Screenreaders 31 March 2008
Posted by martin in Uncategorized.Tags: Accessibility, gui, JAWS, Narrator, Screen Reader
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Just tried our VBase 3 smart client with the Windows XP Narrator and a commercial equivalent called JAWS. According to the Wikipedia article on screen readers JAWS is quite a popular application (would love to hear Joe public’s opinion on that). I have not spent a great deal of time accessing either of these applications and so don’t want anyone to take my word on them as the definitive evaluation but I was surprised to find out that the Windows XP narrator application actually managed to read an entry on a WPF combo-box that the JAWS application failed to read. JAWS was much better on response and seemed to deal with menus in a more appropriate manner and also has features like a braille reader that I’m sure makes it more valuable to certain users than the XP narrator could ever hope to be. We will over the next few days be spending more time on accessibility and will have to as part of this investigate what Vista has to offer on the screen reader front. Hopefully Vista will have advanced from the XP narrator tool and will resolve some of the issues we currently have with accessibility for visually impaired users.
welcome back, camille 20 March 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: team
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our ‘planification’ expert has returned from her travels in the southern hemisphere. understandably she’s a bit jet-lagged but it’s good to have her back in the bosom of our small (yet perfectly formed) v-base family 
survey-itis 19 March 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: requirements, research, surveys
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we’re currently undertaking some research with existing users of v-base, to find out how they would like to record details of policies and procedures against organisations and we’re doing this in the form of a mini-survey.
i’m always a bit apprehensive when sending out a survey – the voluntary sector is awash with surveys of all flavours and i know just how people feel when yet another email lands in your inbox, asking for your valuable input into something (hopefully) worthwhile. seems like everyone’s consulting everyone else and there’s a risk of survey-itis, where people just start to ignore these emails in the hope that others will respond with opinions similar to their own.
it’s a dilemma. we don’t want to pester our users, but if we don’t find out what they want, what chance do we have of developing something they will find useful? or the end result not being tailored only to the needs of the small group of people who can always be relied on to contribute? i can’t see another way around this – all i can do is make our surveys as short and easy to respond to as possible in the hope that this presents less of a barrier.
i’ll write another post shortly about this particular piece of research. it’s related to functionality that already exists in v-base 2.x which we’re thinking of approaching differently in version 3. like a lot of our planned enhancements, the seed for this one originated with someone who actually uses v-base, rather than just being something our development team dreamt up. i think i have the original email somewhere – i’ll see if i can find it.
Recruitment 19 March 2008
Posted by Olivier Van Acker in Uncategorized.Tags: developers, interviews, recruitment
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We’ve been recruiting right from the start of the project and have been fine tuning our recruitment process ever since. In the beginning we invited people in if their CV looked good. Soon it became very obvious that what is on paper is not always what you meet in person (This is a very big understatement). We interview with three people: me, the Product Owner (Tracey) and someone from Central Services, so a candidate who totally doesn’t live up to their CV wastes a lot of time. After several of these failures, Tracey gave me this little book: Smart and Gets Things Done. A very valuable book on how to recruit developers. One of the things I implemented straight away (the same day I got the book) was phone interviews, hooray! This is purely to see if a candidate lives up to their CV. Let me explain a bit more about this ‘phone interview filter’.
It consists of three parts:
- CV specific questions. I read the candidate’s CV and ask specific questions about technologies being mentioned. (E.g You have implemented cached program listings in XSLT/XML, how did you do that?) I’m careful not to turn this into a technical test, I just want to give the candidate enough room to talk ‘tech’ to me ;-P
- I present the candidate with a technical problem. This is to see how they approach a problem. Even if they don’t know the solution it’s good to see if they make an effort and how well they can reason. One candidate once bluntly said: ‘I haven’t got a clue how to do this’, followed by a silence. (Including my own silence) We skipped part 3 of the phone interview.
- Last but not least; I ask the candidate if they have questions about the project or YouthNet. This shows if they have a healthy interest, have themselves prepared and I think it’s good to have a two way interview.
With this ‘phone interview filter’ I’m able to decline about 80% of the CVs that get sent to me. A massive time saver. Also I’ve had some pleasant surprises where the CV was not very well written but the candidate made a good impression on the phone. So overall I can really recommend this, however I do keep in mind not to turn it into a full on interview, it’s just to see if the candidate lives up to his/her CV. The real test comes in our specially brewed ‘in house interview’ 
More about this in a later post.
Olivier
don’t forget to wipe 18 March 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: agile, environment, tools
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just ordered some wipe-clean whiteboards. one of the downsides about working in an open-plan office next to a window is the lack of wall space. an agile project needs to surround itself with visual information… burn-down charts, ladders of story cards and preferably big white spaces for scrawling diagrams on etc etc.
one of the books i’m reading says:
“Try to have at least 24 linear feet of whiteboard space, magnetic if possible. You can never have too many whiteboards.”
personally i’d like a whole room (more about my ideal agile workspace later.)
we do have a great big mega whiteboard but it’s stuck to a wall in a different part of our offices. the new ones are free-standing, so we can wheel them around as needed.
mmmm wheelie whiteboards… how exciting is my life?
calling v-base… come in, v-base 18 March 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: recruitment, team
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after an enthusiastic start to our blog, we’ve gone a bit quiet. don’t worry, we’re still here – well, most of us are. camille has been on holiday for the last 3 weeks – her belated honeymoon in new zealand. can’t wait to see the present she’s bringing back for us (hint hint).
the rest of us have been beavering away on our 6th iteration or sprint. we encountered a few unforeseen problems which have been summarily dealt with but of course this eats into our developer days. baazi and martin have been working like trojans to get through the list of user stories we allocated to this iteration.
olivier is the new best friend of several i.t. recruitment agencies determined to find us candidates for our 3rd developer role. we’ve been recruiting for 3 months and to be honest, the market isn’t working in our favour. cv after cv gets consigned to the (virtual) wastepaper basket. where are all the good developers these days?… besides the ones we’ve already got, of course! the job market seems to be flooded with sub-standard developers claiming to have skills they can’t even spell and asking for way more money than they’re worth. it’s a good thing we started using preliminary telephone interviews to weed out this kind of blagger.
spirits are a bit low in some quarters. good thing it’s easter hols this weekend. then again, that’s 2 full days of development time we lose …argh!!!
sprinteration 6 10 March 2008
Posted by Tracey in Uncategorized.Tags: activity log, development, iteration, planning game, search, sprint, synchronisation
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on tuesday we kicked off sprint/iteration 6 of development with the usual planning game. in this iteration we’ll be
- focusing on bringing basic search functionality into the client;
- changing the save behaviour in the volunteers and opportunities sections;
- laying the foundation for activity recording, starting with the organisation section;
- starting to work on synchronisation between individual v-base clients
the previous iteration went particularly well – all user stories passed user acceptance and the gui in the resulting build looks great, thanks to martin’s keen eye for layout.
MCPD Training 7 March 2008
Posted by Baz in Uncategorized.Tags: .net, mcpd, study
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Every friday we get time to study for a certification. Currently studying for Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, that means i have to mastermind the whole .NET framework. I find it quite useful as i pick up things which help me when developing.
time to go home for the weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekeeeend
Yoga is not the path to Agility, Planning Poker is 6 March 2008
Posted by Camille in Uncategorized.Tags: agile, estimates, Planning
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Becoming Agile is not an overnight process. That’s at least one thing that Yogi Masters and Scrum Masters will agree on. Yoga was not the path to Agility for us. Our approach was somewhat more intellectual: learning from our successes and errors and undertaking training.
So here we were, back to the classroom.
I had the chance to attend an“Agile Estimating and Planning” course with Mike Cohn as an instructor. We looked at various approaches to estimating and went through techniques for deriving estimates as well as when and how to re-estimate.
One of these techniques is “Planning Poker” and the rules are very simple: (more…)
