I have a confession to make.  I’m a manager.  I’ve been a manager for many years.  I’ve led agile development teams most of that time.  I’ve been told I’m a pretty good manager.  And when I look in the mirror, I don’t see any pointy hair.  And as a point of fair disclosure, I believe there actually is a place for managers in an agile team.

Ever since the first days of extreme programming, I’ve noticed a definite view in the agile community that managers become superfluous.  Self organizing teams, coupled with the principles and practices that ease the path toward product and project management, have removed the need for management.  This is a seemingly wonderful sentiment, but it just doesn’t happen that way.  Companies will always have some sort of management structure.  Who those managers are, and what they do, will change considerably though...

One of the Agile practitioners tweeted this quote : "Many Agile-related questions I get are of the type "How do we drive a car safely when it has only 3 wheels, no breaks, and a blind driver?". This is pretty true, because many people consider that software product quality will find itself a path through and just be there, without giving it even small portion of thought. As mentioned in various literature about Agile teams, that the product Quality is the responsibility of the whole team. All team members work closely(Product owner - Developers - Testers - Architects - Technical Lead..etc.)to get the software product to the light. And the capacity to create high-quality solutions lies in the (Will) of the team and their dedication in considering quality through project's different phases. On tight schedules teams tend to squeeze out the time dedicated for QA and testing activities, with a whole focus on getting the set of features done. Actually this may work for small projects and teams, but getting sloppy with process not always succeed; as we ignore the fact that higher penalty and technical dept will accumulate on the team, and then you find that more time and cost are depleted in the maintenance and rework. This was discussed before the Technical dept posted recently. If we looked at the project life cycle through the QA lens, we can see it mainly as the iterating of two major activities: Bug Injection Phase and Bug Removal Phase

You interviewed with team members a month ago, and you were a little concerned--it didn’t seem as if they were keeping to their iterations. Their product owner wasn’t grooming the backlog often enough to keep the backlog filled for the release meeting. They seemed to have an awful lot of defects piling up at the end of the iteration. And it sure looked as if they finished only two or three stories every four-week iteration.

But you really like the product domain--it’s where you want to go with your career. And you think you can learn a lot from your VP, so you decided to take the position. Now it’s your second day on the job and you realize that your original concerns have understated the problem. Not only does your project have all of those problems, but everyone is working on several other projects simultaneously--including the testers.

The iterations are too long. The stories are humongous. Everyone is multitasking. The product owner is not available enough. This is a rich, problem-solving environment--the project has a ton of problems. You know you can help the team fix these issues, but you just have one problem: Where do you start?

What is HTML5 video, and how is it different from what you're used to? What problems does it solve, and what issues does it have? Since HTML5 doesn't require a plug-in, is it open source? Find the answers to these questions and learn the basic terminology for understanding how video works. Learn how to embed HTML5 video, explore the API, and explore browser compatibility.

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As NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT and South Australia switched to daylight saving time at the weekend, a bug in the Apple iPhone caused some workers to run late yesterday.

The bug appears to affect only those with a "recurring" alarm, which is useful for when you want to be woken up at the same time each and every day of the week.

Online forums were filled with Australians discovering the bug; they have found a simple fix - to set their alarms one hour late. Setting a manual alarm each day - instead of having it occur automatically - was also said to work, Macworld said.

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Some users said their iPhone alarms did not go off at all.

There has been no indication when a fix might be made available. Apple Australia has been contacted for comment but is yet to respond.

One little trick that I learned not too long ago was the ability to load a file from Google’s CDN (or any CDN for that matter) relative to the protocol of the page, e.g. if the page is HTTPS, the CDN content would load HTTPS, and vice versa.

In virtually all CDN examples you’ll see something like this:

<script src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js”></script>

But what if my page is HTTPS?  Do I somehow have to go through and either by hand, or with Javascript, update all src values to be HTTPS?

Nope.  There’s a much shorter way that’s part of the official URL spec that’s compatible with really old browsers, such as IE 3 and Netscape 3.

<script src=”//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js”></script>

Did you see that it was missing “HTTP:” at the beginning?  It may look weird, but it’s a perfectly valid src attribute.  All the browser does is infer the protocol from the current location.

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Every school in India has a similar looking painting put up on their notice board. And such paintings by students get appreciated more around Independence day.. Here’s one such painting which was put up at Samaritan Mission School in Calcutta.