When I talk with fellow developers new to Scrum, I often hear a fundamental misunderstanding about Sprints. These colleagues are normally used to Waterfall or RUP methodologies. As a consequence, they think of Sprints as very short repetitions of the following phases: requirements (planning meeting), design, implementation, test (sprint review as acceptance).
And this is completely wrong!
Let me tell you why.
How to find a concurrency bug – this was the question I asked myself some time ago.
It is always very hard to find a concurrency bug. Mostly you have no idea when it happens or if it is really a concurrency issue or some nasty bit of code. If it is a concurrency issue the question is if the bug is in your code or in a supplied library? Will the problem happen only on multicore processors or on any machine? Besides the technical problem the customer is eager to get a solution and management… we’ll i guess you know the story.
I won’t be able to tell you everything there is to know about concurrency testing – but I’ll show you a way that worked for me in most cases.
Important announcement for all those certified scrum masters out there. The scrum alliance recently changed their policy of the certification process for the certified scrum master. Thanks to Ken Schwaber taking the exam and therefore prove that the individual was able to memorize the scrum basics on a theoretical basis is now more important than the experience of living and breathing scrum…
Effective 1 October 2009, certifications will be valid for two years from the date when the CSM passes his or her certification exam. If an individual takes a CSM course after 30 September 2009, he or she will have ninety days after the course date to pass the certification exam.
If an individual earned his or her certification prior to 1 April 2009, the individual must take the initial online certification exam by 1 April 2011 to maintain certification.
If an individual earned his or her certification between 1 April 2009 and 1 October 2009, the individual will have two years from the course date to pass the CSM exam and maintain certification.
http://www.scrumalliance.org/scrum_certification
Additional information can be found on Peter’s Scrum Breakfast blog
http://www.scrum-breakfast.com/2009/08/scrum-certification-exam-required-after.html
Recently, I was asked by a colleague why I like Scrum. I didn’t have a good answer at hand immediately, and since then the question bugged me. Therefore it’s time to give you my top ten now:
There are times, where people ask you questions, which can directly be found on Google. This kind of questions are mostly boring. But hey, there is a nice solution for responding to those people:
On the website Let me google that for you you can enter any search query and send the generated link to the person, who asked you something. Perhaps, this person will learn something and will google the next question before he will ask you…
Peter Stevens from scrum-breakfast.com blogged today a really interesting article about an adapted scrum process for IT support. As Peter Stevens describes in his post on of his attendees in his workshop was the leader of IT Support for the EE Department of the ETH Zurich. They where facing the problem that their support group had to deal with daily business and they had to successfully compete medium term projects but their daily business was consuming all their time.
The answer to their problem was not strictly speaking Scrum… I suggest you read the interesting article from Peter!
http://www.scrum-breakfast.com/2009/05/towards-agile-support.html
I found the blog Agile: In A Flash some time ago and I really like it.
The blog discusses agile software development based on flash cards. The authors put together cards that each express a single idea, practice or methodology in agile software development.
Go and have a look!
Lately, I asked myself why I like Scrum most. I’m a big fan of Scrum because of a lot of things. So I asked myself: “What is the root cause of all these”.
I tracked it down to two main things:
I’ll come back to that later.
I’m also a big fan of Test Driven Development. Guess what, I performed a root cause analysis on TDD, too. And once again:
After that, I asked myself: “Are there other things I like with these root causes?”.
Yes there are:
So it seems, I’m addicted to the Focus-Feedback drug :-O
Some people share the opinion that scrum and other agile development methods are easily maintainable with pencil and post-it only. Nonetheless there is a growing list of software solutions which support scrum methodology. Boris Gloger from Scrum 4 You publishes regularly reviews of scrum tools on his blog. I strongly recommend to take a look at his website and the scrum tools list!
http://scrum4you.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/scrum-tools-list/
http://scrum4you.wordpress.com
For those of you interested in TDD:
I’m speaking at the conference SET (Software Engineering Today) in Schlieren (Zurich) on Tuesday May 5th.
I’ll show the basics of the TDD cycle, benefits and pitfalls, and how you get started.
Link to SET 2009: SET 2009
Link to my session (german): TDD
Looking forward to some interesting discussions…