The need to expand your development team is a fantastic opportunity to bring in new skills, new expertise and new thinking to your existing team.

Finding the right person to join a group of developers who already work well together is a daunting task and one way I’ve found to make sure that everyone is on board with the new team member is to make the existing team part of the recruitment process.
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MoSCoW prioritisation is a method for collating all your features, user stories and feature requests into an sense of order, identifying what is most important and therefore should be delivered first or given the most concentration, within software development projects.

My particular umbrage with MoSCoW is the “Won’t have”. In my opinion this is wrong, it’s negative, it dismisses features or requirements because there isn’t enough time to complete them all. A perfectly valid viewpoint I hear you say – but in my experience dismissing any feature or requirement at the stage of a project wherein you would use MoSCoW is far too early to begin dismissing anything.

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Last year, June 2016 to be exact, I took part in my very first company “HackFu” event. I had decided that my first years’ attendance would be as a competitor, to get a feel for the event from an attendees point of view, before attempting to become part of the team that would organise and run the event for the following year.

“HackFu” is a two day, completely immersive, story based, learning and development event, run by MWR InfoSecurity for its employees – and most recently organised and developed by chronyko, for MWR. In the month before the event attendees begin to receive parts of the storyline, beginning with some soft detail before getting into the hardcore minutia shortly before the event. The entire event is themed, and actors are brought in to portray characters within the storyline.

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TLDR; Upgrading YouTrack to 7.0 and getting a “Failed to execute refactoring for entity type: Event” memory error in the Hub upgrade? Add more physical RAM, then add some more, with maybe a little more on top. YT 7.0 upgrade process is memory hungry.


If you’ve read the previous posts on this site, scrolled through my Twitter feed, or spoken to me about issue management, continuous integration, delivery or deployment, then you’ll have probably heard me talk about the Jetbrains product, YouTrack. Heck, I even used it to ticket-manage my wedding back in 2014!

YouTrack is, in a nutshell:

Easy-to-use, fully customisable issue tracking and agile project management tool your development team will love.

(Those are Jetbrain’s words) – and they’re right. It is easy to use and your dev team will love it. Especially if you’ve made them use other management tools, especially that one beginning with a ‘J’. Ouch.

Anyhow, We’ve been running YouTrack 6.5 as a standalone JAR instance, on a linux box, for quite some time. The recent announcement of YouTrack 7.0 with it’s enhanced agile boards and other wonderful improvements meant I was quite looking forward to updating. Along comes the fateful day and having taken another backup (never hurts to have multiple backups) we took the service down and started the upgrade.

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UPDATE: The book I mentioned, Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET, by Chris O’Dell and Matthew Skelton, can be found here.

On a lovely warm Thursday evening in May I returned to the speaker’s floor and presented a great session on Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment, to a fantastic group of developers at DevSouthCoast in Southampton.

The main takeaways from the session are all about how easy CI, CDel and CDep can be to get going, as well as how you can start the process off for free using popular, industry-used products. One of the most exciting parts of this session for me is that everything about the session is live. Using two VMs I replicate a standard setup – installing and configuring the applications right there on the session floor. Whilst the progress bars load I talk about how the applications I’ve chosen will help the process flow and what they bring to the Continuous party,
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