Planning Poker Cards

If you don’t know what are planning poker cards are, it is one of the nice ways used by Agile teams to estimate the effort of a user story, as the whole team of developers are involved in estimating the effort, not only managers.

If that estimation is done manually, you can have funny cases like these, so some would recommend doing it using cards. I personally think that a nice deck of regular poker cards would do the job, but they might not be as interesting as the Agile version.

You can also play the planning game online here which is brought to you by agile consultants and trainers at Mountain Goat Software.

Random Data Generator Tool

Have you ever needed to fill a table with random data and started to get bored after 10th or 20th row.

And have you tried to enter rubbish data for the sake of saving time as you cannot find meaningful names for 50 or 100 persons (you can use your friends names, but this won’t be so quick, and what about if you need their phone numbers :)

Here is a quick and easy tool that can get you full tables of any size of rows with any size and type of columns you need. And the output can be in HTML, XML, Excel, CSV, or SQL Inserts.

http://www.generatedata.com/#generator

The best of all is that it is totally free.

An insight on functional programming

It has been a long vacation, with quite some events to talk about

I had been following up the release of F# CTP which I haven’t got comprehensive knowledge yet, but to sum it up, it is a functional, declarative programming language.

In a functional language, each function should get some inputs, and return an output, with no other “side effect”; which means the internal implementation of the function doesn’t affect the state of the object or the state of any other related objects or global variables.

This is what differs functional languages from procedural or object oriented languages where a “method” can affect the instance fields or properties of the same object and/or other objects, can print something on a screen, or can persist something on other media. Each of these action doesn’t qualify a language to be a functional language.

Some “pure functions” are mathematical functions such as “SUM()”, “AVG()”, “MAX()”, “MIN()” which typically get one or more input and return an output regardless of the context it is called from.

That decoupling from the context, make it easy to define “what” instead of “how” and hence it is a declarative programming language as well.

You can get a quick understanding of this language and the concepts of functional languages from this 20 minutes tutorial.

Visual Studio 2010 (Rosario)

Microsoft has provided the first look at its new development platform Visual Studio 2010 which is based on the new .NET Framework 4.0.

Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas:

• riding the next-generation platform wave
• inspiring developer delight
• powering breakthrough departmental applications
• enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing
• democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM)

Their efforts in the area of ALM is the next step after their launch of Team Foundation Server (TFS) in 2005 and their efforts to combine Management, Analysis, Design, Testing, and Deployment all together under one platform.

The new announced features includes enhanced modeling with new diagram types such as use case, activity, and sequence beside the tightly close integration of modeling with existing and new code.

My favorite in the new features is the new testing capabilities which includes a stand-alone Test Runner that allows for running manual test, and at the same time take system snapshots with pertinent information and can be even used to take video captures of what was done during the test and report a bug to TFS directly with the captured data as an attachment.

Another favorite is the Test Impact View, which allows the developer to view the code changes made and the impacted tests that needs to re-run before checking in the latest modification.

For more info you can check the Visual Studio Team System 2010 Overview page.