Autumn of Agile: Iteration 1 Part A screencast is available

I am pleased to announce that the next installment in the Autumn Of Agile screencast series is now available for immediate download from the main web site.

Good news, Bad news

The good news is that this is the installment where we finally start to write some code! smile_wink  The bad news is that this installment clocks in at nearly two hours in length (and about 200MB) owing to the wide variety of things that are covered in this one…

  • TDD Concepts and practices
  • Configuring Testdriven.NET keybindings in Visual Studio for speedy test-runs for easy TDD
  • Iteration and Release Planning in TargetProcess
  • Using the TargetProcess Visual Studio plug-in to manage assigned work
  • Getting our CI Server to run our first unit tests
  • Wiring up our Domain Classes for easy persistence support using common base-classes
  • Leveraging NHibernate mapping files to drive the auto-generation of our database schema

>whew!<

I Promise: Sensible length in the future!

Subsequent installments should be a bit more sensible in length; this one got a bit out of control because of all the ‘foundational’ concepts that needed to be put together to support the development of our first User Story.  Now that this is all behind us, subsequent installments can (hopefully!) be a bit more focused and of a more reasonable length (1.5 hours is my practical target goal).

Schedules and Burn-Down Rates

More good news is that the pace at which I am blowing through the tasks in the User Stories is faster than expected.  In the two hours that I spent for this Part A of the first iteration I completed about 50% of the first user story that was estimated at 9 hours in effort.  That’s a burn-down rate of 2.25x the original estimate (9 hrs X 50% complete / 2 hrs spent = 2.25).  If I can maintain that burn-down pace against the backlog throughout the entire project then its at least conceivable that I could complete even the user stories flagged as ‘nice-to-have’ by the end of the series.

But experience has taught me that the burn-down rate in a single iteration (and especially that of just half of the first iteration) is a terrible predictor of maintainable burn-down throughout an entire project, so I’m happy but cautious at this point based on present rate-of-completion of User Stories.  I may be off to a good start, but I don’t have near-enough data upon which to base a positive projection for the life of the project yet.

Coming Next: Rhino.Commons and ASP.NET MVC

In our next installment we will dive into the Rhino.Commons framework and begin to understand how it grants us power over the unruly nuisances of an NHibernate implementation for data-access and will stub out our first user interface page using the ASP.NET MVC framework as we try to complete our first user story.

As always, comments, feedback, and (constructive) criticism are welcome.  Happy viewing~!