I thought I would take a break from rambling about agile software development to talk a bit about the TG2 sprint which I participated in just this last weekend. Well, maybe I’ll talk a little about agile…

If you have never sprinted before, you should, at least once. What I like best about sprinting is you typically have all the experts right there at your finger tips if you get stuck. Everyone has a unified goal of developing sofware in a certain domain. This creates a great work environment, and one in which you can get a great amount done in a short period of time.

This last Turbogears sprint was interesting because it was a truely international crowd. What was particularly neat about this was that there was an extended amount of time that the sprint was happening, because people from different time zones were working at different times. This is probably more difficult for the sprint coordinator, Mark Ramm, but he pulled off coordination seamlessly. One of the greatest tools in our arsenal was IRC. Mark also had a cut-and-paste webpage, which was incredibly useful for sharing snipets.

While my project is pretty independent of TG, it was great to have discussions with other members on-line about low-level decisions regarding the architecture of TG2. Normally these conversations take a few days over message boards. So, thanks to some sprinting DBSprockets is entering it’s Beta phase, and I am hoping to get more users now that I have created a primitive way to manipulate Sprockets.

In any event, I hope that Mark will be coordinating another sprint in February, I am pretty sure he will, and if you want to come over to Boulder, CO I would be happy to make you feel welcome.

-chris