Continuous Improvement: Day 2

Just a short post tonight. It was a long, hectic day, and I didn’t get enough sleep last night.

Day two on my journey of Continuous Improvement saw me getting one of my team’s projects set up to automatically build through TeamCity. After fixing a couple project reference issues, I was able to get our public website project building. We use the Visual Studio 2008 Web Site model; we do not precompile the project in any way before deploying to production. This caused a problem in TeamCity. This is because the Build target for Web Site Projects doesn’t do anything. Instead I had to set the build target to Publish. This causes the web site to be precompiled. I did this all on my lunch break :) I’ve recommended to my manager that he include the cost of an enterprise license in his budget for the next fiscal year.

Once I got the automated build working, I was wicked excited. I spoke with a fellow Senior Developer and our Lead Analyst about what I had accomplished. Both were equally excited. they basically had the same thing to say:

We know our current process is broken. I’m glad you’re doing something about it.

Rock on!

I gave my manager a quick update on what I’ve accomplished so far. He was equally excited. Then he asked the million dollar question:

Does what you have done require your team members to change their workflow?

To which I happily replied: No. This was the right answer at this stage of the game. We’re shooting for low-to-no friction to get the ball rolling.

What I meant was: Not Yet! ;)

I’m presenting my work so far to the team tomorrow at our weekly meeting (note to self: include replacement of weekly, hour-long meeting with daily, 15-minute stand ups in future plans).

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Continuous Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. Cory Foy says:
    February 10, 2009 at 11:26 pm

    Congrats! Glad Team City worked out so well for you. Sounds like you are off to a great start! If you ever need to meet for lunch, just give me a shout. Good luck!

    – Cory

  2. Shivesh Wangrungvichaisri says:
    April 15, 2009 at 7:08 pm

    That sounds great you find TeamCity so fun to use.

    Are you able to integrate TeamCity to your preferred-choice of bug/task tracker?

    I’m thinking about integrating TeamCity to JIRA.

  3. Will says:
    April 21, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    I haven’t even tried. Since I started this series of posts, I’ve changed my company; that is, I’ve moved on. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about it, but I just started this week, so things are a bit hectic.

  1. There are no trackbacks for this post yet.