Latest articles

  • Sitecore Technical MVP Award 2014!

    A few months ago I submitted my candidacy for this year’s technical MVP awards and this month I was notified that I had been rewarded for my efforts in 2014! I am now officially a Sitecore Technology MVP. I have joined a small group of excellent folks from around the world who are focused on… Read more

  • Tracking hours burndown in Trello

    Tracking hours burndown in Trello

    In the past, I’ve written about some tools for doing Scrum inside of Trello, as well as some guidance on creating Scrum boards using these plugins. Recently, I received a question about how to accurately track hours spent in Trello.  Zig Mandel, the man behind Plus for Trello and Spent for Trello, reached out and recommended… Read more

  • Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Video presentation from SVUG

    I had planned on kicking off a short series on how to tackle the challenges of Sitecore Continuous Deployment, but after I had written my post the Sitecore Virtual User Group (SVUG) held an online Q&A presentation by Jason Bert on Continuous Integration & Deployment. The presentation is a great introduction to the concepts and… Read more

  • Git branching model

    I haven’t really had the chance to work with Git much over the years, other than creating a GitHub account and performing some simple merges on my own projects. For work reasons, however, I’ve been looking into sustainable models for using Git as an enterprise source control for larger, long-running projects. My investigations started with… Read more

  • The NFR Dilemma: Capturing Nonfunctional Requirements in the Backlog

    The NFR Dilemma: Capturing Nonfunctional Requirements in the Backlog

    Development teams using Scrum, or similar agile forms, will find that the constraints on the system that are represented by Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) can be a pain to capture and reference in product backlogs. The NFRs aren’t acceptance criteria, but the “story” isn’t really done unless it meets them. The NFRs  also usually span multiple… Read more

  • Sitecore login performance slows down over time

    Sitecore login performance slows down over time

    On a recent project using Sitecore 6.6, we ran across a strange performance problem with logging in visitors to the site.  As the day went along, the response time for logging in a visitor to the site would slow down. Combined with Windows Authentication being required, this meant that initial loads of all pages were… Read more