Aslak Hellesøy

Try it out here, but please read on…

David (with the help from Pat Maddox and the RSpec list) has done some absolutely phenomenal work on RSpec lately, allowing executable user stories to be expressed in plain text. The plain text format of user stories is so simple that it should be easy to train non-programmers to write them. This is what has made Fit and FitNesse such useful and popular tools.

RSpec user stories are built up by scenarios, which again are built up of “canned steps” – or Givens, Whens and Thens. When the number of canned steps grows, it can be hard to edit a text file, because it can be hard to remember the exact wording of a step (and if the wording isn’t exact, it won’t work).

I’ve created a prototype for a browser based story editor. It has autocompletion for adding of new steps and in-place editing of parameters to existing steps. Steps can also be reordered.

The idea is that domain experts can work with this tool to add more stories, scenarios and steps and save them. The same tool would also allow users to run the stories and get the results back. Very much like FitNesse does, but adapted to RSpec and with a (hopefully) better user interface.

So far I’ve only fiddled with the browser/Ajax side of things. You can’t actually use this thing yet – but it’s a start.

I’ve attended and spoken at dozens of conferences, but never organised one myself.

So I got together with some folks from the agile movement in Oslo and set up Smidig 2007

It’s a 2 day conference with a half day of Lightning Talks and a half day of Open Space each day. So far we have 170 people signed up and 20 sponsors. We’re aiming for a good mix of techies and non-techies, customer types or vendor types and the main topic is agile software development. This is going to be fun!

A few months ago one of my colleagues, Christer Løvaas, brought a couple of old-fashioned hour glasses (minute glasses, really) to a release planning meeting. -A red one with one minute and a blue one with two minutes.

We used these to timebox the time spent on estimating each story. We had set a goal of spending maximum three minutes per story, including discussion and planning poker. We were estimating a huge backlog, so this was absolutely necessary in order to get through as much of it as possible in one day. (What a day).

A couple of weeks ago I was facilitating two all-day release planning/planning poker workshops, and I brought the hour glasses with me. This time we were facing exactly the same problem as the first time: It was so easy to forget turn the hour glasses or realise when the sand had run out! So we repeatedly spent more time on each story than we had decided.

So I sat down in the lunch and wrote Aslak Hellesøy’s Planning Poker Timer. Props to Kristoffer Dyrkorn for fixing some IE bugs.

It’s a big digital countdown clock that switches from green to red and plays a bell when time is up. Try it out and let me know how it goes.