Agile Development and Scrum

The Agile family of development methodologies was born out of a belief that an approach more grounded in human reality would yield better results. Agile emphasizes building working software that people can get hands on with quickly, versus spending a lot of time writing specifications up front. Agile focuses on small, cross-functional teams empowered to make decisions, versus big hierarchies and compartmentalization by function, and Agile focuses on rapid iteration, with as much customer input along the way as possible. Often when folks learn about Agile, there’s a glimmer of recognition – it sounds a lot like back in the start-up days, when we “just did it”.
One of the fastest-growing Agile methods is Scrum. It was formalized over a decade ago by
Ken Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland, and it’s now being used by companies large and small, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, SAP, Cisco, GE,
CapitalOne and the US Federal Reserve. Many teams using Scrum report significant improvements, and in some cases complete transformations, in both productivity and morale.
For product developers – many of whom have been burned by the “management fad of the month club” – this is significant. Scrum is simple, powerful, and rooted in common sense.

SolverFinish Function in Excel 2007 development

Tells Microsoft Office Excel what to do with the results and what kind of report to create when the solution process is completed.

Before you use this function, you must establish a reference to the Solver add-in. In the Visual Basic Editor, with a module active, click References on the Tools menu, and then select the Solver.xlam check box under Available References. If Solver.xlam does not appear under Available References, click Browse and open Solver.xlam in the \office12\library\Solver subfolder.

SolverFinish( KeepFinal , ReportArray )

ReportArray    Optional Variant. The kind of report that Excel will create when Solver is finished: 1 creates an answer report, 2 creates a sensitivity report, and 3 creates a limit report. Use the Array function to specify the reports you want to display — for example, ReportArray:= Array(1,3).

Example

This example loads the previously calculated Solver model stored on Sheet1, solves the model again, and then generates an answer report on a new worksheet.

 Worksheets("Sheet1").Activate
SolverLoad LoadArea:=Range("A33:A38")
SolverSolve UserFinish:=True
SolverFinish KeepFinal:=1, ReportArray:=Array(1)