Autor: NicoPaez

Agile Open BsAs 2009 – Sessions part 2

Here are some others sessions I was:

Session 2: How can I evangelize my team?

This session was proposed by me. During the time I have been practising agile I have found some people that do not «believe» in some practices and because of that they do not perform the practices that most team members agreed to follow. Example: in a team of 8 members there is one that do not like sticky-notes, he prefer to track his work using Excel spreadsheets. Of course the team leader could oblige him to use the sticky-notes, but everybody knows that that is not the best alternative. So what should we do in these cases?

There were about 30 people in this session and it was very useful for me. I get some interesting ideas to try with my teams, here are some of these ideas:

  • Try to change the roles along the iterations so everybody can experience the different task and responsabilities
  • If somebody does not perform some of his tasks, you (as a leader/scrummaster) take care of the task. This way you show the importance of the task.
  • I was used to implement a punish policy, for example, when somebody brakes a Build he must pay crosands for the whole team. A better alternative to punish can be prizes, for example if the build remains successful during the whole team, the company rewards the team with crosands.

Session 3: Popurri of Tools

This session was proposed by Juan Gabardini It was very interesting. I recommend you to read Juan post about it.

To be continue…

Agile Open BsAs 2009 – Sessions part 1

In this post I will try to resume some sessions I took part on.

Session 1: Technical debt

This session was proposed by Vincens who introduced it commenting this article. I think that we all agreed that we should try to minimize it to prevent it to convert in a big ball of snow and that oblige us to make a full re engineering of the system. It should be kept small, so it could be attack applying refactoring techniques along the iteration. One point of discussion was how to plan that refactoring: should that refactoring effort be visible to the product owner and added to the product backlog?  should it be handle by the team without telling the product owner? what if I am working on a legacy system that has a huge technical debt that can not be handle with refacting? is it possible to have an entire iteration to make just refactoring?

The conclusions were:

  • We should prevent it
  • We have to be honest with the product owner
  • We must understand the value of not having technical debts

Session 5: Next steps of the Latinamerican community

There were more than 30 people in this session. After explaining the current situation and the need of having a formal structure, we talk about the pros and cons of joining SADIO and finally we decided to try joining it. We also decided that to be part of the community members will have to attend to at least one of the major annual events organized by the community.

More comming soon….

After Agile Open Buenos Aires 2009

During the last weekend I was participating in this great event. As part of the organization group I am very happy with the results, there were almost a hundred participants and the sessions were very interesting.aobsas2009

It was my first experience with the open space technology, I felt very comfortable with the format and I liked it very much.

In futures I will shared the conclusions of the session I took part on.

To close this post here are some pictures taken by Xavier.

Bertrand Meyer in Argentina

Last Wednesday I attend to an open class by Bertrand Meyer at UTN Buenos Aires. It was about «How we teach programming». It was interesting but it quite filled my expectations. In the first part, Meyer did a review of the different ways of teaching programming in introductory courses (first year courses), explaining the pros and cons of each. During the second part he introduced the way he uses in his courses and that is explained in his next book: Touch of class: Learning to program well with objects and contracts.

SmallTalk class

Last week, like every end of semester I gave a special introductory class about SmallTalk programming. This time I decided to modify the slidedeck to put more emphasis on the fact that in SmallTalk everything is an object. The slide deck is available for download here.

Enjoy it!

Technical careers scholarships

The Argentine goverment is implementing a scholarship program called Becas Bicentenario with the aim of promoting the study of technical carrers. During the ’90 the Argentine industry suffer a lot, many factories closed. At the same time young people prefered to study humanist carrers. After the 2001 crisis, local industries start to expand again -and this expansion still continue. But there aren’t enough technitians to suppport this expansion and that is why the goverment has implemented this initiative. If you are interested, all the information is available at the official website.

Team Puzzle

Today I went to the presentation of the final project of my friends Carolina and Marcio. Their project consist in a management tool to support the development of software projects. It is called Team Puzzle and has been publish here -at Sourceforge. It has some similar features to Team Foundation Server, but it is built on open source technologies. It integrates Open LDAP, Tomcat, MySql, JBPM and Eclipse.

Congratulations Caro and Marcio, you have done a Great job!

Something is changing…

Over the last two years some interesting things have happened in the .net community, among these things I would like to highlight the followings:

  • Greater interest in Domain Driven Design in contrast to the traditional MSDN Data driven way. This has stimulated the adoption of certain design techniques like DI and AOP among other.
  • As a consequence of the previous point there has been a wider adoption and diffusion of open source tools (beyond the P&P application blocks). Tools like NHibernate, Castle and Spring.Net have proven to be high quality products providing efficient solutions for typical problems in enterprise development. Event Microsoft (in a certain way) has recognized these facts, I think ASP.NET MVC is an example of this.
  • Massive adoption of agile development practices like continous integration, unit testing, pair programming and iterative development among others.

I think that evidence of these facts are the creation of the ALT.NET community and the publication of the excellent book «Foundations of Programming» by Karl Seguin.
I see this as great progress for the maturity of the community and the quality of its developments.