from my work as a developer
Posts tagged scrum
what I learnt
Nov 25th
Do you remember my posts about the fourth question and fast thursday ?
Here is another constant behaviour for another day – friday with constant question: what you learnt (during this week).
Your answer can be related to your job or to hobby or to whatever you want. Give just one small example of what you learnt, it can be something small and funny or huge and very important 
It’s up to you, but share your knowledge, make other start wondering what to do next, maybe you’ll inspire others to do something like you. It’s very informative attitude, you’re expressing yourself, showing you aren’t just a nerd
Ok, so what I learnt ? I remember two things:
- below 0 degrees it’s hard drive a bike, not because it’s cold, but because a glass from the helmet freezes and you see nothing on the road
- at last I understood what’s the difference between @Inject (JSR-330) i CDI (JSR-299), CDI bases on @Inject, but you cannot put equal mark between them
There were probably more, but it isn’t important to say about all of them, just two is enough. Please try, share your knowledge!
And as usual some nice presentation from TED – be smart, play games
a fast thursday
Oct 27th
Do you remember the post about the fourth question ? If so, there is a little backward of that. Some people like to talk, they talk a bit too much, especially in a case of the Daily StandUp. You should answer short and on topic, not to talk about what if … just answer the three questions: what I did, what I’m going to do, what blocks me.
The fourth question should be used to bit relax the discipline (it isn’t the Army ) , but overused it can have negative influences. To stop that, we introduced a fast thursday – the day without the fourth question, you must answer the standard three questions. Nothing more.
Some says, if you talk too much, you did nothing So, don’t talk, answer!
Today I have another interesting presentation from TED, to sum up: “All right, so for some of you, this may be really, really out there.”
fourth question
Jul 27th
Many of you know how the Scrum’s Stand Up Meeting is going to be held. There are three questions you must answer:
- what did you do ?
- what are going to do ?
- what is blocking you ?
It’s quite obvious and after some time it’s getting bored also. So to change a schema you can add the fourth question. It was proposed by Pawel – our Scrum Master and I must say, it was a very good idea – think out of the box
What is the fourth question ? It depends … as say consultants 
It shouldn’t be related to your tasks, it must be more about surrounding environment. Like for example: what kind of book have you read recently (not related to software development) ? or what was the lats boardgame you have played ? or what did you learn from the last week ? and so forth …
Why the fourth question is so important ? To break rutin, to express a different you, to show up that there is something other than coding When people are laughing, sharing experience in different areas they’re socialize, they become more a team of friends instead of a team of geeks. We aren’t just geeks, behind we’re humans 
This time no new interesting TED’s presentation, but if you understand polish language you maybe find something interesting in talks from Confitura 2011 conference. Enjoy!
extend or not extend
Jun 14th
That’s the question!
When you are managing a project using the Scrum methods, each of your tasks must be grouped in sprints or iterations. The whole team is preparing a sprint, estimating the tasks and fitting stories in a given period of time – the Iteration.
As usual, the estimates are just estimates It’s always some kind of guessing … even if you spent a lot of time on the project and you know each line of the code and all the business behind (do you?). The problem is, there are many unrelated things that can happen. People can be sick, a build server can blow-up, a team member can left the company and so on and etc …
The reasons you cannot imagine and predict.
So, because of that should the sprint be extend or not ?
We can fail, we can move tasks and stories, we can spend hours trying figure out what was wrong … Or maybe extend the sprint for one, two more days, solve all the issues, close all the tasks. No one will be frustrated because of fail of sprint. We will not lost time for looking into the problems, we just passed over them. What do you think ?
At the end there should be a presentation from TED, but I didn’t get the newsletter yet, so I’m going to say how I work. As a member of highly distributed team which is working remotely, we use Skype to communicate. And because of that there is a drawback – you don’t know when someone just left the room and he / she isn’t at his / her desk. So, we use the short status messages (you can use “/me text” to change the status in Skype). The list is below, feel free to share it or extend!
- ś – śniadanie (breakfast)
- b – back (I’m back at the desk)
- brb – be right back (means I will be back in few seconds / minutes / hours)
- biab – back in a bit (means I will be back in few minutes / hours / days)
- bbiab – be back in a bit (means I will be back in few hours / days / years)
- o – obiad (lunch – in Poland not known)
- z – zupa (soup – if you eat)
- dd – drugie danie (second meal)
- out – out (means you finished the work for today and now you’re coding for pleasure)
Enjoy!
laugh, laugh, …
Feb 2nd
It was quite busy beginning of the year. I was working on the two projects – in both partially 
Anyway I found out the way how to handle such situation. What works the best are the short Sprints (Scrum), about a week. So I’m working hard one week on the first project and at the end of the week I’m delivering some peace on a functionality. Next week I’m starting a new Sprint but for the second project.
In such a case, I can focus and get into the project for a long time. I don’t feel disrupted that I forgot to finish something.
On the beginning I was trying to switch the project each day, but it worthless and useless. Human’s brain needs up to 20 minutes to switch a context. For large tasks (like a project) even more, for me it was around half a day to get into – to check what I did previously, what are the new task and where the project is in matter of functionality.
Short Sprints demands a short estimation and short tasks. After second, third sprint I’ve got used to it And it was even funny to work that way – short sprint are the best!
To be more specific what I did, I’m going to share my deep knowledge with you
The first project is related to Circular – I’m writing a Desktop Client which will be able to communicate throughout a REST API with the service. Is written in Java Swing and the latest Java 1.6 brings many new futures to cooperate with a Desktop System. The first is the java.awt.Dekstop class. It can be used to open file with a default editor, open links with the default browser and so on. Very useful class. The next is the javax.swing.SwingWorker class. It’s used to launch long running process which must communicate with a Swing UI, e.g. to display progress.
You’re wondering why I’m using the native Swing instead Eclipse RCP or NetBeans Platform. The answer is easy – size of the file. With the current solution, the executable file has around 3.6 MB with all the dependencies included in it – you can use Maven Shade Plugin to do it. I’m also using a modified Launch4j Maven Plugin to create Windows Executable file from my Mac OSX – the modified source code you can find here.
The second project I’m working on is the Attikis service. It’s used to monitor Alarm Systems throughout a phone line. The UI is built using JavaServer Faces 2.0. And the last time I spent the whole day to solve a problem with the SelectManyListBox tag that has a custom converter attached to it. In such a case, you must use a bean with well defined equals() and hashCode() methods or just a simple String as a SelectItem. In other case you will end up with strange error: Field not valid!
It’s a very weird behaviour, whilst you will attach a built in converter, you can use Integer or what else you want
Ok, that’s it for today and at last I’ve got something from TED that I want to share with you
dark ages
Oct 6th
The whole last week was as black whole – without passion, hopeless and so one 
Maybe because of weather or something – Autumn is coming Nevertheless that’s over, today day was absolutely brilliant – I got my books from Amazon:
- The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers)
- Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
As you can see, quite interesting readings – so the Autumn can be very productive period, especially when the weather will be bad
I also solved many bugs today and it was even nice – it wasn’t either boring nor frustrating – I was fascinated that I could help someone to achieve his goals. Passion!
The second main achievement today was meeting of Warsaw Design Patterns Group – we started implementing mentioned early application. It base on Maven 2, Wicket and on some common stuff like Hibernate and Spring. There was enormous pill of knowledge – we used TDD first methodology, with mocks base on Mockito. I never used Mockito before and I’m delighted what you can do with it! We developed almost the whole functionality within one hour! Well designated and suited! I’m looking forward what we do on the next meeting!
Preparation for Warsjawa are also going well – the agenda is almost done, the conference room is booked and the pizza is coming! We will be discussing about Scrum and Agile – from one person to distributed teams! If you are in Warsaw at 24. of October, come visit the conference!
restart
Sep 22nd
The day was so bored, I’ve been fixing bugs regarding the new print template I had made last week. Many small and stupid mistakes, few of them were significant but most have never wouldn’t happen when I got more focus at first time when I did the template. Nonetheless I closed around 30 bugs, that improved my statistics
After work we had first meeting of Warszawa Design Patterns Study Group for this season. It was purely organizational meeting, we’ve been discussing about what we want to do for up coming weeks. What kind of expectation we have and how to achieve them. We decided to learn TDD on some real example, next we will add DDD, maybe some Scrum and XP methodology. We will see! As a example we decide to develop software to manage conferences. As a organizer of Javarsovia 2009 conference I had experienced lots of problem that I can address in the requirements. Hopefully we will be able to build either something useful or at least some basis for a real project.
I must prepare a backlog and next time we will be able to start coding
The quite interested technique was suggested during meeting. The meeting should start as a Code Kata session when we will get some functionality and learn coding techniques. The second part will be like a Randori Session when we will be able to refactor the code and learn (maybe) some Design Patterns with live examples!
I’m looking forward for the next meeting!
lazy time
Aug 4th
The vacations period is the most lazy time ever. No testers, no managers, no developers – almost. So what can you do to survive? In my case I’ve read a book – Agile Software Development with Scrum and had also prepared my self to pass Sun Certified Java Programmer, Standard Edition 6 exam which I passed! So at least I can say I know how to write programs in Java language
That exam was the most frustrating ever, I had been learning my self from a book and from the mocks. The mocks are good when you don’t know Java in deep, but in other case they just boggle your mind
Any way I passed and I can start preparing my self for a next exam – I think it will be Sun Certified Web Component Developer for the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.
hidden plan
Jul 15th
As you maybe noticed, I wrote nothing for yesterday. Frankly, I forgot about that because I’ve been testing delicious bottle of wine But there is one thing worth to mention – I had got my books from Amazon – Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin), Agile Software Development with SCRUM and Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional). Lot’s of reading.
Indeed, but that is connected with my hidden plan. After I read all those books, I will propose to introduce Scrum methodology to the company. I will not be easy, but I have to try, what can I loose?
And the last thing, we finished our Clean Code Days. It took two days to clean almost all warnings from the Checkstyle. We discovered some hidden bugs, so it wasn’t wasted time. Any way, we figure out (as team), that code quality matters and we will try to keep it high and always on top. The work is not done yet, but that was the first step to build stronger team of highly skilled developers. What an exciting future is coming
ordinary day
Jul 13th
Today was very ordinary day, I’ve solved some bugs, sent some requests for explanation and so on. Nothing special I also started assigning some Issues regarding Clean Code Day. So boring
Few days ago I ordered some books about Agile and Scrum from Amazon. I’m really looking forward to put my hands on them. It would be very nice to introduce Scrum methodology in my current company. I need some basis and I will try.
