Agility and more - better & faster business solutions with software - part-3

In my previous posts, I discussed about practicing agile in real life, and why adapting the agile prescriptions is important. I discussed how the basic values of Agile manifesto narrates it all. This is my last post in this series, where I will explain about practices even beyond the direct agile prescriptions, that can help build faster and quality software with smiling teams.

Some Agility and beyond

While the software creation itself is creative, the process employed to create this software is also creative. Its not just practicing agile, that helps create good software, there are more things to it. The craftsman (developer) who creates software has also to be given importance (Did I mention that before?). Let me discuss few of these things that include things from the Agile practices such as XP and Scrum, as well as those that go beyond them.

Agility and more: better & faster business solutions with software - part-2

In my previous blog post, I talked about why software development needs processes, and the need for agile in the processes. Here, I continue with the discussions, focusing on how the basic principles of agile itself has a lot to say, that can help us build better software.

Practicing agile - adapting is more important

As mentioned before, the popular practiced tools for agile process include Scrum, Kanban and XP. But often, the process models/tools are applied as a religion, being strict on what the text prescribes. This has resulted in some rumblings that has questioned the effectiveness of agile processes to deliver quality and creative solutions to business. The InfoQ book on Scrum and Kanban has highlighted the need for the process models to be adapted to their needs.

One size doesn't fit all - adapting is important.

(Image Courtesy: Robin Skyler Tell's photostream)

So what needs to be practiced is taking a lean model, and adapting it to your needs, probably by adding "prescriptions" from the stouter process models, and even removing "prescriptions" that hinder your progress, but with absolute knowledge of what is being removed. This is what Henrik has put in his InfoQ book - "Do not limit yourself to one tool!".

Agility and more: better & faster business solutions with software - part-1

Software development is a creative process, where we create software to deliver solutions to business problems (most of the time), and/or to add value to it. Although the holy duty of a software developer is to deliver solutions to business problems, and not always necessarily developing software. But when we have decided to build a software, we work as teams (most of the times), and the business problem is the central focus of the process. But, the overall quality of the developed software also depends on how we are developing the software - from the requirement capturing to coding, testing, and implementation. This highlights the need for a process at all stages of software development.

Note: Software is also developed for fun, some write it to learn programming (we all have did that), some times it is written for personal use (eg,. automating some mundane task). But most of the time, its written for business needs - let it be a game software, and ERP, the OS itself, or the search engine software - most of them eventually turn as a business or a business solution. In this post I am talking mostly about the software that deals with business and hence the software shops find time and money to be spent to develop these software. So whenever I talk of software, I mean it to be the software developed in these software shops, unless otherwise indicated.

These series of posts highlights my understanding and experience on how the Agile processes can be effectively used to improve the overall quality of the software solutions with reasonable time leads and better estimates. Why and how agile processes needs to be adapted? For Software Engineering teams, there is even more than just being lean/agile, that needs to be into the process.

(Image courtesy: Coffish's web album)

This is of course not a comprehensive discussion on any of the process tools/frameworks discussed here. Although I discuss about Scrum, XP and Kanban to certain extent, what I tell here is the basics, a skeleton that every team/organization can give thoughts to, and then adapt them to their needs. You may add whatever more is needed to meet some standards, but just don't overdo it that you have problem remembering your own processes - keep it as lean as possible. There are several literature that talks about these specific techniques. I will not talk about all the aspects of software development too! Here I will talk in general, about faster development cycle and developer productivity while achieving quality and timely software releases with less team burnouts and overtimes.

Downloading InfoQ videos and slides

InfoQ is a portal with lot of interesting and happening stuff for IT people, and especially for the developers. Some of the areas, it specializes includes - Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Agile and Architecture. Like many others, I am a regular user of the site, that provides me the "energy supplements" for my developer life.

Like many others, I was always interested to download the videos and slides from the InfoQ website. With some effort I could device a way to achieve that - exclusively for my private usage. I did this because, often my internet connection is slow and then watching the entire presentation/interview would eat much of my time - most of it waiting for the content to get downloaded.

I wanted to share this technique with others on my blog. However, I was concerned on the IP rights and so checked the website for it. However I could not find one that stated a usage policy. So I decided to check the same with the website owners - c4media. I emailed them and in the reply, I was advised not to publish any details on downloading slides and videos. This was the response I got.

Thanks for taking the time to ask us about this. We’d ask that you not provide instructions on how to download or view these videos beyond the means we currently offer.

When we go out and film these interviews or presentations one of the stipulations in the agreement we sign with the conference or individual is that the video not be made available for download. By allowing or even turning a blind eye to people doing this it would not only put us in potential legal hot water but would also “blacklist” us from filming future presentations or interviews.

Due to this we can unfortunately only support people viewing the presentations or interviews in the formats we currently offer; either streaming them online or, in some cases, downloading the MP3.

It was a co-incidence to find that InfoQ was reacting publicly to seek feedback for their site, probably at the same time when I was drafting the mail. The responses will indicated that people are interested to download the videos and slides, and the InfoQ's response to these queries.

Further, I was encouraged by the InfoQ to publish their response to me, showing how transparent InfoQ was. Respecting the InfoQ's  legal terms, I have decided not to publish any technique for downloading the InfoQ videos or slides.

InfoQ may change the way it is presenting the videos and slides, to stick to its legal agreements. However, as far a technical feasibility of devising any hacks are concerned, even RSA encryption can be compromised, for that matter, given enough of time and CPU power.

I am however, happy about the fact that InfoQ is redesigning its website, closely working with the users. It may also present direct method to download interviews, which is InfoQ's "original material". I would encourage you to provide your feedback, and help yourself to make the site more useful.

Tech and some...

I had just brought a new headphone for making Skype calls. I was trying testing it out, and I recorded my voice to test it. What came in was a movie song that I was chanting over. I played it back to find too much of background noise. I wanted to remove it. Now for any utility for my OS, I do not rely on a search engine,.. I rely on my "Synaptic Package Manager" on my Linux box - Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Quick was it, to get "Audacity" to help me record, and edit audio.

Notice, that I split the audio into multiple tracks easily and mix it at proper timings.

A tribute to my ex-colleagues

Moving with the waves of time, I changed my job. So did some of my other colleagues at Miediant Solutions - my previous employer. Now after we all are into our new jobs, happy and looking forward for a pleasant and prosperous future with our new jobs, we all miss our team, the togetherness we shared. We enjoyed the fun-filled, yet productive work environment, that had so much to learn, and had contributed so much to our professional career. While, many love to hate their bosses, we hope to have him again in our team. We all keep our fingers crossed, and hope for the best to happen, and meet each other and work together again some day.

Thank you all for making the work a pleasurable experience, and the office - a home away from home,
a place we wish to stay together. We shared so much professionally, and 
we worked like soldiers in the war.

Thank for all the sprints, the daily scrums and the virtually fighting retrospectives,

the lunch, the outings - thanks for all that time.

Thank you all for the professional and personal growth gained together.

Wish you all a prosperous and happy future!

QCon London 2010 slides

The QCon London 2010 has just concluded. There was extremely good response from the delegates. Many attendees have blogged on the same.

The conference had 19 tracks spread over 3 days:

Wednesday
1. Architectures You've Always Wondered About
2. Software Craftsmanship
3. Non-Relational DBs & Web Oriented Data
4. Dev and Ops: A single team
5. Functional programming
6. Solution Track: Wednesday
Thursday
7. 2015 Software Development
8. Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects
9. Pragmatic Cloud Computing
10. Agile Evolution
11. AlphaGeeks on .NET
12. IT - more than tools and technology
13. Solutions Track: Performance and Scalability
Friday
14. The Concurrency Challenge
15. Cool Stuff with Java
16. How do you test that?
17. SOA 2010
18. Browser as a Platform
19. Solution Track: Friday

Some great speakers such as Robert C. Martin, Martin Fowler, Rod Johnson, Joe Armstrong, Dan North teamed up for this.

Some of the slides for these are available online on the official QCon London website. Although, the slides by themselves do not ever match for going there yourself, these and the blogs are good for those who could not attend it.