Feedback Loops in Scrum the Other Way Around

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Scrum in ActionUser Stories are the way a non-technical product owner can communicate with the technical team. It is probably the best way any product owner can tell the technicians what he or she actually wants. A the same time it is the best point to pick up technical requirements, limitations and pitfalls related to your requirements. Therefore, take this opportunity and listen carefully. The feedback loop is not only top down, it’s bottom up as well, you just have to use it.

A difference maybe not realized yet

The difference in Scrum related to many other development processes is the rapid feedback you might get during backlog grooming or estimation meetings. Developers will moan about the stories, complain about requirements and tell you more often than not, these particular wishes might be very expensive or even not possible to achieve at all…

Take Action

Even this might be exaggerated, listen because here you get feedback from the folks knowing the software best. Change requirements on the stories, modify the scope, prioritize impossible features down. Nobody else does understand the overall system that well. Non of your architects, managers or analysts understand the system that way.

No means Maybe Later

No does not mean no by definition. If you come up with a story, developers think its impossible, it’s actually not. Stop fighting for the story. Take it, go back to the drawing board and refine or start over. No simply means it too expensive. Always remember: We are talking about technology here. probably everything is possible. It is simply a questions about how much effort one (in this case the product owner) is willing to put into it. If developers say no, they come up with a natural instinct which tells them it simply not feasible under the current circumstances. Always remember, SCRUM is about performing on the very best level under a certain set of circumstances and limitations at a very specific point in time.

Resume

As a product owner make use of estimation meetings and/or backlog groomings. Go over stories again an again and pick up the feedback from your developers. With every meeting you will get better feedback more details and better estimations. Take this opportunity receiving rapid feedback from the developers. There is easier way to get this feedback, though.

andreas on Google+

SQL Joins Made Easy

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I recently came along this great cheat sheet explaining SQL joins. Doe’s not need nay further explanation, though…

SQL Joins

 

andreas on Google+

Cool Stuff

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Every week, there are many things I stumble upon worth blogging about. Unfortunately, there is either too much to at that time, just too little to say about it or it’s simply worth to be remembered without bloating it with an exhaustive blog entry.

Therefore, I want to give a more or less regular (let’s see how this works out) update on all these cool stuff one might find out there in the wilderness of the cyberspace.

 

andreas on Google+

Can’t Be Opened on Lion Easy Fix for Single Application

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After installing Eclipse on Mac OS X, I was permanently told the app’s developer is not identifiers and the app can’t be started.

Can't be openend...

Better than turning off Gatekeeper and less annoying than CTRL-clicking the app all the time is simply to run 

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /applications/eclipse/eclipse.app

No side effect on security settings at all…

andreas on Google+

Where is my Space

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Using Bootcamp, running a Mac OS X and a Windows installation in parallel, space is slowly but constantly running low on my MacBook Pro. Before upgrading my HDD, I was looking for a better way than using du or df -h to check where I might free up some space on my disk.

Disk Inventory X is a free tool available using cushion tree maps to visualise the disk usage. A similar tool was developed at the Technical University of Eindhoven named SequoiaView. While SequiaView was developed for Windows, Disk Inventory X is designed for Mac OS, working fine with version 10.8.3.

Disk Invetory X

After selecting the disk, it’s possible to browse through the directory structure analysing where your storage when to.

Disk Invetory X Cushion Tree

Both, SequoiaView for Windows and Disk Inventory X for Mac are quite useful programs that should be definitely part of ones toolset.

andreas on Google+

There it Goes – Google Reader Gone for Good

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Icon by http://icontexto.blogspot.de/ via Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)First headline in this morning’s news: Goggle stopps Google Reader (please bear in mind, this link won’t work anymore in the future). Google wants to power down the Google Reader among other APIs and services since the 2011 spring clean. Personally, I am affected the third time by Google’s cut downs after the Feedburner burnout last year.

While I was annoyed in the very first moment, I had to think through various perspectives, not just coming up with yet another rant post about Google’s attitudes.

The Business Point of View
Google is not doing anything wrong (I guess) from a business point of view. They simply cut down projects, teams or cost centers with no or little revenue. I have seen this several times during my time at Microsoft where teams or studios where shut down due to a revenue not meeting the expectations. Larry Page wanted to focus on core products and  less speculative projects which does make sense considering the shareholders beyond Google. Consequently, cutting down free services not being paid for, requiring manpower for development an maintenance and (not to underestimate) bare metal down in Google’s data centers is a plan to increase revenues, cut down losses and save not to spend money.

The User ‘s Point of View
As a user, you might rely on these services. Maybe you build up your website based on various Google APIs (as they have been free), you maintained you RSS feed in Google Reader and so on. Even with several weeks of notice, you need to change technologies, maybe rebuild or recode you page, and even worse to change habits. At some point in time, after this happened one, two or three times (depending on your very personal potential to suffer).

The Developer’s Point of View
There are quite many apps, tools and pages out there heavily depending or based on Google’s API including Google Reader. Not only their apps and tools stop working, also users who bought these products will be forced to stop using these tools. With feedly, there is timely an alternative Reader and with Normandy developers get an API they might use for their products. However, Nick Bradbury already announced to stop working on the Windows client FeedDemon which heavily depends on the Google API for synchronization.More will definitely follow…

The Consequences
As developer, I was affected once before, as user I am affected the second time by now. By cutting down both services I am left with Google Calendar. While Google might or might not continue this service in the future, one might rethink if using it is a good choice. Keep in mind, we do not pay for it as users and the Google App Sync meanwhile is only available for business users (probably paying for it). Google Calendar Sync was a great tool to sync between Outlook and Google Calendar. I fought my way through the setup using Windows 7 three years ago right after they stopped development for it.

There is already an petition for keeping Google Reader alive, supported by more than 35,000 users (nothing compared to he 10 Mio user susing G+ stated by Larry Page). Still chances that Google will continue the service are less than probably.

The Business Point of View Revisited
I wonder if Google thought of charging for these services. I wonder if one (e.g. I) would pay for such a service. It definitely would depend on the amount they would charge. A few bucks a year won’t hurt and with a few ten thousands of users they might pay the bills for this service one might think. On the other hand, a company like Google might not be interested in any service with less than ten million $$$ of revenue (please put in whatever amount you think is suitable) or a million of users…

andreas on Google+

Early 2011 MacBook Pro RAM Upgrade

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Since working more more in virtual machines and processing large amounts of data, I was looking to upgrade the memory of my early 2011 15” MacBook Pro currently utilizing 4GB of RAM. After digging through hardware specs and various manufacturer site, I decided to pick a 16GB kit from Crucial.

CT3327367 Crucial 16 GB Memory Upgrade

The specs of the memory chosen are 

  • Part Number CT3327367
  • Module Size: 16GB kit (8GBx2)
  • Package: 204-pin SODIMM
  •  DDR3 PC3-10600
  • CL=9
  • Unbuffered
  • NON-ECC
  • DDR3-1333
  • 1.35V
  • 1024Meg x 64

The only thing you need is a Phillips #0 screwdriver to remove the bottom of the MacBook.

Phillips #0 screwdriver for MacBook Pro

Old memory out, new in is pretty easy, both modules are on top of each other.

Crucial Memory Upgrade CT3327367

Once upgraded, I had to check the Windows Experience Index, if the new memory did change anything considering the performance, Actually the subscore for the memory went up from 5,9 to 7,6.

Windows Experience Index before memory upgrade

PerIndexNew

While I bought the MacBook, more than 4 GB was not a requirement. In addition the model is officially supported by Apple only up to 8 GB of RAM. However, the hardware can handle 16GB which now just comes in quite handy.

andreas on Google+

Ubuntu: Setting up Oracle JDK

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Since Oracle’s Java SDK is not part of Ubuntu, there are some steps required to get Java set up on a Ubuntu system. Especially running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu requires one tiny additional step driving you crazy in case do not speak Ubuntu fluently.

There are quite some scripts and tutorials out there how to get Oracle’s Java working on a Ubuntu system, however, there are only a few steps necessary to do so:

Pick the bits from Oracle’s download site and extract the archive using tar. In my case we use the 32-bit version of the JDK

tar -xvf ~/Downloads/jdk-7u15-linux-i586.tar.g

Create a folder and move all the stuff over there

sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0 
sudo mv jdk1.7.0_15/* /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/

Now set up the symbolic links for java, javac and javaws.

sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/bin/java" 1
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/bin/javac" 1
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/bin/javaws" 1

Now, create a Bourne script to set the JAVA_HOME variable and update the PATH variable. In case you haven’t used Vim yet, get it using

sudo apt-get install vim

and then create the file

sudo vim /etc/profile.d/java7.sh

edit the file file and add the following export statements

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Finally execute the script

source /etc/profile

and try to call java. If you run a freshly set up Ubuntu such as mine, you probably will end up the system telling you

bash: /usr/bin/java: No such file or directory

What happened? Actually, we installed a 32-bit version of the JDK, however as mentioned at the beginning running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu and therefore we come back to this very tiny bit missing. One additional package is required to run the 32-bit version: libc6-i386.

“This package includes shared versions of the standard C library and the standard math library, as well as many others. This is the 32bit version of the library, meant for AMD64 systems.”

Said that, get it

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386

and try to run java one more time. It should work now fine.

andreas on Google+

Confluence Math Formula Macro

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As we are dealing quite a lot with mathematics in our current development and using Atlassian’s Confluence as our documentation system, we were looking for a elegant way to document our mathematics in any better way than E=mc^2.

We found the Math Formula macro originally written and tested against Confluence version 3.5, not playing well with the latest Confluence version, we are using.

After following the installation steps there it was, the incompatibility note:

“There are user macros without any metadata configured in their template. They have been highlighted below. For these macros to be available for use in content they require parameter information. See the Guide to User Macro Templates.”

Check out the highlighted macros, and click Edit.

Installed User Macros

In the Template field add the following as the very first line of the template:

## @param size:title=Font Size|type=int|default=150|desc=Font size for formulas in percentage

Within the template, the the font size is referred as $paramsize, however, in the metadata description you denote the param just as size.

Once these changes are made, you can use the macro to create your formulas…

Math Formular Macro

 

andreas on Google+

I DRAW COMICS REWARDED

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A few days ago, I received the reward for backing the Kickstarter project I DRAW COMICS. I really liked the idea of creating a guide how to start drawing, showing you a few of the tricks the pros use during their day job.

As  this was Matt’s second project, there was a quite a chance to receive a high quality result out of the project. As this was my very first non-technical project backed, I was really interested in the outcome.

I DRAW COMICS Sketchbook and Reference Guide 

If you are interested in the sketchbook as well, head over to their website, the sketchbook will be available for pre-order there soon.

andreas on Google+