only slightly fried, Fiorano

It has been a while. This weekend I want to rebuild the database at agilewiki.org, as I've noticed some strange behavior before I totally neglected it.

Things are better at Fiorano. Focusing mostly on bug fixes and automated tests, with fewer bugs to fix as we go along. My goal is to continue to reduce the stress levels at Fiorano while increasing the overall quality of the code base. Then we will be in a great position to continue to build on our world-class products. Case in point, I have the weekend off, and I consider that a very good thing.

I've only been at Fiorano a little over a month now and I believe this company has great potential. So far my efforts have been directed at improving the development processes and in this I have gotten tremendous support from both the CEO and the developers. We are moving towards XP, but with some qualifications.

I say towards XP and with some qualifications partly because becoming an XP shop takes a lot of time, both in terms of the development methodology and the code base. In this reguard, things have gone supprisingly well. The developers (and management) are extreemly open to a new development methodology, and there is an extensive amount of test code already in place. What was missing was good coverage for receint developments--the shop had drifted away from its roots. Once this was clearly realized, there was little resistance to focusing on bringing the test suites back up to snuff.

Another area where we will not become a pure XP shop is in the area of design. As a middleware company supporting dynamic distributed application composition and management, design is essential. I also want to return development back to more asynchronous implimentations and this too requries good design.

Bill