Working with a pomodoro...

I was recently at the fifth Italian Agile Day, where there was an interesting discussion about the 'rigid' use of agile techniques, in particular about the Pomodoro technique. I knew this practice but never tried it seriously, so in the following week started to use it with my team (along with other techniques we already used, as pair programming...). I will not explain the pomodoro (by the way...'pomodoro' means 'tomato' in Italian...), as there are a lot of good resources out there in the Web, but want to express some random tougths about it:

- It really helps you to focus on your work and to decrease your distraction

- The standard time of 25 minutes for a pomodoro is not always optimal...I think this technique will be more effective not using always the same pomodoro time ( just a 5 minutes variation can do the work...). Obviously you change the pomodoro time before starting it, not during it. The gratest drawback of not having a constant pomodoro time is that you loose some precision in the extimation phase, as old pomodoro times can vary, but you gain in using more effectively your time

- It's not a capital sin if you go on working after the pomodoro rang, if just for a few minutes (3 - 5 min). In my experience sometimes the last minutes of a pomodoro can be the most productive, and there is no evidence of a bigger number of mistakes as someone (the agile radicals...) say. By the way, my pomodoro rang as I was starting writing this third point...

Maybe after some more use I will become more radical, but I always like flexibility, and don't think the same exact way is good 'as is' for everybody...
(total writing time: 1 pomodoro + 4 min...I'm slow when writing in English...)

Grails & Spring together...

The news is fresh, and unexpected, but big, very big for the Groovy / Grails world. G2One, the company behind Groovy and Grails technologies, was acquired by SpringSource, the company of the popular Spring framework (read the news). What does this mean for the future of Groovy and Grails ? From the technical side, Grails is build on top of Spring, so the integration between the two technologies can be more tighter in the future. Also, SpringSource can dive into the world of dynamic languages backed by a mature and fast growing technology. But the most important thing is not technical but commercial. Backed by SpringSource, Grails will enter in the arena of enterprise applications from the front door. The technology is very good for big projects, as the social network LinkedIn and UK TV broadcasting giant BskyB sites demonstrate, but is still facing a lot of resistance in big and meaningful projects, maybe because it's considered too new or not reliable...This is likely to change in the future as a result of this acquisition. Tell your boss, and to the big boys in your company...Grails is going to become mainstream...