Presentation Agile software development

Today its time to give a presentation about Agile software development and how we used it by the development in the project RAIS.

The project RAIS at Achmea has combined SENS (Samen Effectief Naar Succes) with Agile. We have looked at the thing SENS is giving us to work on a better way. And look backwards where we could do it better next time.

We have used a whiteboard to give everybody information who is walking on the floor to see witch work we already have done.
Thing that are put on the board are:

• Some time management. When is witch developer not available.
• All the tasks of the iteration and who is working on a tasks.
• A burn down chart.
• Some charts of the bugs who are found.
• Feedback from the customer every 2 weeks when they have a demo.

Things you can do to make development in SharePoint faster

Yesterday i have a course from Bas Lijten -> Blog . The course give some information to make your develop environment faster. We work within Achmea-IT Mscc with an virtual pc. Because our environment is not working directly on the hardware of the pc we loss a lot of speed. So one of the options we could do is to delete the virtual pc from our environment. The problem is that there is a part of our company that is responsible for the hardware and wants only 1 workstation (also called 1WS). That means that a developer has the same hardware and basic software as an manager or other employee. We have got an virtual pc image to make our system ready to develop software in Visual Studio 2010.

One of the options we now are going to try is to give the SharePoint developers a new laptop with 8 in stead of 4 Gb Memory, also is in the new hardware a solid state disk (SSD) that makes our system a lot faster. The department that is responsible for 1WS gives us a go because our solution is not the final one. Because a other solution cost a lot of time to do research the are okay. The other solution is to make a develop environment is to going to work within a software cloud.

This action is something that need some time to buy and configure the software. So now some other things you can do now to make your development faster.

You can use a tool like ramdisk that enables some hard-disk space directly to a part of the ram memory. If you bind the virtual directory in the ram space the rendering of the SharePoint portal gives a speed-up from x2. Before it was like 54 seconds to start the portal for the first time. After we bind the space to the ram memory the first time to start the portal it was started in a small 30 seconds.