Certified ScrumMaster

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

As you might have read on Didier’s blog or even on Innoveo’s blog I passed the ScrumMaster’s certification end of last year. Yeah I know I am late to post this ;-)

I must say that the course held  by Jimi Fosdick was interesting and brought me some new idea.

What is Scrum? (ScrumAlliance definition)

Scrum: A team-based framework to develop complex systems and products.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for developing any product or managing any work. It allows teams to deliver a potentially shippable set of functionality every iteration, providing the agility needed to respond to rapidly changing requirements.

The Scrum framework constantly challenges its users to focus on improvement, and its Sprints provide the stability to address the ever-changing needs that occur in any project.

These characteristics have led to Scrum becoming the most popular method in the world of agile software development.

At Innoveo we are using Scrum to build up our product Skye®, a front end solution for insurances.

At Jobping we are also using Scrum in a distributed way to build up www.jobping.com, our new job posting web site aimed specifically at job seekers and employers who work with Microsoft technologies.

I would like to thank Didier and Nick, first to give me the possibility to attend the ScrumMaster course and certification  and for all the interesting discussions we had on change management in an organization, Scrum, Agile, Software Engineering…

Certification was one thing, it was a step, having the possibility to live the framework in an organization is absolutely another thing which is made of lots of other steps.

Daily stand up meeting using Skype

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Today at Innoveo Solutions we had our daily Stand Up meeting using Skype as I am at home. It worked really good ! I can’t wait to experience it on the new plasma TV that we have in our meeting room!

And a Chicken entering the meeting ! Hey Bojan :-)

Attending “Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft” PDC2008 Pre-Conference Session

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

I just registered online to PDC2008 and will attend the following Pre-Conference session:

Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft

Presenter(s): Mary Poppendieck, Grigori Melnik

Agile development is here! During this all-day agile session Mary Poppendieck, author of "Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit" will share profound insights that will optimize your agile processes. The session will focus on best practices and advice to avoid the most common pitfalls for teams practicing or moving towards agile. During the second half of the session, Grigori Melnik, Technical Program Manager in Microsoft Patterns & Practices team, will share the lessons learned his team has acquired over many, many agile projects. The session will close with a panel - including Mary, Grigori, and a few guest speakers - for you to ask your tough questions around agile development.

About the presenter(s):

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both product manager and department manager. After Mary left the corporate world in 1998, she found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word "waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book "Lean Software Development” to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, "Implementing Lean Software Development.” A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Grigori Melnik is a Senior Product Planner in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft, leading the Process & Engineering focus area. Prior to that, Grigori was a researcher, software engineer, coach and educator with 15+ years of meaningful industrial and research experience. His areas of expertise include agile methods, empirical software engineering, software testing and test automation, and software economics. Prior industrial engagements include Microsoft Canada Money and SmallBiz portals, Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal, and The Canadian Agile Network - Le Réseau Agile Canadien. Grigori is an agile enthusiast who has been involved with the agile community since 2000. He is a regular contributor and speaker to software engineering conferences and workshops around the world. Grigori is the Program Chair of the Agile 2008 conference and a member of the IEEE Software Advisory board.

Some month ago I was asked at Innoveo Solutions to introduce some agile project management in the form of Scrum.

So I am delighted to have the opportunity to attend such a full day of Pre-Conference with Mary Poppendieck on this topic.

Silverlight Planning Poker Timer

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

The other day I was searching for a small project to get started with Silverlight 2 development.

In my today’s works at Innoveo Solutions I am spending quite some time evangelizing about Scrum framework. I found some time ago the Planning Poker Timer by Aslak Hellesøy. That’s definitely looks like a great project to implement with Silverlight 2.

So my goal is as the following:

1. A full re-implementation of the Planning Poker Timer using Silverlight 2 and C#
• You can set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
• Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
• Make the colours start at blue, go red at 4 seconds and black at 0 seconds or use your imagination to let people know time is running out
• You can make the timer restart automatically at a certain time. Hitting the spacebar will also restart the timer (and make all of this text go away)
• Use it to keep folks focussed on time in other situations - like lightning talks, where you can use these settings
• Make the text bigger to fill the whole screen. This is CMD+ or CTRL+ in most browsers - or via the menu if you're using IE
2. Turn the Silverlight Planning Poker Timer to a Vista Gadget

So I fired up Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and created a first very simple project with two TextBlock and used it in Visual Studio 2008.

After less than one hour I was able to:

• Set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
• Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
• Go full screen

It is really impressive at which speed you can start to handle a project in Silverlight 2 with some .NET backgound. It was really clever from Microsoft to give the same development environment on the client that you have on the server side.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 - Unable to start debugging!

An article by Laurent Kempé 6 Comments

Unable to start debugging! The silverlight managed debugging package isn't installed.

If you are facing this issue when you try to debug your Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application from Visual Studio 2008 just extract the silverlight_chainer.exe into a folder and run Silverlight.2.0_Developer.exe from the folder. You even don’t have to quick Visual Studio 2008 during the installation.

I was facing this issue in a little project I started to experience Silverlight 2. It is realted to my today’s great interest Scrum! Wait and see.

ScrumWorks Pro integration with Java & .NET

An article by Laurent Kempé 9 Comments

Today at innoveo we had a great meeting in which I made an introduction of Scrum to the whole team! The presentation and the Scrum methodology got a great feedback, and I am very happy about that. We were already using for some years now some key points of Scrum without really knowing it. Now we know it and we will use some more advantages that comes out of it.

My colleague Lorenz challenged me just after the meeting showing me a unit test he made in Java in which he was calling the ScrumWorks Pro back-end for an integration idea we had.

From danube website:

ScrumWorks™ Pro is a collaborative system that allows teams, product owners, and stakeholders to manage the Scrum lifecycle at the program, product, release and sprint levels. Scrumworks™ Pro offers role-based project tracking, and reporting features that support the ScrumMaster, Scrum Team and Product Owner by encouraging Scrum best practices.

Back home this evening I had to give it a try with .NET (What else! ;)

And here is the first result:

So I am also able to call the ScrumWorks Pro back-end but with .NET Framework 3.5 and a WCF client. Cool! That gives me some more great integration ideas!