Summary: Makyo: the GUI can break the charm bcsaller: Write user stories as functional tests: improv plus Selenium bcsaller: card velocity improving gary_poster: run the tests before landing, or, we are not as good as an automatic tester gary_poster: teknico is "documentation daddy" bcsaller and Makyo: proliferation of ENV=1 make [target] rules goodspud: what do we do with the juju-gui charm in

We are working on the Juju GUI. This weekVery good interaction with design team Improved team velocity after deceleration last week Real users are starting to trickle in We have had some very positive interactions with the design team. We have dug up some good data, requirements, and decisions together, and we've increased our dialog. They have been very responsive to what we need in the short

Welcome back! We've been away working in secret for awhile. Our work is open now, so our retrospective notes are too. Our current project is a web-based GUI for Juju. Juju lets you deploy connected services to the cloud in a convenient, vendor-neutral, and powerful way. The GUI lets you visualize and manage your work (see also another blog; a demo of our trunk, which is reset every 15 minutes

Summary: We're still hiring for openings in a very cool Python & cloud position, so please apply soon if you are interested! frankban landed a gigantic lpsetup branch to simplify code flow per discussions we've had lately in the squad (see last week's "topics" discussion about OO vs. functions, etc.). benji and gary_poster interviewed a lot. bac identified and worked on final changes before we

Summary: bac/gary_poster: re-reconsidering required pre-implementation calls gary_poster: postpone reviewing the collaboration feedback experiment? [introduction] [project report] (no tricks this week) [topics]Attendance: bac, benji, gary_poster. Apologies: frankban. bac/gary_poster: re-reconsidering required pre-implementation callsWe had a kanban card take more that 24 hours in an active lane,

Summary: gary_poster: reconciling staff unavailability with kanban work-in-progress (WIP) limits gary_poster: OO versus functions, inversion of control, and how much agreement is important gary_poster: More incremental success with our integration tests [introduction] [project report] (no tricks this week) [topics]gary_poster: reconciling staff unavailability with kanban work-in-progress (WIP)

Summary: A vacation kept one weekly report from being written, and another weekly meeting from happening. Welcome back! We're still hiring for openings in a very cool Python & cloud position, so please apply soon if you are interested! We are progressing pretty far along the process, though we have many more interviews to make. Interviews consumed gary_poster completely, and affected all of us

Summary: This was gmb's last week with us. Farewell from Yellow squad, and best wishes for leading Green squad! We're still hiring for five openings in a very cool Python & cloud position, so please apply soon! The interview process largely consumed 3/5 of the squad; next week it will affect 3/4 of us. We've had some good interviewees, and we hope to have more. We did not have as many test runs

Summary: bac: Don't use seteuid with bzr frankban: Using deb package recipes with Distribute-based Python packages frankban: os.path.expanduser uses $HOME to expand '~' frankban: In tests, use a temporary home plus a bzr whoami before bzr commit [introduction] [project report] [tricks] (no topics this week) This week the meeting was very short because we had an interview with a job candidate

Summary: benji/gary_poster: Different ways to keep Juju from forcing you to repeatedly accept SSH keys [introduction] [project report] [tricks] [topics]benji/gary_poster: Different ways to keep Juju from forcing you to repeatedly accept SSH keysJuju is a great tool, and this week we used it to develop some integration tests.We focused on external back ends (like EC2 and local OpenStack) rather

Summary: Parallel tests are running very well this week, with 37 successful runs in a row so far...even though we haven't changed anything. The parallel testing machines in the data center will reportedly be ready for us next week. The lpsetup code's refactoring is again at a usable milestone, and we are ready to test a new package of the code. The lpsetup code has its first integration test,

Summary: benji: Juju-based integration tests are a success for incremental value bac/gary_poster: Is it ever OK to knowingly check in broken code? gary_poster: Not meeting our weekly goals [introduction] [project report] [tricks] [topics]benji: Juju-based integration tests are a success for bringing value incrementallyWe chose to pursue integration tests of the lpsetup project as a timeboxed,

Summary: gary_poster/benji: Personal feedback loops bac/benji/gary_poster: Poorly specified tasks [introduction] [project report] [tricks] [topics] gary_poster/benji: Personal feedback loops We already have team feedback loops, in the form of weekly internal retrospectives and weekly external goals, deliveries, and reports.  They help us identify when we need to evaluate and improve our

Summary: bac: manage your services together with their supporting infrastructure gmb: beware: Launchpad's ec2 command will sometimes silently break if your download cache doesn't have what you need. gary_poster/gmb: if you get a weird ec2 result, don't forget about ec2's postmortem option. [introduction] [project report] [tricks] [topics] bac: manage your services together with their

Summary: We made some good progress, but this week was not as successful as we had hoped. [introduction] [project report] [tricks] [topics] Weekly Goal Progress Continue running parallel tests on the EC2 32 core machine and aggregating results.COMPLETED. Our tests continued to be triggered only by three known bugs (974617/1011847, 1002820 and, apparently, a return of 1014916), though for some

When do you want to duplicate effort?  You often want to duplicate learning across a team.  What about prototyping? Last week, I read an internal report from Maris Fogels at Canonical about the virtual sprint that he and his team ran. The goal of the sprint was to learn how to write Juju charms. A virtual sprint means that they all met together online for several days in a row, continuously

Introduction What is this post? I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track

Introduction What is this post? I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep

The squad I manage is fully distributed, like most of Canonical's employees.  We are all in relatively overlapping timezones--ranging from Italy to the American east coast--but none of us work in the same building, or even the same city. We also are on the Lean journey.  We're not nearly as far along as others you'll find blogging on the web.  However, maybe we're interesting because of the

Introduction What is this post? I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track