deltalounge

Wishing you and your loved ones all the best for 2012!

That you may enjoy life’s little (and not so little) miracles each and every day.

The basics of Scrum can be found in the Scrum Guide. Besides that there are loads of resources available on the subject. In this post I’ll share a few with you I recently discussed with my colleagues:

• The Nine Boxes – Interviewing technique to help you understand problems and opportunities faced by others.
• Tools, tricks, and tips for great retrospectives can be found in the book: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
• The classic on The Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Optimized Production Technology (OPT): The Goal. Very interesting book on ongoing improvement written in an easy to read novel style.

Besides these the online library of one of my colleagues gives some other great hints. You might also like to read his selection of 10 from ‘Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines’.

Working at a customer in recent months I was on the receiving end of a Scrum coaching project. Unfortunately this ended early. And I started thinking about what I could learn from my angle as a team member. I came up with the following cases and hope they can be helpful for you as well.

Stick to your role and deliver value

If you take the role of coach in a certain expertise field, stick to the that role. This will give you focus and a higher probability of success in the field in which you perform really well. In addition to that, this is the thing/trick you are hired for. It is great if you can deliver additional value, and get the team of organization you are coaching to a higher level, only after you are delivering what you should deliver.

For example you’re coaching in SCRUM, and there is loads of work to do to get the Product Backlog in good shape, getting the documentation up to par, and help the people with the SCRUM way of working; it might not be the time to debate all kind of possible coding issues, try to remove commit hooks from SVN (requiring an JIRA issue number) and other stuff like that.

Should you as a coach decide to be a part of the team, you also have to commit to results delivered by the team (that now includes you). After you check out the code it doesn’t shown you value individuals if the only thing you do is place remarks and object without not delivering anything yourself (let alone things perceived as value by the product owner).

Stick to your role.

Focus

Focus on your assignment and the results you have to deliver. In the case you are coaching a team in the world of SCRUM it is not necessary to start a debate on all design, technical, technology and frameworks choices that are made in the first week. When valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, also keep in mind that it is the team of those individuals that made a range of choices. Some of them could very well be the result of much (heated) debate.

Focus on your assignment and the results you have to deliver. Don’t (re)fight every battle.

Wanted to do a quick blog on installing Windows8 on VirtualBox. However work and stuff came in the way and of course now there are multiple sites describing it now like this quite short on Oracle blogs, Life Hacker Guide and How-To Geek. Since especially the first ones lack some screenshots, I’ll share mine:

[Show as slideshow]

More info on installing an OS like Ubuntu 11.04 on VirtualBox can give you some background on the general process of creating a new VirtualBox image.

Within lean and other practices the 5 Whys are used to determine a root cause of a defect or problem. However in the following TED talk Simon Sinek shows us that most of the times the answer to one why determines whether we as customer experience value delivered in a product or service:

You might have read here or on other blogs that SOA isn’t a purpose. It is a means to an end. The same goes for all the technologies that we use when implementing a SOA, or an architecture, or an application in general. So I wanted to share the next video with you since I think that it – in an even broader perspective – shows this point. Technology itself is not good or bad. It all boils down to how we as people use it.



Source: RSA.org 21th century alignment.

An earlier post on how cookies are used to track you, explained how tracking cookies work. This post will show you how to stop websites from tracking you using Firefox 4. This latest release has a Do-not-track feature that lets you tell websites you don’t want your browsing behavior tracked.

By turning on the Do-not-track feature, Firefox tells websites you visit that you don’t want your browsing behavior tracked. Please note that honoring this setting is voluntary. To put it differently websites are not required to respect it.

Turning on the Do-not-track feature in Firefox 4

• Click the Firefox button at the top of your browser window and click options.
• Make sure you’re on the Advanced panel.
• Select the General tab.
• In the browsing section check the Tell websites I do not want to be tracked.
• Click OK to leave

Check the Tell websites I do not want to be tracked option

Although there can be a lot of debate on what is Architecture in the world of IT, what IT degree programs discuss about architects, and on who is an architect and who isn’t, I think it is clear that it is not exactly Brain Surgery. And i think that is actually a good thing. Although the implementation of a (Service Oriented) Architecture is in most cases bound to hit vital parts of an organization it isn’t …

And even though there can be just as many parameters in the larger equations, architecture isn’t exactly rocket science either…

There is a growing number of Twitter Apps that trick you into giving them access to your account and so enabling them to send spam on your behalf. Should you (like me at least once) fall for this trap, here is an easy way to prevent further damage. Use the following url: http://twitter.com/settings/connections or click the links that are highlighted in the screen shot on the right to manage your Twitter connections.




After that you just click Revoke Access below the Application that is using your account to spam others. An example is depicted in the screen shot below (for a non spamming App):

It is impossible to create a single Definition of Done that suits every situation. In SCRUM each team should come up with it’s own definition. A definition that suits its unique environment. To help you and your team to get to your Definition of Done, I post ours as an example here.

In general organizations that have just started with agile may find it difficult to reach a mature level immediately; therefore, they should take the steps, sprint-by-sprint, to improve their done definition. For example on the code coverage of their JUnit test.

Definition of Done on our current project

In our current project we are working with a customer that is getting started with an Agile and SCRUM way of working. Besides that they also recently changed their technology stack to WebLogic Server, SOA Suite. They have been programming in Java for years. Here is what we as a team came up with:

Definition of Done

• Code complete
• Unit tests all green
• Code Coverage 35% (with the explicit ambition of growing to 90%)
• Documentation updates:
• Release doc
• Deployment Guide updated
• Technical Design
• Quick Guide for Users
• Coding Standards met
• Functional Testing passed on DEV