Tag: Scrum

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Øresund Agile 2008 Conference Day

(Continued from Accelerated Agile on Øresund Agile 2008.)

After two days of workshops, Wednesday was the conference day. Two sessions specifically addressed distributed Scrum: having teams, or part of teams, in different geographic locations. The presentation by Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland was great but also a bit utopian while the other, by Arto Vihavainen and Muqeet Kahn from Qvantel, was not only interesting but also very down to earth. Tobias Fors from Citerus had a very the best presentation slides and Henrik Kniberg told a great tale of Scrum and XP adoption.

Next year’s conference, obviously Øresund Agile 2009, will be in Copenhagen on May 12-14. Add it to your calendar right now!

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Accelerated Agile on Øresund Agile 2008

Yesterday I participated in the Accelerated Agile workshop at Øresund Agile 2008. It was attended by both developers and non-developers. Some parts of the workshop were common for the two groups and others were separate.  Me and another developer actually did both TDD and pair programming! BestBrains, the company that organized the workshop, had prepared an Eclipse project in a Subversion repository, using Maven to build and with CruiseControl for automated build on commit. We pair programmed on an MS Windows machine but I tried on my Ubuntu Linux machine to and it worked fine.

Update Photos and comments from BestBrains.

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Agile Architecture on Øresund Agile 2008

Today, on the first day of Øresund Agile 2008, I attended the Agile Architecture workshop held by Jim Coplien. He is a really great speaker! Some things that stuck in my head:

  • Don’t use TDD, it destroys architecture because it makes the programmer focus on individual methods, losing the bigger picture on the way
  • Don’t bother with unit tests, they make a bigger code base (equal amounts of application and unit test code is not unlikely), meaning more defects! The system tests should be enough
  • A subset of system tests that run in less than ten minutes should be used as a smoke test.
  • For interactive systems he was able to unify Agile software development, Model-View-Controller(-User) and Object Orientation.
  • MVC inventor Trygve Reenskaug was referred to a few times, and Jim told us that Trygve’s Data-Collaboration-Algorithm (DCA) was going to be the next big thing in software development! (This will be the seventh hit or so on a Google search for "Data-Collaboration-Algorithm". Maybe I should make a dedicated blog post about it.)
  • Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are bad because they add new languages to learn when new people should work on a system, and it takes years to create a good language.
  • UML could be used to visualize a system, but should be generated from source code. Quote: "No hand should ever touch a UML diagram."

Food for thought, isn’t it?

The list above is unfortunately a little short on things that Jim advocates but I need some good sleep before the Accelerated Agile workshop tomorrow and my writing would not be half as good as hearing him saying it.

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The Scandinavian SCM day on May 28th, 2008

From the Scandinavian SCM day web page:

The Scandinavian SCM day is an opportunity for people from academia and industry with a passion for Software Configuration Management to get together once a year to discuss SCM, exchange ideas and share problems.

The reason I tag this post with "Agile" and "Scrum" is that two of the presentations have "Scrum" in the title and I’m pretty confident that they are not the only ones to mention agile development methodologies in relation to Software Configuration Management.

The Scandinavian SCM day is held at the university in Lund, Sweden.

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Coding, not blogging

During the afternoon today I attended the first part of a mostly in-house course Scrum for team members led by Arne Åhlander. I’ll hopefully write more about it later, but now I’m going to work on The Project. Before I forget; I was recommended Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting at GleSYS. Anyone else who can share their experiences with them?

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Project prioritization – Inspect and Adapt!

I try to avoid telling myself that I don’t have time for this or that. The truth is that it comes down to how I prioritize those things. I naturally try to put family and work first, but I also make room for my own projects and ideas. Some projects only take a few hours, others linger for a long time.

For example, I would like to register the really neat domain name and aggregate blogs on a certain topic connected to the domain name. I have promised myself (and my visitors!) to make a price database for my energy drink site. I have barely started working on my so called Holiday Project. I have not finished the support for tags on my site Folkmun. I would need to polish my Instant Messaging to RSS system Esagila a bit. There are other projects that are postponed indefinitely. All in all, I really shouldn’t bother thinking of new projects right now.

This blog is another project. I could have been working on any of the above instead of writing this blog post! It’s all about what I give priority to, and I’m not always good at choosing. I probably need to Inspect and Adapt, as done in Scrum. Speaking of Scrum, maybe I should create a product backlog for my projects?

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“Daily Scrum” at home?

I’m I crazy or not?

Me and my wife usually have a chat in the evening about what we’ve done during the day (“started painting the bedroom”) and our plans for the day after (“continue painting the bedroom”). When I realized how similar this is to the Daily Scrum, I smiled and started asking her and myself for impediments too (“we may not have enough paint left”).

I could call our common to-do list a “Family Backlog” too, if I wanted to take the analogy a step further… 🙂