devgrind

… and a long, long way from home. Currently, I am looking forward to doing software projects as a solo developer for the next time. The XP way seems very promising to me but it has a strong focus on teams - pair programming, stand-up meetings and the like. Fortunately, the XP people are also aware of the “solo developer” problem and there are some interesting suggestions for using the XP benefits for your lonely-cowboy-project.

Filed by Magnus at 2:49 pm under development, methods, organization, xp
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This one is for our german-speaking audience: if you are interested in agile development methods (or eXtreme Programming in particular), but never had the opportunity to try it for real, you should listen to this issue of Chaosradio Express, a german radio show/podcast. It features Pavel Mayer, head of development at art+com.

From the show’s description:

Pavel berichtet aus seinen jahrelangen und mehrheitlich positiven Erfahrungen in der konkreten Anwendung von Extreme Programming im Unternehmen und erläutert, welche Schritte nötig waren, um diese Umstellung zu einem Erfolg zu führen, welche langfristigen Effekte das hatte.

Its a great and very insightful show, now I’d like to try XP myself…

Filed by Arne at 1:56 pm under agility, development, management, methods, organization, xp
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A question to all the project managers and other folks concerned with project planning out there: How do you embed gantt charts taken from MS Project into a MS Word document? Sounds easy? Well, there are a few constraints that must be satisfied:

• It must be possible to rotate the chart — after embedding it or on the way.
• The embedded chart must be resizable without quality loss, i.e. it must transformed into in some kind of vectorized form, or in very high resolution.
• The Word file must be readable & editable on machines where MS Project isn’t installed (in order to collaboratively edit a document).
• The resulting Word document must not exceed a reasonable size, i.e. its okay for a document to gain a few MB by adding a one-page chart.
• The process of converting/embedding must be reasonably simple so that it can be repeated iteratively, i.e. it shouldn’t take more than a fistful of steps.

According to my personal experience, its an almost impossible job to do. After researching this problem and doing some tedious trial-and-error work for several hours, I found a way:

• print the chart as a high-quality PDF with embedded fonts using Adobe’s PDF driver
• open the PDF in Acrobat
• rotate
• save as EPS
• insert the EPS into the Word doc

This works — if I perform these steps on my colleague’s machine. I tried this on my machine, but it won’t work. Exporting from Acrobat as Word doc works sometimes, but shows rather indeterministic behavior and sometimes leads to a mangled mess. Other approaches, such as going via WMF, EMF or directly embedding the MPP as an object, failed right away.
I assume there is an easier way to do this which works on any machine (with the necessary software) — any suggestions?

Filed by Arne at 5:34 pm under organization, tools, writing
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