items". The patterns for these are User Story, Technical Task, Defect Fix and Delivery. In fact you can see just this menu of items if you right-click on the "Backlog..." task (or a Sprint if you've created one) and select "New" there.