Software Development Process is no Monkey Business ;-)

Scrum and Lean Development

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:26:42 +0100

Hi there, I've been pretty busy on the late... as you may have noticed ;-) I managed to work out in a couple of interesting projects where I had the chance to learn a lot about Scrum and LEAN managed development.

LEAN is more a way of "Thinking" than a Methodology or a process, but none the less it may dramatically improve the way you work and with that your productivity. The fastest way to get a bit of LEAN thinking into your company is to look at the Scrum Framework, which extracts from LEAN some important principle and bring them to the Software Development specific world.

You may start reading Ken Schwaber book: "Agile Software Development with Scrum" and eventually try it out yourself ;-) Once you have an idea of what Scrum is and you are intentioned to have more detailed information you may take the chance to attend to a Training Session, make sure that the trainer is a member of the Scrum Alliance.

If you are looking for an easy to use tool to support the Scrum process, and you know what TRAC is, you may be interested in Agilo for Scrum an Open Source (Apache Software License) "extension" to TRAC, adding to the ease of use of the widely used Tracker, the specific feature a team would need to easily adopt Scrum. In particular you will have a nice automatically generated Burndown Chart, a specific Product Backlog report and the possibility to manage the Daily Scrum in a very convenient way.

I am planning to write a bit more on Scrum, therefore if you interested, stay tuned ;-)

Ciao & Happy New Year!
ANdreaT

Does the 3G iPhone exists?

Thu, 24 May 2007 16:37:52 +0200

There's been a lot of rumor around the iPhone, some already buried it as a failure (even before it's official launch on the market) only because Apple success is sticked to devices who normally do only one thing, good and they are very easy to use!

Being the iPhone, also according to his father Steve, is "3 device in one... A wide screen iPod, a phone and an portable internet device..." ;-)

According to market movement, and Apple stocks (AAPL) it looks like the world believe in it... but what about Europe? Will there ever be a 3G version of the iPhone? According to this post, some far east hardware providers confirmed Apple requests to product iPhone 3G components, pushed mainly by European carrier... it seams that latest in Q1 2008 there will be an answer ;-)

I mean... an iPhone.

Frankly speaking... I hope so

Yours Digging
ANdreaT

Get Shoutparked...

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 16:32:54 +0100

I think that naturally around Christmas everybody is a bit loosing the business grip and start to think about something else, the life... the universe and everything (No Panic!). I found it funny and nice to take a tour to the South Park Studio and get a couple of SouthParked pictures from me and Marion, have a look ;-)

Merry Christmas to Everybody :-)

Ciao ANdreaT

The importance of reviews

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:25:46 +0100

It often happens in my consulting to come across environment in which the "Review" process is absolutely underestimated. The "review" is the closing part of any activity, is the moment where the truth should come out, and where gratification for success is mostly perceived and enjoyed... as well as -of course - frustration for failure and mistakes.

Nevertheless it is one of the most important phases of any process, agile (see this post at Jeff Sutherland Scrum Log) or more structured, and should not be threated as a trivial, and formal approval of the achieved results. Some times the results are not even evaluated... not even acknowledged.

In a very collaborative environment, people are all involved in the creation of the final result, the product of the activity of each single worker is than used as an input from some other(s) and therefore it is extremely important that the individuals who collaborate reach a common and mutual agreement on the outcome of each activity.

The same apply to the customer, at every stage of a production process, there are always expectation to be met, and these expectations can be only verified through a review, where client and supplier of a specific artifact come together and discuss whether or not is what they were expecting and what has been asked.

Keep in mind, it is not a matter of finding out who did something wrong, if the supplier didn't correctly understood the original client's needs, or whether the client didn't explicitly stated what he was expecting to the supplier, both party should be committed in achieving a common result (the Product) and appointing guilty to one or the other will not help to reach this goal!

Yours "Collaborative" ANdreaT

How-To synchronize Nokia N70, Palm, Evolution and Google Calendar?

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:11:33 +0100

Many of you have this problem as well, the happy Mac folks - beside having a nice GTD supporting tools portfolio - can use the multi functional and efficient iSync application, but what about Linux?

I spent some time browsing here and there and googling even more, with scarce results, so finally I decided to write it here, all the ingredients you need to synchronize a Nokia (or Sony Ericsson) Symbian based phone, with your Evolution (Calendar, Tasks and Contacts) and/or with your Palm based device (Calendar, Todo and Contacts) and/or with Google Calendar.

The solution is based on OpenSync the open-source general synchronization framework, with some plugins. You can have more information about OpenSync from the website, the general principle is that OpenSync act as an mediator between to entity to be synchronized, mapping the data between the entities types and synchronizing when possible the records exchanged, in case of conflict the standard behavior is to prompt the user for correction/decision.
Depending on your distribution you may find different package names, I use Gentoo and for me they are:
• app-pda/libopensync-0.20
• app-pda/msynctool-0.20
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-evolution2-0.20
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-palm-0.20
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-google-calendar-0.20a
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-syncml-0.20

And optionally you may want to install also;
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-file-0.20
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-gnokii-0.20
• app-pda/libopensync-plugin-python-0.20
• app-pda/multisync-gui-0.90.19

Unfortunately the Multisync GUI tool is not really working, at least for me, therefore you will need to use the command line tool :-) what a pity ;-) Based on the fact that my primary goal is to have GTD on the Phone, and on the Palm, my main focus was to find a suitable solution to have the tasks replicated on the phone and the Palm, as well as the Calendar, of course I also needed to synchronize contacts, but I gave no importance to the notes (luckily cause it seems that there are still some bugs around related to notes synchronization :-) ). My other requirements where:
• Do it all via Bluetooth, I have it and I hate cables, so why not use it...
• Evolution has to be the "Master" platform in case of conflicts, I trust it more than Symbian and Palm OS...
• It has to be possible to synchronize all together but also only a couple...
So following the requirements, this is what I did:

Synchronizing Evolution and Nokia N70

1. I have created some OpenSync groups, each group contains at least a couple of member, between which the data have to be synchronized:  msynctool --addgroup evo2-n70 msynctool --addgroup evo2-palm msynctool --addgroup evo2-gcal 
1. Create the member in each group, first I always put the evo2 (Evolution) because it is more easy than to specify that in case of conflicts is n.1 that overwrite:  msynctool --addmember evo2-n70 evo2-sync msynctool --addmember evo2-n70 syncml-obex-client  Note that I didn't used gnokii plugin, because at the actual stage it is not working via Bluetooth (for info on how to configure Bluetooth, I found it useful to have a look at Gentoo Wiki and Documentation). 
2. Configuration of the members:  msynctool --configure evo2-n70 1  Note the number 1 identifies the first configured member, so the evo2-sync plugin...  <config> <address_path>file:///home/<username>/.evolution/addressbook/local/system</address_path> <calendar_path>file:///home/<username>/.evolution/calendar/local/system</calendar_path> <tasks_path>file:///home/<username>/.evolution/tasks/local/system</tasks_path> </config>  Now configure the Obex client, in Nokia phones the "identity" with which to synchronize is often named "PC Suite", to find out how is it called for you, grab the phone, select "Application" menu , than chose "Connectivity/Sync" there you find the list of the configured profiles for synchronization. msynctool --configure evo2-n70 2 this time the number 2 identifies the obex client plugin  <?xml version="1.0"?> <config> <bluetooth_address>00:AA:BB:CC:DD:EE</bluetooth_address> <bluetooth_channel>11</bluetooth_channel> <interface>0</interface> <identifier>PC Suite</identifier> <version>1</version> <wbxml>1</wbxml> <username></username> <password></password> <type>2</type> <usestringtable>1</usestringtable> <onlyreplace>0</onlyreplace> <recvLimit>10000</recvLimit> <maxObjSize>0</maxObjSize> <contact_db>Contacts</contact_db> <calendar_db>Calendar</calendar_db> <note_db>Notes</note_db> </config>  How to find out which is the Bluetooth channel to use? You have to identify your device SyncMLClient service, to do so execute the following command: sdptool browse 00:AA:BB:CC:DD:EE and search for a service block named SyncMLClient, you should find something looking like this:  Service Name: SyncMLClient Service RecHandle: 0x10013 Service Class ID List: "Error: This is UUID-128" (0x00000002-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000002) Protocol Descriptor List: "L2CAP" (0x0100) "RFCOMM" (0x0003) Channel: 11 "OBEX" (0x0008) Language Base Attr List: code_ISO639: 0x454e encoding: 0x6a base_offset: 0x100 Profile Descriptor List: "Error: This is UUID-128" (0x00000002-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000002) Version: 0x0100  After having configured the Obex Plugin correctly you can try whether the synchronization is working or not issuing the following command:  msynctool --sync evo2-n70 --filter-objtype note --filter-objtype event --conflict 1 --slow-sync todo  The filter object options are used to avoid failure, most of the time note objects and event object contains binary or not well formatted data that can cause the synchronization to fail. 
Synchronizing Evolution and Palm OS

1. In order to successfully setup the synchronization with Palm OS, using Bluetooth, I recommend you to have a look at "Synchronize your PalmOS® Handheld over Bluetooth in Linux" from David A. Desrosiers. When you are done with that and you have the Bluetooth connection in place, than you may start with the following:  msynctool --configure evo2-palm 2  The configuration of the Evolution plugin is the same reported at point n.3 of previous section.  <config> <sockaddr>net:any</sockaddr> <username>username</username> <timeout>60</timeout> <type>0</type> <speed>115200</speed> <id>0</id> <codepage>cp1252</codepage> <popup>1</popup> <mismatch>1</mismatch> </config>  The synchronization, if you followed the instructions at point 1, should happen via Network, therefore the address of the socket is "net:any", this should reflect your pilot-link configuration. Remember to use your real username for synchronization. If you want to test it, use the command:  msynctool --sync evo2-palm --filter-objtype note --conflict 1  It should work ;-)

Synchronizing Evolution and Google Calendar

1. To synchronize with Google Calendar, you need to set up the appropriate plugin, to do so, issue the command:  msynctool --configure evo2-gcal 2  As before the n.1 configuration, for the Evolution plugin is the same as in point 3 of the first section.  <config> <url>http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/GOOGLE_USER@gmail.com/private/full</url> <username>GOOGLE_USER@gmail.com</username> <password>GOOGLE_PASSWORD</password> </config>  When you have finished, to try it out, once more send the command:  msynctool --sync evo2-gcal --filter-objtype note --conflict 1  you may have some error here, the Google format is under minor changes, there may be a fix soon...

Putting it all together

1. As said you will not always have all the devices at hand and ready to synchronize, therefore the evo2-all group may me rarely used, so I created a simple script with which you can synchronize your PIM devices and applications 
#Script for synchronization of devices
WHAT=$1
CONFLICT=1

# Helper Function Definition
function sync_palm() {
if [ "`ps ax | grep dund | grep -v grep | wc -l`" = "1" ] ; then
echo "Prepare to push HotSync button!"
msynctool --sync evo2-palm --filter-objtype note --conflict $CONFLICT
else
echo "DUND is not running, network connection from Palm not allowed!"
fi
}

function sync_n70() {
msynctool --sync evo2-n70 --filter-objtype note --filter-objtype event --conflict $CONFLICT --slow-sync todo
}

function sync_gcal() {
msynctool --sync evo2-gcal --filter-objtype note --conflict $CONFLICT
}

function sync_all() {
msynctool --sync evo2-all --filter-objtype note --conflict $CONFLICT
}

# Now process the WHAT and execute the proper function

if [ "$WHAT" = "palm" ] ; then
sync_palm
elif [ "$WHAT" = "n70" ] ; then
sync_n70
elif [ "$WHAT" = "gcal" ] ; then
sync_gcal
else
sync_all
fi 
Yes you are right, I didn't told you how to create the evo2-all group, but I
guess you know how to ;-)

I hope you will have fun, and that soon the Multisync GUI tool will be nice and stable enough to be used, in the end a GUI has to be nice ;-)

New Apple MacBook Pro shipped with a secret?!

Wed, 1 Nov 2006 16:27:52 +0100

It seems that new Apple MacBook Pro, featuring the new Intel® Core® 2 Duo® processor - In italian is really sounding like a tongue ripper: "Intel Core Due Duo", God bless marketing departments! - have been shipping with a secret under the hood, apparently there is a "dormient" WiFi 802.11n card inside.

Do you think this is a Marketing Strategic manovre? As soon as the standard will be defined, they ship through the Update a nice new Firmware and Ta-Da! The MacBook Pro are already in the next generation...

Or, Intel jus shipped the all MB with inside the disabled chip? :-)

Ok, this was unfair ;-)

Ciao
ANdreaT

Agile Prouct Development... How to manage Requirements?

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:21:25 +0200

It has been a while since my last post, I have been a bit busy in real projects... Particularly a topic which seems to be very hot is how to concile "Agile Development Principles" with "Product Management and Development" where:

Agile Development Principles: "Among the most important principle of agile development there are the need to have a customer playing an active role into the product development, the fact that changes of requirements or change requests are mostly welcome at any time and that for many of the agile practices any written documentation should be limited to the minimum and verbal communication should be preferred". (Agile Manifesto)

and:

Product Management and Development: "It is the set of practices that aims to define, plan, implement, support and promote a product - or a line or family of products - to the market. In the general conception of the product, it should be the response to a need present on the market, and the interpretation of a specific company on how to solve the identified target needs". (Wikipedia)

There are indeed some questions that should be answered and leveraged in order to make it possible to adopt and Agile approach into a industrial - or even not - product development environment. Without involving specific quality standard or regulation issue (such as traceability from requirement to code through tests whenever "safety" or "security" concerns are implied, as for FDA and GxP, or even CMM-* in some specific environments) there are some key issue to address, in particular:
• The product development targets a specific set of "needs" belonging to a market, rather than to a single customer, therefore it is impossible to involve all the potential customers into the product development. As suggested - see also the post in the newsgroup - from and agile perspective it would make sense to have a Customer Proxy that act as a collector of information from the market and a single point of contact for the development. It is anyway not so easy to be "agile" in the respect of the customer, and to use as much as possible the "agile" successful principle to share results and participate to the success with the customer. This is no trivial problem, and is not only an organization issue, the value of agile is into people - motivation and commitment - my experience is that people involved with the customer are motivated and share with him experience, this improve the final result and the customer satisfaction. In a scenario with a Customer Proxy this advantage is nearly lost...
• The "Product" is an asset for the company who is building it, in software this asset is mostly "untouchable" and - fortunately - not protected by any Patent (at least in Europe) therefore its values is in the knowledge that developers and analysts put inside the software itself. This asset has to be protected, and in a real product development scenarios it has to be kept safe. The Agile approach - sometimes extreme ;-) - is that documentation (including requirements) has to be kept to the minimum, and the Code is self-explanatory. Of course this is a provocation, but on the other side to find compromises between the need to have "Requirements" - easy to understand, realistic and achievable descriptions of what the needs are, and how to measure their achievement, and trace their orign and what has been generated out of them - of product development, and the need to limit as much as possible the written documentation is not so easy... 
The reality today is that most of the product are developed as components - or parts - that are then assembled together. It is also clear that the complexity of most of the industrial environment is such that the verbal communication itself is not anylonger a feasable solution, not even inside the same team (above 25-30 people team require often the adoption of scale-up strategies and the sacrifice of some agile principle [Highsmith][Cockburn]).

For treacability reasons it is mandatory to have Requirements written, and versioned, it often happens that while requirement are implemented, somebody else is changing them under the hood, with an Agile approach this is mostly welcome, and should be merged directly into the project, but in the end it is all a matter of complexity, and above a certain level it is not acceptable to initiate changes which are not synchronized and regulated between teams or even between people working in the same team. There is the risk that some changes will result in mulfunctioning sub-systems, that even with the Parachute of Unit Testing (TDD is a very effective practice of XP) can result in huge refacoring costs.

It is nothing more than common-sense to understand that with growing complexity, more infrastructure and rules are needed, and not all the Agile principles (at least as stated - I believe that a principle is always valid for itself, for what it represent, and that its applicability may vary from one situation to the next) are always adoptable. A good example of a scalable approach in this respect are the Christal Methodologies developed by Alistair Cockburn in the early '90.

I am working now on a possible Scrum (I believe that Scrum is the most Agile way to manage a project, is a complementar practice to XP and can incorporate Requirement Management techniques to correctly feed development teams) approach to Requirement Management, that should fullfil the following requirements:

‣ Respect Scrum approach to be highly reactive to changes;
‣ Support Product Release Planning needs from Product Management and Marketing;
‣ Synchronizes requests for various product subteams, or components teams;
‣ Support traceability to source code and tests (coverage, results, acceptance) 
I will keep you updated.

I took it personal... I am trying to build a GTD tool :-)

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:44:33 +0200

After some discussions with friends, colleagues and GTD enthusiasts I have decided to start the development of a GTD supporting tool, there is no real tool out there that specifically does this, as discussed in a previous post (exclulded the development of Inbox but only for Mac OS X).

So after collecting some ideas, I decided to follow the approach => Get it Done!

With a bit of luck it will not take so long, and by the way it is making fun :-)

My assumption at the moment are:
• The tool should work on any platform, at least the most common, and because I am a real geek in the order: Linux, Mac OSX, Windows
• The tool should be light enough not to require a CRAY to run and at the same time not require uge infrastructure
• The tool should be "process centered" and ease the user from all the operations that can be guessed or automated according to GTD processing approach
• The tool should integrate with existing desktops environment and common applications for E-Mail, Calendar and Todo (Linux: Evolution, Thunderbird, K-Mail, Mac OS X: Mail, iCal, Windows: Thunderbird, Outlook)
The current approach, with relative rusults is that:
• I decided to adopt Python as a programming language and use wxLibrary as a crossplatform GUI framework;
• I have implemented a light-weight persistence approach that is using the file system, based on the great cPickle module included in the standard python's distribution;
• I have implemented the basic Item Management Engine and a _very_ basic GUI (it is nearly awfull so I don't dare to post a screenshot yet);
I have collected some "needs" and requirements from some friends, please feel free to post yours as comments to this post :-)

That's all Folks

are you watching geekbrief.tv?

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:21:24 +0200

Hi there, just want to spend a couple of minutes to point you to a nice Video Pod Cast for Geek, Cali Lewis is showing every coupe of days new and cool technology toys, that will make your geek life even more awsome! ;-)

You can subscribe to the pod-cast also if you don't have iTunes, and you are not using Mac, or Windowz, I use Listen in Linux and it works just great!

Watch it out tomorrow, there's going to be an Apple announcement, probably from San Francisco to London (Streamed) during the opening of the Apple Conference in Paris (12-16 Sept. 2006).

Here what's reported in MacRumors:

« Apple is hosting a media event on Tuesday, September 12th 2006 in San Francisco, CA at 10AM Pacific. The event will also be simulcast to a location in London where journalists have also been invited.

The invitation to the media was entitled It's Showtime -- suggesting Movie-related announcements. Rumors sites had originally expected iMac updates during the event, but Apple surprised everyone with iMac and Mac mini updates last week.

This leaves iPods, a Movie Store and the possibility of a new streaming Media device for the Tuesday event.

As usual, a number of anonymous images have been circulating claiming to represent upcoming products, but these are all considered to be fake. Other circumstantial evidence (2) has been reported, but no definitive information on the event. »

If you want to have a look a the full post and comments click here.
That's it, stay tuned ;-)

Tools to support gtd?

Fri, 8 Sep 2006 16:05:50 +0200

I know many of you out there are using GTD (David Allen Getting Things Done) as well as I know that each one found a different way to implement and support it...
I have to admit that the Mac folks seems to be the "lucky" one, there are plenty of solution to implement GTD on Mac platform, some a bit "self made" and some specific, some examples are:
• Journler I think is a good integrator for Mail, Calendar, Tasks and other things; 
• Kinkless Self made set of scripts for OmniOutliner Pro, ingenious; 
• Inbox Probably the first real GTD application for Mac, looks really promising; 
There are many others, I know, and also a lot of web based hacks, including the GTDGMail a plug-in for Firefox that extends GMail functionalities to support GTD (But as Alessio my Web Wizard friend - citing Arrigo the security guy - said once... I don't use web application... - funny cause he is actually developing them but I agree at a certain extent).
So what's left out there if we remove Web staff and Mac apps... ok there's an Outlook add on... I don't even want to think about it, but for the Linux folks (GNU/Linux please - Michele would say...) it seems there aren't many solutions :-(
Most of the people I know managed to implement a series of filters, virtual folders and task mapping tricks on Evolution (if you never heard about it, and you are using Linux and you are a GTD fun, than at least one of the previous condition is false, don't lie!) others implemented interesting things using text files, emacs, directory structures... ok I am a geek as well, but I don't want to link my life to emacs... I was already following inside it once... and that's was enough :-)
If you found some specific apps that would work in Linux environment and at the same time would integrate Calendar, Mail and Tasks together in a GTD way? Let me know than... ;-)