link[rel='developer']

I found this post on estimating user stories via the Stack Overflow podcast. Since my only experience with Agile/Scrum estimating was with planning poker, I found this an interesting approach. T-Shirt estimating is a great way to get a  feel for the size of  a user story (a task); the team estimates how long a story will take by saying “This task is an XL”, or “This one’s a small”. The sizes correspond with how long that team member thinks it would take to complete that task.  You don’t need long drawn out discussions here — the idea is to get a quick feel for the size of the task in order to do your planning. Planning Poker, on the other hand, is a more granular methodology, requiring more discussion and thought.

By having less values to use for the estimates — T Shirt estimating uses 5 sizes, Planning Poker uses up to 10 — allows for faster consensus building among the team. Once the stories have been selected  for the next sprint using T Shirt estimating, more precise estimation using Planning poker can be done if desired.

Comments Off
Filed under: Development

While working on My Fan Flash, I was asked to integrate Google Analytics to the site. After all, what site these days doesn’t want to track it’s users?

So I did the usual. I created a new analytics account, grabbed the tracking script and installed it with the proper tracking code in the footer of the site. After pushing it to production, I was done. Sat back and waited for the first hit. And waited. Hmm… visited the site a few times with different browsers, but still no hits were being recorded.

Alright, time to get dirty. I opened the site in Firefox and enabled Firebug (I can’t work without it,it’s just too useful!). I set a breakpoint on the _trackPageView function and to my suprise it wasn’t hit. I put another breakpoint on the script load, refreshed the page and to my relief that breakpoint was hit. I started stepping through the code and ended up inside the Spry framework code. Apparently, Spry is wiring up an event handler that breaks the new Google Analytics script.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t much to be found on the internet about this but over on the Google Analytics, I did find the brand new asynchronous tracking script that can go in the document head instead of the footer. Google claims that this will speed page loads and improve compatibily with scripts that use onLoad handlers.

After replacing the old ga.js snippet with the shiny new async snippet and pushing to production, tracking for this site was functional again. So if you are having issues with Google Analytics not working on your site and you’re using third-party scripts that hook into the page load event, switch to the new the async snippet.

Comments Off
Filed under: Development