Scrum training

Technorati Теги: management

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year’s Resolutions for Internet Junkies:

1. I will try to figure out why I *really* need 7 e-mail addresses.
2. I will stop sending e-mail to my wife.
3. I resolve to work with neglected children—my own.
4. I will answer my snail mail with the same enthusiasm with which I answer my e-mail.
5. I resolve to back up my hard drive daily...well, once a week...okay, monthly then...or maybe...
6. I will spend less than one hour a day on the Internet.
7. When I hear "Where do you want to go today?" I won’t reply "MS Tech Support."
8. I will read the manual.
9. I will think of a password other than "password".
10. I will stop checking my e-mail at 3:00 in the morning.

--

I've got this congratulation from Dmitry Krushinsky, thanks for that!

Technorati Теги: fun

Google Introduced Scrum

Technorati Теги: management,development

Being a manager means....

Just have read an article of Henrik Kniberg devoted to the manager role in SCRUM process. Absultely aggree with him. Sometimes it is so hard to be...

for the team, is not it?

Book Shelf

Rather a well written book devoted to Prince2 project management methodology. It does not have lofty topics yet it has a good structure and it is easy to read it.

 

Technorati Теги: Project management,Prince2

Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful....

Take my warmest greetings.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Systems Journal

Just found this site of IBM Systems Journal with a plenty of interesting information. Join!

Struggle for Better Software

In the article of Sten and Per Sundblad "Business Improvement Through Better Architected Software" different roles of the architect are suggested.

"Business architecture should be established and managed by a new breed of business architects rather than by the old business analysts. Software architecture should be established and managed by solution architects with a more business-oriented and a less technical background than yesterday’s application architects. Business and solution architects should work together to design and suggest improved business processes that take better advantage of technical
opportunities than the original ones did.

But still it is difficult to find a company where all these roles are performed by different people.

In the most cases the person who is responsible for project business-technical vision takes all these roles. I see the shift of roles, but all together they are the same :)

Microsoft Dynamics Nav 6

Found the architecture of new Nav 6 here . A small step for Humanity but rather a huge jump for Navision!

Communication Skills

This here, 5 useful communication skills:

1. Make sure the person you’re talking to is ready to hear what you’re saying.
2. Instead of complaining, ask for what you want in concrete, measurable terms.
3. Give feedback if expectations aren’t met, even if the effort is good.
4. Take responsibility to make your boundary needs clear.
5. You must keep talking. That’s the only way to make progress.
   

Some Like it Hot

Personality Type

Passed the test by JT O’Donnell to find out personality type. My result is EMPATHIZER !

By the way the last word cast a plot of the "Funny Face" 1957 where many things were connected to "empathic" :)

Technorati Теги: personality,management

VS2005+3 has been released

So, VS2008 has been release today. In the blog post it was announced that source code of .NET 3.5 will be available shortly after VS 2008 will have been released. Well...... :)

Technorati Теги: .net,development,microsoft

Is that in recent times?

Technorati Теги: fun,management

SaaS vs Software+Service

Technorati Теги: SaaS,architecture

Again! Why they are constantly mixing these things: SaaS and Software+Service? Even in the channel9 video cast with Steve Swartz, Clemens Vasters and David Chappell the approaches are identified.Besides they talk about connected systems and do that in a very simple manner.

.Net Framework Poster

Technorati Теги: .net,development

A big picture of .net framework can be seen on the poster.

Developing Project Scope

Found this post devoted to creating the project scope statement.
There were some priciples that are quite reasonable when employing visual communications to create project scope statements.

Manager's Style

Technorati Теги: management,fun

Having read an article "Ten commandments of Steve Job" I found it interesting to share my attitude to each clause. So here they are:

• Never let people know where they stand. - Partially agree
• You don’t have to hire the best people. - Agree
• Only promote stupid people. - Disagree
• Never tell people what is expected of them. - Partially agree
• A manager should be inconsistent and unpredictable. - Unpredictable - yes, inconsistent - never!
• No praise. Ever. - Disagree
• Keep people’s spirits broken. - Disagree!
• Throw tantrums. - Disagree
• Don’t speak to employees in elevators. - Why?
• Start with the ad campaign. - Partially agree

Complexity does not go away, it just changes hands...

A fascinating idea from Gianpaolo's blog "In a closed system, software complexity does not go away, it just changes hands"

Fine for NOT being PCI DSS Compliant

You know that since companies are constantly at risk of losing sensitive cardholder data, which could result in fines, legal action and bad publicity, achieving compliance with the PCI DSS should be high on the agenda of companies who store, transmit or process credit card data. Furthermore, PCI DSS compliance needs to be achieved by December, 2007 – this is the deadline posed by credit card companies. Organizations that fail to comply face fines of up to $500,000 if the data is lost or stolen and risk not being allowed to handle cardholder data.

Did you know that? I did not. Think many of you too :) Beware! Keep your $500,000 !!!

Plan for the next several days

I have beared in mind that project envisioning steps might be the following:

1) Gather and organize both technical and business requirements
2) Envision and create a solution that meets requirements and can be implemented
3) Model the pieces of an infrastructure and their points of integration
4) Prove the feasibility of a design, the toughest thing :)

Just 4 steps. And I need to walk them over in a few days.

SaaS - Integration Value

David Linthicum in his blog post defines the problem SaaS consumers faced with.
Sometime it's very important to think as a customer. So what he writes:
"When planning to integrate your SaaS applications, certain things need take place. First, you need to define the information you need to integrate, what it is, who owns it, and how it's accessed. While most SaaS vendors have APIs or Web services to support integration, many of these interfaces are not well thought out or are limited in some way. Next, you need to define the interfaces and information on the enterprise applications side, answering many of the same questions. This means you should have a semantic- and interface-level understanding of the integration domain, including all systems connected, SaaS and non-SaaS."
A good case comment. It must be owned we often do things nobody particularly needs. And that's a pitty.
The article can be found here.

Imagine You are a Point in the 2D space...

Imagined? So where do you think you are?

I found this chart at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945098.aspx
In the article the author shows what an EA does and how his/her role relates to other architecture roles within the enterprise. A good way to represent architects in terms of breath and depth and for developers either.

Twelve

Watched "12" by N. Mikhalkov. This is the right film. It's not only about Russia, justice or that concrete case.

It's about us. Me. You.

Art of Presentation

by Alexei Kapterev. A well made slide show how to make your apperance better.

Service Delivery Platform in a Nutshell

Today on my way home I read an article from The Architecture Journal devoted Service Delivery Platform. This is the same as SaaS but from a little different point of view.

Efficient Software Delivery Through Service-Delivery Platforms by Gianpaolo Carraro, Fred Chong, and Eugenio Pace

Summary: Delivering software as a service (SaaS) has gained a lot of momentum. One reason this one-to-many delivery model is attractive is that it enables new economies of scale. Yet economy of scale does not come automatically; it has to be explicitly architected into the solution. A typical architectural pattern allowing economy of scale is "single instance multi-tenancy," and many Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) offering SaaS have moved to this architecture, with various levels of success.
There is, however, another means of improving efficiency which ISVs have not adopted with the same enthusiasm: the use of an underlying Service-Delivery Platform (SDP). Adoption has been slow, mainly because service-delivery platforms optimized for line-of-business applications delivery are still in their infancy. But both existing and new actors in the hosting space are quickly building compelling capabilities. This paper explores the goals, capabilities, and motivations for adoption of SDP, and describes the technology and processes related to efficient software delivery through SDP.

In addition I have to make a note that the article is quite intelligible and makes many things related to SaaS clear. My verdict - RECOMMENDED

The Smithy

Three Characteristics of Engineering

1. Mature Engineering Disciplines Provide Design Decomposition from Top to Bottom
2. Mature Engineering Disciplines Use Analysis Techniques (Which Might or Might Not Be Mathematical) to Test Each Level of Design
3. Mature Engineering Disciplines Have Implicit Requirements, as Well as Explicit Requirements

So it seems to me I am not an engineer, I'm a smith at most :(

Multiplatform .NET

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

In other words MS is trying to spread its tentacles to YOUR computer. Are you afraid? Joking :)

In fact the the underlieing idea is more powerful than it may seem. I tried the VS2008 beta 2 + Silverlight SDK + Blend. And within 5 minutes I was capable to integrate video to the page.

Check the Silverlight project for cool examples.

How many types of architects do you know?

In general I know 3:

1. Solutions Architect
   Also known as: Application Architect, Software Architect, Data Architect, Integration Architect
   Role: The Solutions Architect manages the design of one or more applications or services within an organization, usually within the scope of a division.
   Some would argue that “Software Architect” is more applicable here. But since the design for many applications and services often transcends the creation of software – for example, in a data-heavy application or the integration of a series of applications – the term “Solution Architect” is a good fit in many cases and seems to be gaining adoption.
   The Solutions Architect works with the Enterprise Architect for strategic direction (both conforming to strategy, and helping to define it).
2. Infrastructure Architect
   Also known as: Technology Architect, Systems Architect
   Role: The Infrastructure Architect’s job includes the design of the datacenter and the deployment and maintenance of applications and services across the organization.
   This role involves working with both the Solution Architect to design for scalability, reliability, manageability, performance, and security, and the Enterprise Architect, from whom he receives and contributes to strategic direction.
3. Enterprise Architect
   Also known as: Strategic Architect, Chief Architect, Business Architect
   Role: The Enterprise Architect is concerned about the strategic vision of application and services within the organization. He or she is responsible in part for strategic direction and ensuring all applications comply with internal policies, and may be in charge of setting the direction for methodologies, tools and frameworks used.
   Many people believe that Strategic Architect is a more fitting title here because there can be a disconnect between Enterprise Architect (the role) and Enterprise Architecture (when used to describe architecture for an Enterprise), but the term Enterprise Architect seems to have built up some momentum over the past few years, and is generally more accepted.

The classification was taken from here.

Responsibilities of a System Architect

Recently I've read an article regarding system architect and found this definition:
"A system architect is responsible for creating or selecting the most appropriate architecture for a system (or systems), such that it suits the business needs, satisfies user requirements, and achieves the desired results under given constraints."
That brought me back my study in the uni with all those sophisticated definitions :)

Besides, read this if you want to know what does it take to be an architect.

Always for the road

Spent a couple of weeks in Western Europe. A lot of impressions've left, do you want to share them with me?

BeNeLux-2007

Also yesterday took part in a fascinating yachting event. Outstanding relaxation!

Yachting Summer 2007

Inflammatory Music

On thursday I visited the concert of Igor Butman jazz band. It was the first time he played in Kyiv. The audience was delighted with the music and me either. Great impression of jazz and the heat :) 32C - 11p.m. !!!

Cultural Shift

James Whittaker wrote a very important thing about his image of MS attitude to the Security. A quote from there: "The SDL works because a cultural change has happened at Microsoft. Innovation, security, customer experience are all so tightly intertwined that we don’t think about them as separate entities. We don’t do the SDL because we have to; we do it because we do it. Word is getting around, the cultural change is spreading. The clipboards have been thrown out and the natural resistance to change has morphed into a development culture centered around a secure customer experience."

I believe the shifts were caused by the whole community so let's be regarded as a merit! :)
I expect the changes will happen not only within MS but there and everywhere!!

P.S. The full article may be read here

Michael Howard Interview

Rather an engaging chat with the Microsoft employee Michael Howard:
http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2007/06/24/michael-howard-microsoft-interview/

Acropolis

Microsoft released "Acropolis" CTP 1.
Microsoft Code Name “Acropolis” is a set of components and tools intended to make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client applications for Microsoft Windows on the .NET Framework.

Seems developers will be out of job soon :(

Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72386ce5-f206-4d5c-ab09-413b5f31f935&displaylang=en&tm

Security shifts?

It was just naturally to read the following post "Oil Change or Culture Change?". Some time in the past I had a discussion with a Microsoft employee. Amongst other questions I mentioned that SDL and other security frameworks can hardly be used outside MS.

Why? MS people apparently tell us the same and they came to a conclusion that there is a misunderstanding of a security problems importance on the CxO level and on the customer's level at the same time. I think CxO level is quite adequate. They raise money. Poor customers....

The final pasage is well turned: "A final note to help illustrate my point – for those of you that are old enough to remember, there was an old TV commercial for Fram Oil Filters that showed a mechanic working on the tear down of some old beater. At the end of the commercial, the mechanic turns to the camera and says, "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later..." "

The whole article can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2007/05/31/oil-change-or-culture-change.aspx

V-Day

Great day - Victory Day! Congratulate you heartily.

MS Released Privacy Guidelines for Developing Software Products and Services

The document is a set of privacy guidelines for developing software products and services that are based on Microsoft internal guidelines and their experience incorporating privacy into the development process.

Included in This Document:
Basic Concepts and Definitions
Guidelines:
Scenario 1: Transferring PII to and from the Customer’s System
Scenario 2: Storing PII on the Customer’s System
Scenario 3: Transferring Anonymous Data from the Customer’s System
Scenario 4: Installing Software on a Customer’s System
Scenario 5: Deploying a Website
Scenario 6: Storing and Processing User Data at the Company
Scenario 7: Transferring User Data Outside the Company
Scenario 8: Interacting with Children
Scenario 9: Server Deployment

You can download the copy from here.

Video Blogging

Recently I've registered my Video Blog at YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/nmedin
So you are wellcome!

P.S. There are lots of interesting things and I have not investigated them all yet.

4 May

Today is the 78th birthday of Audrey Kathleen Ruston also known as Hepburn.

Foto was taken from here
Also read the Diary of Anna Frank. May the 9ht is soon.

ASP.NET Asynchronous Model

Did you know that in ASP.NET 2.0 it is possible to use the power of asynchronous pages just by including an Async="true" attribute in the page's @ Page directive, like so:
<%@ Page Async="true" ...
Jeff Prosise's in his article explains that this tells ASP.NET to implement IHttpAsyncHandler in the page. Next, you should call the new Page.AddOnPreRenderCompleteAsync method early in the page's lifetime (for example, in Page_Load) to register a Begin method and an End method, as shown in the following code:
AddOnPreRenderCompleteAsync (new BeginEventHandler(MyBeginMethod), new EndEventHandler (MyEndMethod)
);
These two methods will be called after PreRender Event. To catch the idea look at the picture below.



Taken from http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/10/WickedCode/
Async processing benefits are depicted in http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/WickedCode/

Wherever you do - think of security

Did you know that the employment of Security Development Lifecycle techniques in Microsoft resulted in more secure software? According to surveys the number of security defects reduced by approximately 50 to 60 percent when the team followed SDL. The simple fact is that every product touched by SDL has fewer security defects.

In the article of Michael Howard "A Look Inside the Security Development Lifecycle at Microsoft" it is shown how to solve security problems on the grounds of development phases.

Special thanks to Oliver Szimmetat from Microsoft for the helpful references.

Digi-topia or not?

In the article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell "A Digital Life" it was announced a launch of a research project aimed at creating a digital archive of all Bell's interactions with the world. Bell's digital memories include documents from his long career in the computer industry, all the photographs he takes and conversations he records, every Web site he visits, and every e-mail he sends and receives. Some of the actual screen shots from Bell's archive are incorporated in the article images.
And this is only the start. What's going to be further? Perhaps some of us will have portable "tape-recorders" that will tape every step we do, every emotion, every smell and so on.....
These thoughts make me prick up ears.

MapGPS 2005

The Map GPS is an analogue of Microsoft AutoRoute. Rather a good soft for those who enjoys car trips. The program has different licence types and has a GPS extention.

You can find some differences below but the main feature of the Autoroute is Microsoft Live webservice integration.

Quantum Computer

Taken from here.

On the 13th of February canadian D-Wave company is going to present its Quantum Computer. As they say this machine should have unrestricted computational power: 65536 threads concurrently. This will certainly increase computation power although cryptoanalyst will get a key to the all existing cryptoalgorithms.

Guy Kawasaki "The Art of the Start" @ TiECon 2006

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Forbes.com. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. where he was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer.

Find yourself

Just an engaging picture, cann't you find yourself?

Not about IT but All about Life

Love Story (1970) by Arthur Hiller has made an impression upon me. I know, I know it's hard to say it is brand new story or maybe the actors performed wonderful but the idea "Love means never having to say you're sorry" is hard to argue about.
Enjoy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066011/

Think forward

"Think forward. Think researchchannel." - the word I've read on the ResearchChannel web site.
Aside the ad, I'm utterly support these words. And the site content seems to me very interesting and well done.
In 1991, Microsoft Corp. became the first software company to create its own computer science research organization. Nowadays Microsoft Research (MSR) consists of many research labs, balancing an open academic model with an effective process for transferring its research to product development teams.

I found on-line lectures and regret having not much time to watch all of them :(

Efficiency, scripting, strong typing, productivity... F# ?

Today I've watched an interview from the Niner's (Channel9) where Microsoft Guru talked about programming languages and mentioned above all F#.
On the Microsoft site I read that F# is an ML language truly at home on .NET with smooth interop with other .NET languages.
For example, C# and F# can call each other directly. This means that F# has immediate access to all the .NET Framework APIs, including, for example, WinForms and DirectX. Similarly, libraries developed in F# are available for use from other .NET languages.
F# is the first ML language where all the types and values in an ML program can be accessed from some significant other languages (e.g., C#) in a predictable and friendly way.
F# was the first released .NET language to produce Generic IL, and the compiler was designed partly with this language in mind. The compiler can also produce (non-generic) v1.0 or v1.1 .NET binaries.
F# supports features that are often missing from ML implementations such as Unicode strings, dynamic linking, preemptive multithreading and SMP machine support
This is the only language which provides a combination of scripted/functional/imperative/object-oriented programming language. That is a basis for many practical scientific, engineering and web-based programming tasks.


F# comes with F# for Visual Studio, an extension to Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 that supports features such as an integrated build/debug environment, graphical debugging, interactive syntax highlighting, parsing and typechecking, IntelliSense, CodeSense, MethodTips and a simple project system.

Experiencing Orcas

Recently I've installed Orcas December 2006 Community Preview and got a chance to test the environment. Without going deeply into all new features I must admit the system is resource-intensive thus on my virtual machine it works evidently hardly. Intelli Sense is also a striking thing cause it does not always work. But nevertheless it is only community preview so let's be patient and wait for a full release version I believe would be more high-speed and responsive.

Test Your Project for Agility.

Top Ten Signs That Your Project Is Just Pretending to Be Agile

10. The project plan has just been published by the project manager and it shows the first release happening 18 months after the start of the project. If this happens, you know the project isn't Agile. In Agile projects, the focus is on the planning activity, not the resulting plan. Planning causes the team to make decisions and set priorities so that something valuable can be released in a few months, and first release after 10 months practically dooms a project to failure.
9.The project manager is talking about the deliverables that the systems analysts will hand off to the application architects. Warning: Waterfall ahead! The next thing you'll see is the architects handing off yet more deliverables to the designers.
8.The systems analysts and application architects are proud of the fact that they didn't write any code on their last project. Bragging about not having written any code is a clear sign that the analysts and architects think that writing the code is a trivial and easy part of the project. With that viewpoint, it's only a small step toward valuing working software less than they value their documentation, a clear contradiction of the manifesto. Whenever any member of an "agile" team brags about being "above" another team member's activities, the team is just pretending; it has forgotten that the real goal is to collaboratively deliver working software.
7.The project is structured so that the programmers and testers are definitely at the lower end of the food chain. Agile projects start coding and testing much earlier than more traditional approaches, typically within weeks of starting the project. Putting the programmers and testers at the end of a long food chain makes it impossible for the project to be Agile.
6.The systems analysts keep trying to get users to sign off on the requirements document. Freezing the requirements might be a good idea in some circumstances, but the Agile approach is to collaborate with the customer to deliver what's needed when the software is released, not what was thought to be necessary when the contract was signed.
5.The development team complains whenever a change request manages to sneak its way through the change-control process. An instant giveaway. Agile projects expect and embrace change.
4.You're more than two months into the project and the project team still hasn't demonstrated any useful functionality to the users. PowerPoint slides or screen mockups don't count—have the users seen a real part of the application yet? Agile projects let users get their hands on the software really early, so that the users can let the rest of the team know what to do to improve the software.
3.The project leads consider the documentation to be more important than communication. This happens when the project is producing a copious paper trail, recording all decisions made to ensure requirements traceability—but in spite of that, nobody on the team seems to understand what's really going on. This isn't to say that documentation is bad—just that it has to be kept in perspective. If information is important enough to be written down in project documentation, it's probably important enough to get the attention of a professional technical writer. If making the documentation easy to read isn't a priority, you can draw your own conclusions about the project, but it definitely isn't Agile.
2.Testing and quality assurance are not an integral, respected part of the development team. All Agile approaches rely on early testing and validation for feedback about the quality of the software. As such, the testing and quality assurance activities are recognized as a vital part of the development process that have to start on day 1 of the project. Deferring testing or quality assurance activities until later in the project is a sure sign that the process is not Agile.
1.Tasks are assigned to individuals who take their work away to a quiet place and treat it as a solo assignment. Whenever "team members" are always seeking a quiet place to work, or wear headphones to block out the distractions from the rest of the "team," you can bet that the team leads don't understand collaborative development. If they don't understand the basics of collaborative development, you can be certain that the project is definitely not Agile, regardless of the posters that might be up on the wall.

BUT Remeber! Agile Is Not a Silver Bullet.
Source here

Recent articles about .net

"Simple and Efficient Multi-threading with Blocking Queues" by Garry Barclay discusses multi-threading, and how it relates to queues; show you a simple implementation of the Airline check-In queue that can be very helpful for your own multi-threaded applications, and provide some guidelines for analyzing and tuning the performance of the queue.
Original article can be found here.

Ahmed El Malt tells us that .Net 2.0 introduced new assembly-level attribute , InternalsVisibleTo attribute which is defined in the System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespace . This attribute allows you to expose internal types and methods to another specified assembly. Ex.:

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("MyFriendAssembly")]

So any class in the assemblies MyFriendAssembly will be able to use MyInternalClass and call its public or internal members. In addition, any subclass in the MyFriendAssembly assembly will be able to access members marked as protected internal.