Archive of Agile Articles

Today we did a little refactoring of code, but otherwise took a quick break from development of nexus.

If you’ve ever had writer’s block, or struggled with a tough programming or representational problem, you know that one way to make progress is to walk away and then walk back. We did that today and reached a couple conclusions.

Nexus Help Document System Operational

Today we fixed a couple bugs, tweaked the UI a little, and implemented the functionality to support help documentation.

In the announcement last week about the third release of the nexus alpha, we mentioned that we would focus on minor improvements, refactoring, and content this week.

Here’s an update about what we did today - we pushed two updates to the site - one this morning, and one this evening.

Release 3 of nexus just went live!

• Our initial alpha release was on May 17th after one month of requirements, design, implementation and testing.
• The next release of nexus was on May 22nd after five days of implementation and minor tweaks to prioritization.
• This release of nexus took ten days, and included significant functionality - as much or more than the first release.

Read on to get a quick overview of the changes.

Implementation continues on nexus, and we’ve re-factored the way that items in a bundle are ordered, as mentioned in our earlier post. We talk a little about affordance, and show a couple screen shots.

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend (or a great weekend even if not a holiday where you are). The implementation is moving forward for the bundles. The pending release now allows me to add, delete, re-order and edit items within a given bundle. The re-ordering is not good - you have to manually change the “position” of each item. While functional, this isn’t good enough to release - so I will be refactoring this tomorrow.

This is a quick update on the implementation progress for the third release of nexus. For this release, we are focused on the creation and consumption of bundles of articles.

Yesterday, we identified the high priority goal for the third release of nexus to be supporting creation of bundles of articles. In this article, we will define the use cases we need to support.

The second release of nexus went live today (build 127). It included the top features from our prioritized list published yesterday. This enabled the next use case from our first prioritized list of use cases - searching the articles. We also took this opportunity to refactor part of the user interface - adding pagination of articles and search results, and reworking the presentation of the article content based on user feedback.

In this article we look at the content of the third alpha release of nexus.

The next build of nexus starts today as our agile project continues. Let us know what stuff you think is most important for this release, as part of our prioritization.