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What you have landed on, possibly inadvertently, is the website of a certain curious character a.k.a Nigel Fernandes
The aim of this page was to serve as a landing point for those of you who want to know a little more about me. The links on the right and left will take you deeper my world, or possibly on to different exciting things.
Its a big web out there and this is just one more street for you to saunter down. I hope you like it.
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About Me
- Name: Nigel Fernandes
- Location: Panjim, Goa, India
Crazy, dancing, programming, Goan.. I'm a computer geek and proud to be one. I program in Java, Ruby and .Net, PHP, Javascript. A lot of my recent work has been about CSS and UI design practices for large scale websites and Agile teams. I still while away hours dreaming up a web startup.
Smelling Bugs
Thursday, August 13, 2009
A few months ago, we learnt that our team had the highest bug count per point delivered as compared to any other team. Since the program of work is composed of several teams all working on the same code base, this was a point of obvious concern.At first we tried throwing more QA's and more QA related process at it. Seemed logical but did not help much. In fact intense QA and QA process meant that story cycle time went up.
Then we started analyzing the bugs, and found fairly distinct trends based on the nature of the bug report.
We had a higher percentage of bugs caused by :
* Implementation defects.
* High levels of customer feedback coming in as bugs from UAT.
* The customer expecting more than the story scope.
Our actions:
* Return to core XP practices. Much more focus on pairing and pair rotation.
* Spend more time on story analysis. Get the programmers to pair with BA's on story definition.
* Tightened story acceptance criteria.
The results are trickling in now. Looks like we got our actions right.
Lesson: Pay attention to the nature of your bugs, not just the bug count.
Labels: bugs, projects, software
When you love what you do, its not work.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
People tell me I'm a workaholic. They base this on the fact that they see me on my PC late into the night, in the office. What they do not always understand is that I choose to spend that time in the office. I do not stay because I have work to do. I stay because I'm doing something I love. I do not believe I have ever complained about having too much work.
Some people work on side projects in their own time. I used to do this too. Until I realized that the reason I did that was to have the joy of building something that people liked and used.
I get this same joy that on projects. I build little tools and code bits that could make my team more efficient, that they could use and be happy. Even make my own day easier. No context switching to deal with either.
I'll go back to working on side project someday. But till then I've found a happy middle ground.
Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful. - Larry Wall
Labels: consulting, thoughts, work