My Life, My Universe, My Everything

Glassdoor is a free service providing reviews, ratings and salary information about a range of companies, provided by people who work at the company. Certainly interesting when you prepare for a move or a salary negotiation.

Last week I conducted a two day in-house agile/Scrum training in Slovakia.

I enjoyed it very much apart from the few people that clearly didn’t want to be there and thus didn’t make an effort to contribute. One agile principle is to build your project around motivated individuals and trust them to get the job done. It is frustrating to realize that the project might fail because of the selection of people.

Contrary there was also a rather motivated group present. They started their agile project three weeks ago and had lots of good and detailed questions.

I also learnt a lot again. I need to extend the time for Q&A from 30 to 60 minutes although I answered questions along the way anyway. I think I will shorted the “User Stories” part. Frankly, I think it is not so important to have user stories if the requirements are given in another way. It is important to know the who needs what and why though and to have clear acceptance criteria. This can all be mentioned when talking about the product backlog anyway. I also need to improve the introductions to the Scrum form Hell and The Agile Hour exercise.

This is just a thought I want to keep: Investigate differences and similarities of Test Driven Development and Formal Specification. There is also a history of executable specifications – does this mean “tests”? Not sure I mix up a few things right now but I think it is worth to consider it a bit further. Also, recently Microsoft Research publishes more about SpecSharp (Spec#).

I am an active Google Reader user and today I thought ‘What does the “Discover” button do?’. Rather than thinking about it for too long I just pressed the button and guess what, it discovered a few really interesting blogs based on my reading habits. There you go…

On Monday I changed departments. After three years of working with telecommunications and enter-/infotainment products I thought it is time to move on and learn something different. I will be working as an internal project management consultant. My first major job is to lead the introduction of agile software development in our organisation. I guess, I will post more about agile development in the future.

Despite using Gmail for my personal communication, I have to use Outlook at work. Mostly, I can deal with it pretty well but I still look for some extra productivity through some extra tool support. Today I read about Xobni, an outlook add-in that I will try once I have an invitation. The video on their home page looks promising.

On Saturday, I went to the store to finally buy a new external drive. For 150€ I got a 500GB Sungoo NASD. While being there, I also picked up the new cat in town – Mac OS 10.5 named Leopard.

Back home I installed the drive first. I connected it to my Mac and Win machines. All worked well and I was pretty satisfied.

Then I installed Leopard. About 1h later I had the equivalent of the “Blue Screen of Death”. Reboot – BSOD – Reboot … Search the Internet … I found out that some applications don’t seem to run under Leopard but I haven’t had installed any of them. Reboot – quickly before the BSOD I managed to start the install again. This time I didn’t upgrade but choose “Archive and Install” (note the little options button on the “Select the drive” screen).

1h later and I had a stable system again. Only my NASD disappeared – so I tried to reinstall the drivers – ok – set up the drive – it stalls. After searching the net again, I learned that the NASD software is from Ximeta and their drivers don’t work with Leopard. On their support website you learn that a new driver is planned for Q1/2008.

I’m a bit frustrated as I wanted to use the drive for the new Time Machine feature. I hope Ximeta will bring out the new driver sooner due to public demand.

This can be cool stuff.

Video Searching by Sight and Script

Researchers have designed an automated system to identify characters in television shows, paving the way for better video search.

Video Searching by Sight and Script

Last week I attended a seminar about our System Development Method. The course was rather interesting although I was pushing our seminar leader a bit. I feel that my experiences in project management and agile software development added to the seminar although I could have made this less obvious sometimes. I am so used in raising my voice, uttering my opinion and leading people that I now have to learn to take myself back a bit again – I think. I liked the mix of people and I think we were a very homogeneous group. I can truly say that I would like to work with any and all in a team. Most of the seminar attendees can be found on Rene’s web album.

VersionOne conducted a global survey to highlight the value teams deliver from Agile development. Survey respondents work in companies of all sizes from small and mid-sized organizations to the largest global corporations. This survey summarizes the state of Agile Development in organizations covering every industry vertical from financial services, health care, and education to video games, government, and defense.

The “State of Agile Development” Survey Results