Occasionally someone leaves a development team. It could be a long time team member or a contract developer who has completed their project. Aside from all the physical office changes you have to make (cleaning the desk, reformatting a workstation) there is the virtual office housekeeping. We recently had an offsite developer finish a project we’d contracted them for and I was left with the task of cleaning them out of the branch we’d set up for them in Team Foundation. The only problem was, there were locks and pending changes… from a remote machine I can’t access.
Command Line Tools to the Rescue!
Luckily Team Foundation has a few command line tools to fix these problems. Here are the three steps needed to clean up after a departed dev.
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I just returned from my ScrumMaster certification training in Kansas City and have been refining our work process accordingly. We decided to build a physical, index card based scrum board in the office.
More information on how it's organized and built after the jump.
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One of the biggest challenges we have faced with Scrum is creating meaningful user stories for our backlog items. I recently came across an interesting article on "storycrafting".
Before
Need to get electronic patient signatures
After
Headline:
Get electronic patient signatures.
Story:
As a Nurse, I want to capture electronic patient signatures and related bar codes for better record keeping and billing.
Conditions of Satisfaction:
- Legal and financial disclosures are displayed.
- Bar codes captured (Patient ID, Items) and patient signature.
- Transaction is recorded.
via http://agile.techwell.com/articles/weekly/storycrafting-idea-action-face-unknowns
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Responsive web design puts a new wrinkle into the standard design constraint of using images in your web designs. You need similar images resized to different resolutions, sometimes cropped in slightly different ways and you need as many versions as you have supported break points in your design. On this blog and on www.hendrix.edu we are currently using 4 specific targets (large desktop, notebook/small desktop, tablet, and mobile). This means we multiply the needed file by up to 4 times for each image. Needless to say, this becomes difficult, unwieldly, and time consuming, especially if you are relying on non-power users to supply those images. We are currently using a tool we found on the internet to resolve that issue, the imageresizer asp.net module (http://imageresizing.net/). In their own words:
Work less, do more
Resize, crop, rotate, watermark, and modify images without ever leaving your browser or editor, with a simple API.
- Query string API (all languages)
image.jpg?width=300 - Managed API (.NET and COM languages)
ImageBuilder.Current.Build(source,destination,parameters)
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