Tracking projects: the constant irritation

So, there you are trying to implement a more agile system (albeit dragging an entire organization's culture is your real problem; you're settling for just a more agile system, but... that's another story). Part of what attracted you to agile was being able to yell "resources are fixed, therefore the schedule is variable!". But... someone has gone and signed a contract. For some reason, money must be exchanged.

This is the largest dilemma of agile programming. You cannot say you can't fix schedules. Time is important, and as long as it equals money, you will be its slave.

So, you're left with figuring out what you can put into a current iteration or release. You have to distribute tasks yet figure out how long it'll take you to hit a certain level of features and quality.

What's the right tool? If you're full agile, something as simple as Joel's spreadsheet would work ok. But... you're not there. You have to know how long it'll take you, which means that you can't only track tasks for this iteration, but you need to know how much is left until a major milestone. That means you must estimate into the future (which engineers suck at), and you must track dependencies towards that milestone, relentlessly cutting out what doesn't fit.

I'm about to write my own software to do this, since I can't find anything.

I'm thinking about GWT + YUI on Eclipse. This means a learning curve for me. It sucks, but I have to know these tools to do modern web development. I have previously done old school Perl (VERY pre-LAMP - I was the first implementer of WebGlimpse). I have more recently done ASP using C#, which, I must say, doesn't really suck. But it's not fast enough. Ruby and Python and all associated toolkits are great backend solutions, but I need a really rich GUI. I'm a fan of big, succulent clients. Hence my run to a rich language for GUI development for the web. GWT seems to give me depth and strength via Java, and YUI gives me some nice pre-built toys.

Wish me luck. I'll post as I get more done.

24 Hour Fitness = Spy for the Man

Recently, I went to the gym after a long hiatus (called the holidays) and found they had installed turnstiles because, evidently, people were stealing health.

I discovered that they had altered their process of checking in from a card-based system that they scanned with a barcode reader into one where you key in a phone number, put your finger on the sensor and they let you through the man-gates.

Well, I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, who cares? I believe in Brin's Transparent Society. But on the other hand, the first keeper of the electronic version of my fingerprint shouldn't be my gym.

I will continue to feel unease. Hopefully they're not in bed with the FBI or CIA. Not that I've done anything wrong...