In an
earlier post about Agile I mentioned that I'm on the fence about it, I said that largely because of the number of meetings I have each week. I'm feeling tied to the Outlook calendar and the constant chime of a meeting reminder. I've never used the full Outlook, though did use Outlook Express for a long time but when it fell victim to the Internet Explorer update schedule I gave up on it and moved to Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client which I've been using since well before the 1.0 release.
The main problem is I'm involved in three distinct areas ASP.NET, VCL and test automation each of which have different deliverables. At the beginning of the Highlander project after a few lengthy discussions we decided to move Zombie, our GUI automation framework, into the core BDS source tree and invest R&D resources into improving and maintaining the code base. Having worked on Zombie for six years while I was in QA I was in a good position to hit the ground running though it meant troubleshooting whatever problems QA ran into until things stablized. The troubleshooting phase wreaked havoc with other work I'd been assigned during the sprint because it was a higher priority to deal with automation issues.
Here are some things that would make me feel more Agile:
- Fewer emails (particularly those related to new meetings, changed meetings etc.)
- Fewer standups
- I miss being co-located with QA their now on the second floor (R&D is on the third)
- More visibility into areas of the product I don't work on
- Better task progress tracking software we're currently using a web client and I believe a thick client UI would be much more efficient.
One thing that would help is an Exchange calendar tray application that requires a tiny amount of system resource but reminds me of meetings. Does the MSN chat client have this? I Googled all over and couldn't find what I was looking for so I've settled on using the Outlook web client. I have a Delphi utility application I wrote that I consider to be my swiss army knife and I tweaked it so the IE window running the Outlook client isn't in the foreground it becomes transparent. Additionally, it refreshes the browser every few minutes cirrcumventing the auto logoff timer thus keeping me logged in all day.