Hiking...

I came back from a hiking trip yesterday evening. Very relaxing experience even though my neck is very stiff and it's very painful to turn my head...

All the way when were walking in the woods, I tried to find some kind of an analogy to projects and project management or at least to teamwork, but at the end I just figured out that hiking is an individual effort, even you're hiking with your friends. The only support you get is the pressure from them that keeps you from stopping and keeps you moving those feet, no matter how painful it is.

Some additions to site

I added some new features to the blog.

1. Now reading... box on the right side. Tells which book(s) I'm currently reading and what I read previously. I have a habit of reading at least three books a month, maybe I even should list these somewhere with a short review...

2. Added Google search

3. Added work related links section, that hopefully will be quite dynamic and changing according to my situations. Now including mainly basic agile sites I use a lot.

4. Added links for the events I'm taking part. Maybe I should use Upcoming for this... Hmm..

End of silent period

Haven't have time to write anything on this blog for a while. Quite much has been happening since XP2007 and my summer vacation. I have been quite busy at work with promoting our agile trainings and trying to build some kind of network. At the same time I have been giving a large number of different kind VB.NET, Symbian, C, C++ and Java programming courses. Well, at least these keep you in touch with the development.

I'm quite excited about our new agile courses and hopefully people will find their way in them. To help this we have been working with my colleagues to publish articles (few examples at the company website, in Finnish only), create workshops and keep seminar presentations. Latest of these happened during ELKOM 07 fair at Helsinki in last month. It was very nice to see that almost without marketing (from our side at least), we got room full of listeners eager to find out more about agile software development and its suitability to embedded world.

What makes me also enthusiastic is the Agile seminar arranged by Agile finland yesterday evening at Helsinki. Good seminar where all of the speakers gave me something.

Craig Larman presented the Lean ideas and even though these were familiar to me, I at least got a reassurance that there are probably a lot of people who think that Lean has a lot to offer. I feel like Lean thinking plays key role in solving the problems of large-scale offshore projects.

Petri Haapio gave a valuable data how agile development is implemented in Nokia Networks and later in NSN. A lot of few interesting points to share people on courses.

Finally Lasse Koskela guidelines for facilitating change in form of 15 excellent points. Lasse's ideas seem to be a bit aligned to my thoughts about learning through failures and retrospectives. Making better developers by forcing them to think. Very good stuff all in all...

Well, those were the topmost things on my mind today. Hopefully I'll have time to come back with new ones as soon as possible.

XP 2007 in Como, Italy

I'm quite excited currently. Only a bit over week till the start of XP2007 conference. The program looks great and I'm hoping to hear lots of new ways to adopt agile methodologies in to different kind of organizations.

Also I'm looking forward to meeting new people all over the world and discuss the cultural differences between different countries and how these differences affect the SW engineering. Who knows what kind of new ideas pops into mind when you're with such people like in agile conferences. Lots of professional people with creative and exploratory mindsets.

Scrum and XP together

A colleague of mine had found a great case study about how Scurm and XP are used in anonymous SW company in Stockholm. This paper called Scrum and XP from the trenches - How we do Scrum by Henrik Kniberg is a good introduction to usage of XP and Scrum and a great example on one way to use these together.

I found it especially useful because the down to earth grip on methodologies, practical insights and taking in to considerations both the technical and the business side. This all in about 100 pages of easy to read and entertaining text. Also Henrik's blog is a blog worth visiting.

Test-driven Java project moving on

I got a slight push to my own project when I gave a few days advanced course on Java programming. The topics on this course included Swing UI programming, JDBC database connectivity and many other interesting techniques. So during this course I came back to my application adding some user interface and doing this of course test-driven.

The normal JUnit framework wasn't enough for TDDing the UI, so I found JFCUnit that is an extension to JUnit and provides mechanisms for this. Using it is fairly simple and you can get started with quite small amount of effort. The documentation found on the website guides newbies nicely to the world of GUI unit testing.

Well anyways, the first version of the UI has been set up and the application is pretty close to being almost usable. Strange how a nice UI makes the application feel a lot more professional...

Agile way

I've just started a new project for automatic generation of article reference list website. As I've been reading, studying and teaching agile methods for a while already, I felt that I should try some practices in my own project too. So I started doing this Java application in test-driven way and I also created my own build server for continuous integration. The first impression on TDD is great: The software is building up almost by itself, refactoring is easy, Test & Profiling Tools Platform is smashing and everything works nice.

However the next step on the model is to create some kind of view. UI development in Java is not my strongest side and I guess test-driving that is not so easy. If someone knows how to do this, please drop me with a comment or an e-mail.

Well, I'll report on the progress of the project later on and we'll see if I'm able to get it out with some open source license. But before that, it should have some more functionalities and a clear direction where it should be developed to.

P.S. The Agile forums is a place to be in case you have questions about agility.

Very nice portal for free software

I just lately found the Wikipedia portal pages and immediately made one as my starting page: Free software portal. Now I'm waiting mainly on the possibility to gather parts from the interesting Wikipedia portals into my own customized portal. This portal would at least contain some RSS feeds on computer, ICT and business related news, some links to agile development pages and few starting pointers for open source software.

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Google presently

As a natural next step for Google online office suite, the rumours of the Google's alternative to Powerpoint are fueling. Few evidences have been presented in Google Operating System blog and its hard to doubt them.

Instead I thought of few things why I feel like this is not the perfect solution. At least the first and most important thing is that the software is online. Presentations are given in all kinds of places, and extremely often without any network available. So will there be a feature to dump the presentation into an executable form that can be used offline?

Another thing, coming from the same reason from previous one, is that I usually use Powerpoint mainly during my work trip in train. I also have a tendency to do things at the last second, so I may sit down in a small cafe and write my few thoughts about the customer down on a slide or two. Does this mean that with this Google Presently tool, I have to get connected to Internet through my mobile phone and after that I can write down the few lines?

Well, I'm not sure but this feels like the most trickiest question around the Presently. I love Docs and Spreadsheet, but I feel that I use these in a bit different way, than I would use Presently.

Apple iPhone introduced

Yesterday Apple introduced the Apple iPhone and just after few hours from the introduction, the net is full of posts about it. Well, nice UI, nice controls, elegant design: just what was expected from Apple. But in no ways could I say that the iPhone is revolutionary. Impressive yes, but not revolutionary.



We'll see how iPhone manages to face the competition at the mobile phone markets. I'm sure it will cut a decent slice, but will it threaten Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson? It will if we believe this article from Times magazines. I guess it won't...

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List of basic open source SW for Windows

I found a nice little list of Windows open source software. The list contains the most common programs for a common user and each of the software, at least on the "Basics" section, is easy to use and well documented. I even started to make few modifications on one of the note taking software to make it fit my needs better. I'll come back about how that turns out.

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