Project Cards

A long time ago, we introduced a Velocity feature to ProjectCards. We got it wrong.  And since we figured a lot of other people get it wrong, here’s a small article on how to handle your teams’ capacity and your teams’ velocity. This is our mea culpa.

First let’s define velocity. Your team’s velocity is, at the simplest, the rate at which the team has delivered product backlog items in past iterations. This is thus tangible, historical data.

Your team’s future capacity however, is uncertain. People get sick. New people get inserted into your team or leave it and it disrupts your team’s cohesiveness.  Your team’s capacity for a given future sprint can only be speculated.

A common mistake and one we made ourselves is to mix capacity and velocity. How often have we heard “What is our teams velocity for this sprint ?”. This is wrong. Our velocity is established by our past actions.

When doing your sprint planning for the upcoming iteration, we should focus on capacity. What is our capacity to deliver this sprint ? Is anybody taking days off ? Is anybody joining or leaving the team ? Is anybody on vacation ? After these questions are answered, you can then use the velocity as one of the many parameters to ESTIMATE your capacity to deliver for the next sprint. Remember that this will only be an estimate.

With that in mind, as of release 2.4.0 we will be introducing a capacity feature. This way, you will be able to manually set your team’s predicted capacity based on your estimates. You will also be able to enter a comment every time you change your team’s predicted capacity. This way, you can track fluctuations in you capacity to deliver based on facts( sickness, vacations, arrivals and departures). Your capacity change history will be available all the time.

-Nicholas Lemay

Agile2010 has come and gone. Hopefully, so did the rain. But what exactly have you gotten out of it ?

• As an attendee, you might have attended a few sessions which did not meet your expectations, but also hopefully a couple of eye opening ones.
• As a presenter, you might have conquered your crowd or failed miserably to spark their interest.
• As a sponsor, you might have had the chance to meet a few potential customers or have realized that no one is interested in your offering.

Where do you go from here ? Having attended a couple of these conferences, here are a few tips we have gathered throughout the years.

Attendees

• Don’t worry too much about the sessions you found less inspiring. Focus on what interested you in the first place and try to get more information on the subject. Your favorite search engine is your friend here.
• If you met a great presenter, feel free to try and contact them. You’d be surprised to see a lot of them have a blog and/or use Twitter.  Many of them will answer some of your questions. Keep the presenter’s name in store to help you select the sessions you want to take part of at Agile 2011.
• You’ve certainly missed a couple of interesting presentations. You cannot be everywhere at once. You can always go back through the schedule and see what you missed. Once again, a lot of presenters will put their slides on the net. Plus you might be able to exchange with them online.
• Remember, attending is often just a way to spark interest. You’re the one who has to do the research afterwards.

Presenters

• Many many thanks for sharing your experience with the community !  You are the essence of this conference, make sure you start collecting ideas for next year!
• Read the feedback forms ! Got aspects you need to improve ? Ask around for help. Getting better is always easier when done in teams.
• Have a blog ? Ask people for feedback. Publish you slides. The more you open up for feedback, the better you will become.
• First time presenting at a conference ? Present again. Soon. The more you do it, the more feedback you will get and the more you will develop a natural “feel” for crowds and how to handle them.

Sponsors

• You’ve seen the interest in your offering. Good. That was the easy part. Now is the time to make something so good that people will enjoy it year after year after year. When they come back for more, then you know you’ve got something great in your hands.
• You’ve seen that people do not like your offering ? Excellent ! You’ve just saved tons of money. How much more would you have spent if you had not met with your real customers ? You are now armed with a lot of valuable information. Use it !

In the past few years, an IDE that has been gaining in popularity has been Aptana. With support for Ruby on Rails, Python, Git, CSS, JavaScript and much much more, you can see why Aptana has had more than 5 million downloads. However, one thing that has been seriously missing to their portfolio is an Agile Poject Management tool.

This is why we would invite Aptana users to try out ProjectCards. ProjectCards can be added to Aptana as simply as it can be added to Eclipse by simply putting the ProjectCards jar in Aptana’s plugin folder and restarting Aptana. It’s as simple as that.

You are just one download away from turning your Aptana IDE into an Agile project management tool. Why not give it a try ? We’re sure you’ll be happy you did.

During the past week,

Jeff and I have been really busy trying to come up with the design of the backdrop. We can humbly say that is some serious hard work. Our hats go off to people who do this nicely day in and day out. Being the first time I’ve ever done this, here are a few lessons learned I would like to share with you guys.

Lessons learned :

• Pressure kills creativity; do not try to force yourself to be create for the next hour. Putting a gun on your head won’t make you creative. Let the ideas emerge and do the design in a playful mood. It’ll be much more productive, and will probably even cost you less time then pressuring yourself.
• Do cheap mock ups first; Draw a cheap mock-up first. Pick up a pen and something you can write on and start building on top of that. Having a real artifact to talk around facilitates communication big time. Don’t waste time on colors first. Place you elements around first and decide the most important stuff, like where you want to put you emphasis first. You can always make it look nice in Photoshop later.
• Get frequent feedback; Do small incremental changes. Letting your designer alone to work on the design for hours at a time won’t do any good. You will probably not like half of what he or she did at best and at worst you will scrap all the work he added. Work in small increments to build it up.
• Do it in advance; Like I said, pressure kills creativity. You do not want to try and be creative 5 minutes before you have to handout the design to the printer. It won’t work.
• Respect your designer; This may sound like a given, but giving someone work only to tell them hours later that their work sucks can kill all their enthusiasm towards the project. Be understanding.

Here is the almost final draft of our backdrop for the Agile 2010 conference.

You will probably recognize the no frills look of ProjectCards in it. And that’s pretty much what we are all about.  Just an awesome software that gets you on the right track and keeps you there.

jumpstart @ projectcards.com/download