Something Smells

Below is a post that I have mulled over for a while. I'm not satisfied with it but I would love some feedback. I'd like to address two areas that are often considered taboo in the Agile field; Accountability and commitment. Just like the pig in the " Chicken and Pig Make Breakfast " story, agile teams make commitments. Teams commit to stories and they commit to estimates. As an agile project progresses through the 5 Levels of Planning it also moves through progressively higher levels of accountability; Nice Idea, Best Effort and Commitment. Making Commitments The Accountability Model above is meant to illustrate how each level of planning helps the team zero in on an actual commitment. Since agile teams accept that requirements will change, the most detailed design estimates are held off until just before implementation. So, project stakeholders can expect The Release Plan to be more accurate than The Road Map and the Iteration Plan to be more accurate than the Rele...

Memcached for Monorail (MfM) is my attempt at a simple, memcached / enyim based, session and caching facility for Monorail . MfM offers a lightweight, fast, low friction, facility for balancing Monorail sessionstate and object caches accross multiple servers. You can read my original post . Memcached offers an excellent solution for applications that need to balance object caches across multiple servers. It does so without the overhead of a database or even the use of the hard disk. Although, a major pitfall for memcached is it's unreliable nature. If a server in your memcached cluster fails then you lose all the objects cached on it. Memcached is just not meant for persisting object data permanently. The current release of MfM is capable of persisting sessionstate to a memcached cluster. If one or more memcached servers fails then that part of the session will be lost, permanently. For my projects, I found this unacceptable. I decided to add a DB persistence layer using ActiveRec...