We had Agile Training the other day. All layers of the business are going through it. Engineering already does scrum each morning with cross functional groups, we have continuous integration, unit testing, functional testing, acceptance testing with a business representative before it goes to QA, etc. All those have been grass roots and because of developers wanting to ensure high quality products are delivered to QA.
We do Sprints, but what we do is not agile, it is waterfall with our use cases chopped up into sprints. It works ok, as we can keep a finger on the button as to where we are, but it is not agile. Essentially our system is not feature complete at the end of a sprint, it is at the end of the project (2 months dev cycle).
We have use cases as our product backlog, but they are not managed in an agile manner. The business hands them off to us at the start of the project and there is little resorting/re-ordering etc during the project. We tried using JIRA for our product backlog and chopping the use cases up into day long tasks. Surprisingly that did not work at all. Use cases were a more accepted level of granularity.
At a previous place I put all the requirement sheets up on a wall at the end of the cube farm and we moved them around when they were done from one part to another. The spec sheets had names in thick marker on them and were ticked with a green marker when complete. Despite the visual authority it gave, it wasn't that useful either.
Since the entire company is going to Agile Training there is a strong chance it will stick and the non-Agile parts of the production process will become more agile. It is an easy sell with Engineering, we have implemented and maintained the discipline on most of those processes already.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
