My First Distributed Planning Session

We had our first distributed planning session today and I wasn't too impressed. Conference call + WebEx = Challenging

First off, I was using MS Paint + Mouse as my "virtual whiteboard". I bet WebEx has something that can be used and I could bring my Wacom tablet from home, but I'm a newbie to this so that will have to wait until another day. Another thing that's tough is that I rely on reading peoples facial expressions to guide my line of questioning in planning meetings, but that aspect is also nonexistent in distributed planning. I've got several more coming up, so I'll be getting more practice...

I guess some distributed Agile sessions are in order at Agile 2007...

IntelliJ Sucks! AKA keybinding hell.

Ok, out of morbid curiosity we decided to download and install IntelliJ trial for doing our development during this iteration. Getting our Eclipse project imported and Tomcat installed was pretty painless so we thought what the heck, let's try it. It didn't last long. It really boiled down to our addiction to the keyboard, no mouse for us. Even with the Eclipse keybindings set, it didn't cover all of the shortcuts we use regularly. The "Quick Fix" keystroke (Ctl+1) was not available for instance. So we could probably have taken the time to get them completely set up "Eclipse Style", but how many IntelliJ shops are using Eclipse bindings? I guess my thoughts turn more and more towards thinking that the IDE doesn't really matter that much, it's all in what you're used to.