Date archives "November 2011"

Agile Project Tools Review

Over the course of the last 2 years, I have tried out a number of Agile project management tools.  These tools are very important to us as we are often on distributed teams, given we have an office in Mohali, India.  So although we follow an Agile approach to our custom dev projects, we cannot stick to the Agile commandment that all development and project resources should work in the same location . Therefore a simple and efficient Agile card board on the wall will not suffice.  We need a tool that can be referenced not only by the internal development teams in Chicago and Mohali, but also often by the client as well.  We emphasize an open and transparent approach to our client relationship, which means our clients can log in and see the progress whenever they wish. This includes joining the daily-stand ups if they want.

So here is a quick run through of the tools we have tried, and why we ended up settling onAgile Zen.

Note that this post was also cross-posted to the Triton-Tek website, you can see it here also:

http://www.triton-tek.com/blog/2011/11/22/agile-project-tools-review/

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Starting fresh

I feel the need to start a new blog. Something that will allow me to write down the thoughts and interests that I have which span across a few differing areas. Currently I run a Business Analyst blog (buddingba.wordpress.com) and a Tumblr effort aimed at capturing my experiences learning Ruby on Rails (learningrubyonrails.tumblr.com) which by my own admission has been sparsely updated. These very narrow focused blogs have been effective in their own way, however I feel they have stymied my expression. I find myself searching for topics that will fit the parameters of the blogs focus, particularly with the Business Analyst blog, and that is restrictive, and counter-productive in my eyes.

Over the past 3-4 years, I feel like I have finally discovered an area of interest around which I can build a career, and that area is the Web. When I say the Web, I do mean that in it’s broadest and wonderfully diverse sense. I am fascinated by design, both the aesthetics of websites of course, but more so the interaction design, the crafting of user experiences in a virtual space, encapsulated in a screen, with resolutions ranging from an iPhone up to a big-screen TV. I love the disruptive nature of the Web. The fact that it is still in the process of creation and development, and that it evolves through this process with no one hand guiding it. There are just millions of people contributing to it’s ethereal body, and over time the most successful or innovative contributions rise to the top. What this means to me personally is there is always something new to learn. Always something that grabs my interest and opens a door to a new world of knowledge, and a new community of people with whom I can interact.

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