jDowdle.com

While we at work are not "agile" I still find that some of the techniques used are very helpful. Today, I read an article on how to use "Planning Poker" to assign business value to features in a release.

This article's value can be seen if you've ever been in a meeting where 10 new "awesome"/"cool"/"really important" features have been introduced 3 months after the requirements have been completed. To a developer these changes can be frustrating (if we aren't the ones proposing) or exciting (if we propose). Either way leads to either a rejection of the idea or an over commitment of our time.

The best thing taken from this article is the questions to ask of each feature before it is decided to be in the next release. They are:

• What does the feature mean to its user?
• What does the user mean to the product? Potential purchaser, marketing partner, simple user, influential user, investor…
• What does the feature mean to the company or companies developing it?
• How would you rate feature on the Kano scale (Pre-Requisite, Positioner, Exciter or Deterrent)?
• What is the consequence of not implementing the feature?
• What is the consequence of delaying implementation of the feature?

Original article (AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com), Planning Poker (Wikipedia)

A goal of mine for this blog is being connected to the readers. This afternoon I thought a great way of accomplishing that goal would be through installing a feedback widget.

Today I read about what looks to be a great tool to accomplish that. If you have any ideas or topics that you would like to see appear here please submit those ideas through the tab on the far right that says feedback. If there is the same idea already posted, just vote on that one please. The general focus of this blog is on web development and I'd ask that any ideas stay related to that.

I can't wait to see what people have to say. Thanks!

EDIT: Looks like the widget isn't showing up for some/all people. The other method is by going here: http://jdowdle.uservoice.com/. Thanks to those that mentioned that issue.

I always find myself surprised at how many sites, that I use on a regular basis, depend on Coldfusion. Florida's Sunpass site uses Coldfusion and they are so proud they even wanted to show it with the favicon!

Site: https://www.sunpasssecure.com/

Looking for a way to keep up with the global Coldfusion community on Twitter? Its quite simple. You only need 1 thing for this to work in its entirety: A Google Reader account.

1. Create a search feed for the terms you want to follow here. I simply used "Coldfusion" but you might want to play with some hash tags such as #maxmilan.
2. On the search results page, grab the feed for the query.
3. Add the feed to your Google Reader account
4. Under feed settings, select "Translate into my language"
5. Enjoy reading multilanguage tweets!

If you don't know, jQuery can load a remote page into a DIV very easily. Not only that, it can also filter on which parts of that page get loaded.

First you have to use load method of the target div. For example if my div looks like <div id="target">, then my load call will look like $("div#target").load(  "file.html" );

The load method has more to offer than that though!

You can only load into your target div the sections of interest my specifying selectors after the url.

Ex.  $("div#target").load("file.html .targetClass"); will loading all of the elements in file.html with the class "targetClass".

To see this in action, see the live example here. The file being loaded is here.