Aloha Karl 6 October 2009
Posted by Tracey in team.add a comment
Good news! following another arduous round of interviewing we have a new developer in post. Karl joined YouthNet on Monday and is already hard at work with Olivier, getting up to speed with the project and the intricacies of what we’re building. Yay! No more recruitment (for now) and we can plough on with more server-side development.
Dodgy Developer 7 September 2009
Posted by Tracey in team.add a comment
we had another blow last week when we found out that the java developer we had hired decided – at the last minute before joining us – to take another job elsewhere.
this would have been slightly less annoying if he’d turned us down straight after accepting, even if he’d done so just after he’d signed and returned the contract to us. however, instead he made us struggle along for yet another month without a developer while he touted himself around other companies. we even delayed his start further so that he could “visit some family” in another country “for personal reasons”, which funnily enough he ended up not doing.
bitter, me? yes, i am. over the course of this project i’ve seen plenty of timewasters and this was just the latest in the list of those. but at least we found out about the others early on. this person cost us over an entire month of recruitment and potentially the chance to hire someone else, by spinning it out right until the end. what a jerk.
oh well, back (reluctantly) into the bosom of recruitment agencies we go…
Open Source Volunteering 14 August 2009
Posted by Olivier Van Acker in do-it, team, technical, v-base.Tags: opensource
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On the backend we use quite a lot of open source software. One of the (smaller) open source tools we use was lacking a feature I desperately needed, I quickly downloaded the source code, added the missing feature, compiled it voila, progress. Of course I donated the addition back to the developers of the tool. This is the second time I did ‘open source volunteering’ during this project. The first time I helped adding UUID support to DBUnit. 
Are you our perfect Senior Java Developer? 17 June 2009
Posted by Tracey in team.Tags: developers, do-it, java, recruitment, team, vbase, youthnet
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Yes, we’re still recruiting. For details of the role, please see the Work for Us page on the YouthNet website
More recruitment… argh!!! 20 May 2009
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: recruitment
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Our next round of recruitment is underway, as we look for a replacement for Ben, who was working on the NVD/do-it integration part of V-Base 3. After 7 years at YouthNet, he’s migrated back into the private sector – we wish him every success in his new role and look forward to hearing what it’s like doing agile development in a much bigger organisation.
Recruitment has been one of the biggest time-eaters on this project. We spent almost a full year recruiting a team of developers in a highly competitive market and although we’d finely honed our recruitment process by the end, it’s been great not having to deal with recruitment agencies, poorly written resumés and disappointing interviews for a while. Keep your fingers crossed that we find someone soon!
3…2…1…Lift Off! The first VDAG pre-release 17 April 2009
Posted by Tracey in VDAG, v-base.Tags: do-it, VDAG v-base vbase youthnet
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Olivier posts the VDAG pre-release
V-Base 3 had its first official outing recently when we presented a demo of the client application to the VDAG (V-Base Development Advisory Group). It was lovely to meet in person all the people with whom we’ve been having online discussions about V-Base 3 and the day was a great success. Comments about our fledgling application were very positive which is great for the morale of the team who’ve been working so hard on it.
Today’s another significant milestone: we’re sending out a pre-release of the client application to VDAG so that they can play with it and feed back their comments to us. This is to be a vital ongoing part of our development process and we’ve been trying to get to this point for some time now. There’s still much to be developed so VDAG’s input will be key to making sure that we get things right.
Finally we see our baby take its first steps into the big wide world… how exciting!
Volunteer Opportunity – Software Tester 9 March 2009
Posted by Paul in agile, do-it, technical, v-base.Tags: agile, agile software testing, opportunity, software testing, software testing volunteer, volunteering, volunteers, youthnet
3 comments
Software Tester for YouthNet (volunteer, remote/on-site, min 6 hours/week)
YouthNet is developing the latest version of our V-Base software, version 3. V-Base is the UK’s leading software for volunteering management. Developed by YouthNet in partnership with volunteering agencies, V-Base is a Windows based, easy to learn and use application. It has a range of tools to help you manage your volunteering programme and is the only software that enables you to post your opportunities directly to the do-it.org.uk database of volunteering opportunities.
We are looking for a Volunteer Software Tester, responsible for improving the quality assurance of V-Base 3. This opportunity is open to people who are looking for a way into or have an interest in software testing.
(more…)
Hello and Merry Christmas 22 December 2008
Posted by Sau in stakeholder involvement.1 comment so far
Hi everyone,
I’m Sau and I am the new IT Project Coordinator/SCRUM Master at YouthNet. I have been in YouthNet since the beginning of November 2008. Now that I have settled in I am ready to write this short and sweet intro.
Working closely with Tracey, I am responsible for tracking the development progress of the VBase 3 project. As you probably all aware, we have adopted the Agile SCRUM development methodology which I love and welcome the high visibility of the project. I have worked with SCRUM for over 3 years and hopefully I will be able to use my past experience with VBase.
We are now in sprint/iteration 25, focusing on mail merge, user documentation, code coverage and Christmas!
Have a great Christmas, and look forward to meeting you all online in 2009!
Sau
Before we started with Agile 20 November 2008
Posted by Olivier Van Acker in agile.Tags: agile, decline, goodpractice, jamesshore
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As a response on the (excellent) post of James Shore on the decline and fall of agile, where he discusses why agile often fails when implemented, I responded with what we did before we really started implementing agile; here is my response on his blog:
Very good post, although I would suggest also to focus on how to measure good engineering practices. In the project I currently work on (my job is to implement/streamline development processes) I’ve installed several tools which auto generates lots of reports for our scrum master so she has a lot of tools the measure to the quality of the development process.
And before I even try to implement ‘Agile’ in a software project a want these questions asked and answered:
* Does it compile?
Does it compile on a non developer machine? Do the latest changes compile?
A: Continuous Integration
* Does it run?
Can we execute a recent version of the application without having to wait for a developer to build it, also valid for non gui back end apps!
A: Daily builds
A: Release candidates
* Is it tested?
A: Unit tests
A: Integration tests
A: QA team
A: Hallway usability testing
A: Code coverage reports
* Who changed what and when?
A: Version control
A: Issue tracking
* Did we produce source code daily?
My main goal when I have to start a project: produce code on a daily basis, get the momentum/routine right
(instead of having meetings on a daily basis 
)
A: Version control reports
* Second opinion?
A: Code reviews
Not of everything, just the areas where unit tests fail regulary
* Can we track bugs?
* Is it documented?
Not in a word processor document, but one liners in the code do wonders
I call this my ‘extended sprint zero’, first good and disciplined engineering before we start implementing fancy development process theories
Olivier
