R. John Shields

Expect to see a new blog post here soon! I wonder what it’ll be…

I’m still recovering from my accident.

Last week I saw the doctor and he gave the OK to put weight on my leg. His quote was “I want you walking on it.” Cool! Up to this point I was worried about putting weight on my leg (even though I’d gone down to using only one crutch).

So…. no more crutches for me! Whoohoo!!!

Last week I was walking with a very noticeable limp and moving at a snail’s pace, but this week is much better. I’m still not going to win any races, but it gets better every day.

I still don’t have much flexibility in my ankle. I have about 50% of the range of motion that I have with the other foot and I don’t have any strength to “push off” with that foot.

I started physical therapy this week and have some “homework” to do to stretch that ankle. Things are heading in the right direction!

I mentioned in my previous post that I prefer Information Radiators over digital tools if done right. When Googling for a link to Information Radiators I ran across this article on InfoQ discussing the value of them. Check it out if your interested and share your thoughts in comments!

Don’t know if you saw this or not, but Atlassian has released a new version of their bug tracking tool JIRA and on top of that, they’re selling each of their products for $10 bucks (so called ‘starter‘ licenses).

I didn’t realize this until now, but they also have an agile project management tool called ‘GreenHopper‘ (which looks a lot like Mingle to me – in fact it looks like ThoughtWorks and Atlassian are duking it out product to product).

The best part is that for $10, you get 10 licenses!

I’ve used JIRA quite a bit and its not bad. I really don’t like any defect tracking software (most of them have a lot of noise for little information). However, JIRA ties in nicely with their build server Bamboo and that is huge. Being able to say what defects went into what build without manually tracking build numbers, subversion revision numbers, release numbers, etc provides a lot of value. It automatically answers the question “what’s in the latest build?”

If they’ve integrated GreenHopper in the same fashion, that would also be huge help.

In general, I’m more of a fan of whiteboards, index cards and information radiators. But, if you have a distributed team, Atlassian’s product suite for 10 bucks is definitely worth evaluating.