Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

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Agile Chronicles #5: Acceptance Criteria & Punting
The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting my experiences using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on my current Flex project.
1. Part 1 – Stressful
2. Part 2 – Code Refactoring
3. Part 3 – Branch Workflow
4. Part 4 – POC, Strategy, and Design Challenges
5. Part 5 – Acceptance Criteria & Punting
6. Part 6 – Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions
7. Part 7 – Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput
8. Part 8 – Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling
9. Part 9 – Scope Creep
10. Part 10 – Conclusions
This entry is about defining what the acceptance criteria for user stories are so you can confirm you really did complete them during the UAT at the end of the sprint. It’s also about determining when you should abort a task that is taking too much time.

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November 29, 2008
Writing a Caching Engine for Flash Player

Not to be confused with Object Pooling, I’m referring to saving data you need to persist in your application across sessions, and more specifically about saving images in your own local cache as opposed to the browser cache.

As usual, I ask a question on Flex coders and get no response. This usually arises from the fact that its an open ended question without a simple answer, and thus, would take a long time to answer… say, the amount of time it takes to write a blog entry like this. My question was in regards to building caching engines. I’d never done one, and figured all the Java/Ruby/Python/ColdFusion server-heads who do Flex would know / have experiences to share. Well, it’s a month later, so here’s how it went for me.

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November 22, 2008
Agile Chronicles #4: P to the Oh to the Sea, Strategy, and Design Challenges
The Agile Chronicles is a set of articles documenting my experiences using an Agile process (Scrum) in software development on my current Flex project.
1. Part 1 – Stressful
2. Part 2 – Code Refactoring
3. Part 3 – Branch Workflow
4. Part 4 – POC, Strategy, and Design Challenges
5. Part 5 – Acceptance Criteria & Punting
6. Part 6 – Tools, Extra Merge Day, and Postponed Transitions
7. Part 7 – Bugs, Unit Testing, and Throughput
8. Part 8 – Demo, Burnout, and Feature Juggling
9. Part 9 – Scope Creep
10. Part 10 – Conclusions
This entry is about creating proof of concepts that tackle challenging components in your application before Sprint #1 starts, when Strategy happens in the process, and the design challenges that still exist.

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November 21, 2008
Flex Move Effect Messes Up Mask Alignment

In creating some custom components in Flex 3 last week, I battled off and on all week with a bloody Move effect. Â It kept screwing up the mask I used. Â Basically, it’s a timeline that shows 24 hours in a horizontal timeline. Â The parent masks 6 hours off. Â When a new date is set, it zooms to show that span of time in the 24 hour range. Â The “zoom to” is a Move effect applied to the child component.

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November 17, 2008