How do you know when you're done?

In scrum a story is "Done" when it meets the team's shared "Definition of Done". The definition of done is roughly a list of requirements that all parts of the software increment must adhere to to be called complete. Like most things in scrum the implementation details are left to the team to decide. When I was first working with scrum I had a hard time finding examples of what a typical definition of done would include. Most scrum authors (and even many trainers) wave their hands and say that it's too specific to the team and their environment to generalize.

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FileVault2 Hacks

Mac OS X 10.7 introduced a whole disk encryption service called FileVault2. This allows you to use AES 128 encryption to protect your data. This is a great feature but it has a few small drawbacks. It uses the password of your primary user account to unlock the system. I'm a fan of strong passwords but for encryption I'd prefer to use a longer pass phrase for increased entropy. Second the EFI-boot screen that is used to get the password to decrypt the disk shows the display name of all usersthat can unlock the system rather than blank fields for both username and password. This leaks information that I would really rather not leak. Fortunately I've found a little hack to work around both of these issues.

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Yaml 1.1.1 PECL Module Released

I'm glad to announce that I finally got around to releasing the bug fix version of the YAML PECL module that I announced on 2013-04-23. Version 1.1.1 fixes several long standing bugs:

  • #61770 Crash on nonunicode character
  • #61923 Detect_scalar_type() is not aware of base 60 representation
  • #63086 Compiling PHP with YAML as static extension fails
  • #64019 Segmentation fault if yaml anchor ends with a colon
  • #64694 Segfault when array used as mapping key
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Planning Work in a Sprint

We've been having some discussions at $DAYJOB about process and methodologies. The topic of late is scrum and how it may or may not be helpful for the particular group I work with. I've been providing some anecdotal input based my past experience with scrum and other methodologies/frameworks/practices and asking questions about what problems the group is hoping to find new solutions for.

I started to write a big wall o' textâ„¢ email about a particular topic and then decided that maybe a blog post would be a better way to work through my idea. So dear reader1, here are some of my highly opinionated and mostly unsubstantiated thoughts about a process that a group of people could use to plan a scrum sprint (or really any other iterative unit of work).

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