Hiring a ruby on rails developer

One of our team is moving on. So we’re looking to hire one full-time, experienced developer.

At Simon & Schuster, we’ve created a small, collaborative team where people can do their best, learn in a collegial environment and get home at a reasonable hour. We work at a sustainable pace because after five years as a Ruby on Rails team we know the value of staying current, refactoring our codebase, and cleaning up tech debt.

We pair, we test drive, we retrospect, and we work as a single team with our product owners. If you want to work on a team that really does these things, contact us.

Scrum/XP/Agile team in midtown Manhattan looking for an experienced Rubyist or experienced Java/C# developer interested in learning Ruby. We are an established, six developer Scrum/XP team. We have a dedicated scrum master and we collaborate closely with our product team

Apply via StackOverflow

No recruiters, please.

Presentation: Agile Values, Innovation and the Shortage of Women Software Developers

Presentation notes: http://khj.me/KLKm0u


Judy, K.H.; , “Agile Values, Innovation and the Shortage of Women Software Developers,” System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on , vol., no., pp.5279-5288, 4-7 Jan. 2012

doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2012.92

Abstract: The percentage of women software developers in the U.S. has declined from 42% in 1987 to less than 25% today. This is in a software/internet marketplace where women are online in equal numbers to men, directly or indirectly influence 61% of consumer electronics purchases, generate 58% of online dollars, and represent 42% of active gamers. Women avoid careers in software due to hostile environments, unsustainable pace, diminished sense of purpose, disadvantages in pay, and lack of advancement, peers or mentors. Agile Software Development is founded upon values that challenge such dysfunction in order to build self-organizing, collaborative and highly productive teams. In a high functioning Agile practice, developers engage each other, product owners and sponsors in a shared concern for quality, predictability and meeting the needs of end users. Can Agile values and practice drive changes in the workplace to better attract and retain women software developers?

URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6149534&isnumber=6148595

Agile’s broad adoption and mediocrity – the fault lies…

I have to admit, I cringe whenever I say “agile” or “scrum” (™?) Even as I practice both every workday and care deeply for the values they represent.

Successful movements take on a cloying “fill me with your knowledge” cast. A perpetual newbie state where new adherents come on faster than existing practitioners have opportunity to develop experience and wisdom.

I really don’t need to have another conversation about how to phrase the first sentence of a user story.

And I definitely feel some of the same heat rising from the attention to lean. Buzz, buzz, kanban, buzz…

But can we blame the thought leaders, the coaches, the industry deriving wealth from a movement for the failings of that movement? Is it the corrupting influence of success or rather broad adoption itself?

I think the latter.

First, let me acknowledge that iterative improvement is a lengthy process and has to start somewhere. That your current state is entirely flawed is a given.

You don’t have to be excellent at what you do at this exact moment to begin improving your own practice and your workplace. A broad swath of not soul killing workplaces is at least as valuable as a small set of shining cities on the hill.

But whatever the starting point, taking on agile practice is dedicating yourself to a mission of fundamentally changing the nature of our work to something both disciplined and highly accountable but also collaborative, creative and sustainable.

And broad adoption means that a lot of people who call themselves “agile” just don’t rise up or even aspire to rise up to that mission.

If you claim you’re doing XP: have 24 hour builds, the developers all work solo and your test coverage is 10% then you’re either at the start of a very long journey (which I deeply admire you for) or you’re lying to yourself and you just plain suck.

If you claim you’re doing Scrum and the developers haven’t talked to a business person in months, can’t articulate what your team achieved in the last month, and you require “stabilization” sprints before you can deploy working code, you are either at the start of a very long journey (which, again, I deeply admire you for) or you’re lying to yourself and you just plain suck.

It’s not one of a thousand consultancies, professional coaches, certification tracks, associations or conferences fault if you suck.

It’s not Jeff Sutherland’s or Ken Schwaber’s fault if you suck. As a matter of fact, they and their peers have done a great deal to give a great many of us a chance at sucking less.

The mentor/mentee relationship is powerful but it’s up to each of us to do our work with courage, integrity and passion. It’s up to each of us to hold our peers to a standard of competence and care.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Making an iteration/sprint burn up chart with Thoughtworks Studio Mingle

As I’ve said before, we use Thoughtworks Studio Mingle to track our backlogs.

One thing Mingle has not provided for us in the time we’ve worked with it is a daily burn up. Kind of shocking.

Last month, we migrated our instance to the EC2 cloud. I took advantage of that migration to un-cruft our Mingle instance, apply the XP template and simplify card types and states.

Now time to stop dumping data out of mingle to report status. Yes. Kind of shocking.

The first step was to track the data points we need for a burn up.

That involved creating a series of date fields to track the day on which a story moves from in analysis to ready for dev, in dev, in qa, ready for customer (QA done) and customer accepted.

We also need a way to have those dates recorded automatically as part of moving cards from one state to another.

Mingle card transitionSo we set up Mingle card transitions.

This replaces the drag and drop behavior of a card from one swim lane to another with a button link on the card. This a bummer for our product team but it allows us to script transitions to both change the status and set the appropriate date field.

Now to setup a burn up chart using Mingle charts and mql.

{% dashboard-panel %}
{% panel-heading %}Current iteration burnup{% panel-heading %}
{% panel-content %}
{{
data-series-chart
conditions: (‘Type’ = ‘Story’ OR ‘Type’ = ‘Defect’ OR ‘Type’ = ‘Task’) AND ‘Iteration – Scheduled’ = (Current Iteration) AND ‘Status’ > ‘In Analysis’ AND ‘Status’ is not ‘Deleted’ AND ‘Status’ is not ‘Blocked’ AND ‘Estimate’ IS NOT NULL AND ‘Iteration – Analysis Completed’ IS NOT NULL
labels: SELECT DISTINCT ‘Date Estimated’
x-title: Date
x-labels-start: 2010-08-10
x-labels-end: 2010-08-21
y-title: Estimated Scope in Story Points
show-start-label: false
data-point-symbol: diamond
data-labels: true
chart-height: 500
chart-width: 800
plot-height: 375
plot-width: 500
trend-ignore: zeroes-at-end-and-last-value
cumulative: true
series:
– label: Total Scope
color: black
data: SELECT ‘Date Estimated’, SUM(‘Estimate’)
– label: Development Complete
color: yellow
line-width: 1
data: SELECT ‘Date Dev Complete’, SUM(‘Estimate’) WHERE ‘Status’ >= ‘Development Complete’
– label: QA Complete
color: orange
line-width: 1
data: SELECT ‘Date QA Complete’, SUM(‘Estimate’) WHERE ‘Status’ >= ‘QA Complete’
– label: Accepted
color: blue
data: SELECT ‘Date Accepted’, SUM(‘Estimate’) WHERE ‘Status’ >= ‘Accepted’
}}
{% panel-content %}
{% dashboard-panel %}
{% dashboard-panel %}

Observations:

  • I had to hard code date start and date end in x-labels-start and x-labels-end but otherwise, I was able to use the project variable ‘Iteration – Scheduled’ = (Current Iteration) that’s part of the XP Template.
  • Burn up is accomplished by setting cumulative:true. Unfortunately, I can’t get trend lines to work as a result.

Here’s what the result looks like:

Burn up using Mingle data series chart

This chart along with selected summary counts and tables allows us a real time dashboard of the health of our sprints.

As you can tell from the burn up, we have work to do improving flow in our iterations.

Anyway, reporting is a work in progress. As is everything.

Our team is hiring an agile ruby on rails developer

Hi,

We’re looking for a developer to join our team at Simon & Schuster. We’re a small shop mainly working in Ruby on Rails. We practice Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. We value sustainable pace, work/life balance, and the sanity and happiness of our team members.

You can look at the full posting on Craig’s List or Simon & Schuster’s corporate jobs extranet.

Unfortunately, no recruiters.

Thanks.