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Rusty Divine

Rusty Divine is technical lead who cultivates a fun and friendly environment for his agile team where it is safe to make mistakes and continually learn. Rusty specializes in .Net web applications for businesses and enjoys working with customers and stakeholders, coaching developers, and helping manage projects. Rusty has a scientist’s training and curiosity with a degree in Geology that took him to Antarctica to study climate change for a season. Rusty lives with his wife and son in Nebraska.

Transform Pub/Sub to Firestore Database in GCP

Rusty Divine Apache, Articles, Cloud, Data Science, Databases, Google Cloud Platform, Python Leave a Comment

This year, the client I work with has started exploring the offerings in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) after investing years into the Microsoft Azure cloud. The opportunity has allowed me to explore a few new technologies that this post will cover and that you will hopefully find interesting.

In short, I was tasked with transforming Pub/Sub to Firestore Database in GCP. The scenario explored in this post takes an FHIR healthcare data feed, extracts telephone and email information, and then stores that in a Firestore database.

Story Point

Story Point Estimation: Could Your Team Do Better?

Rusty Divine Agile, Articles, Tutorial Leave a Comment

It can be rough to ask your development team to estimate work based on abstract story point values, especially when they are new to it or to each other. I know this and have experienced this in full.

So in this blog, I am going to share an exercise with you that will give every member of your team the same frame of reference for estimating the size of their work. I call this exercise Story Point Benchmarking.

user story mapping

Every Agile Software Project Needs a User Story Map

Rusty Divine Agile, Articles, Microservices Leave a Comment

In this blog, I share an example of a real-world, agile enterprise modernization project that benefited from a User Story Map.

I’m the team lead for a project to convert a business solution from COBOL to a .NET microservices architecture. Other than some interesting challenges with designing a robust microservices solution, the business logic is very straightforward – input files are processed, databases queried, output files are produced and dropped in a folder, and our goal is to match the output produced by the COBOL solution perfectly.

Yet, we lost our way fairly early on in the project because we had a typical prioritized backlog. Unfortunately, even on a straightforward, well-defined project with an engaged team, we still managed to veer off course.

Our project manager started asking questions about where we were in the project and where we were going. I struggled to answer those questions because I couldn’t make sense of all that was in our backlog. It was around this time that I took a spreadsheet and created our first User Story Map….