First, I want to apologize for the last AF post (not the RSS feed one — the one before that). It’s chaotic and disjointed. Maybe I’ll edit it, though I think I have enough to do staying on top of the current stuff. The conversation that I was blogging was the hardest part of the day for me to blog. Part of the problem was I didn’t think about group dynamics and laptop power dynamics, so I was effectively sitting outside the circle of the group. There were also lots of comments back and forth and it was hard to summarize them. I’ll have to try something different for tomorrow’s wrap up session.

Second, Erik posted a couple of comments on the posts earlier today, and I figured I’d just address them in a new post (since I was doing one anyhow). His first comment is about FIT and the feasibility of holding off on it. I’m probably not the best person to talk about this, since I missed this evening’s discussion of FIT. I do know that at dinner, Cem said that he didn’t see how FIT would help them for the RubLog project, but that the vet stuff should be able to get some benefit from it. I imagine that I’ll pick up some more of what my team will do with FIT tomorrow.

Erik’s second comment asked whether we had already split into groups or we were doing the spikes as one group. We’ve already split. The RubLog stuff already has some mechanism for serving pages associated with it, so they didn’t need the spikes we did today. I think the teams are supposed to remain fairly set, though I don’t recall anything being said either way, so this is just my opinion. I think even after just one day, a person switching teams would have a large learning curve to climb to get up to speed and that’s only going to increase. Things like pair programming can help with that, and it might be an interesting experiment to try in a few days. I don’t know.

Third, the vet stuff is accessible from outside. I was going to put the URL here, but I don’t remember it at the moment. I’ll get it tomorrow (and leave this point in as a reminder to do so).

Fourth, Bret told me that he had put the stories for the RubLog project on the Agile Fusion Wiki. The stuff he’s putting up there is at http://www.testing.com/cgi-bin/agile-fusion?RubLogProject

Finally, some thoughts on blogging a live event. In my reading of others’ blogs, I’ve seen talk recently about live blogging (at some of the recent blogging conferences in particular). They warned that one of the dangers associated with live blogging was not participating as deeply. I think that was to some extent present for me today. Tomorrow, I may try posting a little less and summarizing a little more, but I wasn’t consciously trying to get everything today either, so I don’t know for sure how the entries will be different from today’s.

I did find, however, that the act of creating entries on the fly helped in my processing the information – it was clearer to me (particularly when I was trying to summarize people’s comments mentally) and it feels like it has “stuck” better than other similar types of events I’ve been in. Tying that into the more usual content of this blog (no, not my ongoing obsession with RSS feeds), it seems like I’m much more an active learner than I thought. I’m learning stuff better by creating the posts. At the same time, it could be argued that I’m doing both active and reflective learning (which does in fact correspond to my test results — I’m fairly close to the middle on most scales). The active part is in the explaining what I’m learning and what’s going on here to others (all of you reading this), while the reflective part comes from the summarizing and editorializing I do around the other stuff.

I guess it hadn’t hit me before how blogging could address both sides of a learning styles pair like this. Maybe that’s why I like it so much — it lets me exercise skills in both areas.

I’ll have to ponder that more. Anyhow, it’s off to bed now — stay tuned tomorrow for more Agile Fusion news (and the occasional other random thought should I have time for them 🙂