This summer I had the pleasure of spending a week with Ken Schwaber in Amsterdam. I attended Scrum Training from Ken, the co-founder of Scrum, and the single person responsible for it's world-wide proliferation in a mostly-pure format.
Amsterdam was amazing. Vondel park, canal rides, cuisine, street performers and especially the wonderful friendly people.
Was is the Rijksmuseum, or the Van Gogh Museum my family told me to be sure to visit? Between seeing many of the other sites there was only time left to visit one or the other. I found myself at the Van Gogh Museum. Vincent Van Gogh was, of course, a famous painter who lived sometime ago and left many paintings all over northern Europe before his passing. I remember my brother once said "If you can figure out why Van Gogh is so highly acclaimed let me know because I just can't see it." I've seen high-school work better than his.
The first floor of the Van Gogh museum is inspiring. I walked in and was greeted with paintings of seashores, forests, people laboring, and other personally relateable depictions of my own world and the scenery around us. As I read the captions on the pictures one by one I discovered they were not painted by Van Gogh, but instead they were his contemporary artist buddies who inspired his work. I have to admit they were pretty cool and I enjoyed the ground floor.
The sign at the bottom of the steps read "Van Gogh Upstairs." My girlfriend and I proceed upstairs.
At the top of the stairs I saw the walls decorated with Van Gogh painting. There was this blurry stick thing with a bean or something on it. I couldn't really tell for sure. Another picture looked like a bush with flowers except maybe Vincent fell asleep before he completed the painting.
They said Van Gogh painted all through Europe...thousands of paintings and that it was his primary activity until his death. He lived several different places and painted the whole time.
I kept waiting for the paintings to improve. We wandered around the second and third floors like lost mice in a labyrinth trying to find the good stuff. I figured the first painting we saw would have been his first and they weren't that great. Well, I was right. The only problem was the rest of his paintings weren't any more appealing.
The most renown painting on display was The Potato Eaters. Van Gogh, seemingly inspired by Whistler's Mother must have had a premonition of her long lost African foster parents when he painted that piece.
After and hour and a half I stared into a nervous breakdown and had to get myself and my girl out of the place--fast. I can't explain it. I just felt like I was standing there with hundreds of other foreigners who had paid a premium to see some dead guys rotten work--and all of us were pretending to like the stuff.
If ravel to Amsterdam--and I highly recommend it--go to the Rijksmuseum.
The Project Management Institute created the PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) in 2011 to establish credentials for someone who has been adequately trained with how to implement the Scrum Framework. Scrum was one of the original Agile methodologies and remains by far the most popular today.
The PMI-ACP is a combination of everything you'd learn in a Certified Scrum Master class, and everything you'd lear in a Certified Product Owner class, along with advanced Risk Management techniques, some Lean concepts applicable to software development, and a few extra accessories that help Scrum scale up for larger projects, and larger group sizes.
In addition, PMI requires at least nine months of actual experience working with a Scrum team before they will aware the credential.
If you are an HR Professional, rest assured your candidate presenting with a PMI-ACP certification is slightly better equipped than one with a Scrum Master, or Product Owner, or both.
Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) will be the designation of the new PMI Agile credential. PMI has decided to recognize the prevalence and effectiveness of Agile practices within the project management community and has constructed a tangible foundation of requirements and guidelines for establishing what constitutes an Agile framework. Perhaps we'll soon finally see an Aglie BOK?
Key dates for the PMI-ACP are as follows:
• May 2011- PMI is now accepting and reviewing applications for the PMI-ACP.
• Sep 2011 -The PMI-ACP examination will be available.
• Oct-Dec 2011 - The first PMI-ACP certifications will be awarded to successful pilot candidates
Do you like designing on whiteboards? I do. Colorful markers against a clean, white surface inspire all kinds of creativity and fun.
Recently I came across a great tip. Instead of going to your local OfficeBOX superstore and paying $200 for a 4x8 whiteboard, just hit HomeDepot instead and get a $12 piece of showerboard. It works just as good and if you need a smaller size they will cut it for you on site for no additional charge! At that price, you can line your walls with thinking space.
Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com
I've heard people make references to Geoffrey A. Moore's Crossing the CHASM book for several years now but had't read it until this past week.
Moore's book is a must-read for any IT company trying to launch a new product. Although the concepts in the book are not novel (so admit's Moore) the book brings a vocabulary and metaphoric dictionary to the readers allowing marketing groups, investors, and techies alike to communicate about the playing field in a proactive manner.
Moore discusses the importance of delivering continuous innovation, instead if discontinuous innovation. Our new innovations need to help people do what they are already doing better, and not force them to abruptly change something that kinda works for something that they are not sure about that may possibly work better.
Moore introduces the Technology Adoption LifeCycle, complete with five categories of market segments. He discusses how to market in succession to each group:
- Innovators
- Early Adopters
- Early Majority
- Late Majority
- Laggards
Finally, Moore introduces some business concepts you may have heard of by now, like the bowling alley, the tornado, and the fault line.
If you haven't heard of these, then you need to get reading!
Mi Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com
Recently, while attending the '09 Agile Roots conference in Salt Lake City, UT, Alistair Cockburn--the keynote speaker--referenced Miyamoto Musashi's 16th-century book called The Book of Five Rings.
I like Asian philosophy (and swords and such) so I picked up the book and read it. The book was written in 1643 by an undefeated Japanese samurai master who was so effective he was rumoured to have spent the latter part of his career entering sword-fights purposely without a weapon. Although meant as a battlefield manual, the book has gained popularity as a handbook for conducting business in the 21st century.
The book was translated into English by Thomas Cleary at some point and the edition I read was published in 2005. Improperly named "The Book of Five Rings," the book is actually a compilation of five scrolls.
The Earth Scroll: Musashi talks about how a straight path levels the contours of the Earth and how various occupations provide life-improving principles. He talks about observing patterns and learning from them. Certainly a great primer for any business trying to get across the chasm.
The Water Scroll: Here Musashi talks about how water conforms to the shape of its container. He suggests a separation of one's inward mind against it's outward posture, maintaining that one's control over one's mind must not be relinquished to outward circumstances. He translates these philosophies into about 80 pages of sword fighting techniques. An interesting modern parallel is found in Jim Collins book, Good to Great, where he talks about how the most successful companies are able to say 'No' and not be influenced by immediate but non-strategic opportunities.
The Fire Scroll: As with any book written by a 16th century samurai master, you'd expect a core discussion on combat strategy. The fire scroll is full of combat strategies, positioning, and pre-emptive theory. Very interesting. Did anyone notice how Apple's announcement of the latest iPhone came about 1 day after the Palm Pre phone was officially launched--killing it's market blitz? No coincidence there.
The Wind Scroll: The wind scroll contains a directive to study and be aware of your opponents techniques. Translated into business speak, this means one should always study ones competitors. Be aware of new offerings, partnerships, markets, etc. that they persue. Emphasis is placed on observing rhythms and strategically harmonizing, or dis-harmonizing with them as appropriate.
Finally, The Emptiness Scroll: This scroll discusses the value of escaping personal biases. Emphasis is placed on not lingering on past situations and being able to adjust quickly to new scenarios.
Overall I found this book 'enlightening' to read. If you like metaphors and inferences, or sword-fighting, then you will enjoy this book.
Mike J. Ber />www.RedRockResearch.com
I recently attended an Agile Development Product Owner class taught by Alistair Cockburn. The content was excellent. He taught us about the proper perspectives an Agile Product Owner needs to successfully interact with the project sponsors, users, and the development team.Alistair Cockburn has authored several books on Agile Development, and is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto.I would describe Alistair's environment as squirrely and fun. We built user-stories out of the Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella stories (from the original Nicht fur Kinder European versions--full of violence and gore!)We also discussed the differences between Use Cases and User Stories. I was happy to hear he prefers Use Cases, because so do I.All class attendees had already been through the Scrum Master course, so as we executed sprints for our product backlog, it was interesting to see how many attendees actually sought the sponsors/users feedback during the iterations--without being reminded.Overall it was an educational and enjoyable experience.
Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com
Recently someone on StackOverflow.com asked me to explain how to compute the defect removal rate for release candidate software. There are two methods for producing this number and I teach both in several of my seminars, but I'll explain the simpler method in this post...
Lawrence Putnam presented this model in his 1992 Book titled Measures for Excellence. His book reads more like a math text than a software development guide, and suffers from an unfortunate formula typo which has lead to widespread confusion about his models in the industry, but I will explain his defect removal rate calculation process. (I hired a math wizard to examine his data and correct the formula!)
1. For a typical project, code is produced at a rate which resembles a Rayleigh curve. A Rayleigh curve looks like a bell curve with a long-tail. See my ASCII graphics below:
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2. Error 'creation' typically happens in parallel and proportional to code creation. So, you can think of errors created (or injected) into code as a smaller Rayleigh curve:
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where '|' represents code, and '+' represents errors
3. Therefore, as defects are found, their 'detection rate' will also follow a Rayleigh curve. At some point your defect discovery rate will peak and then start to lesson. This peak, or apex, is about 40% of the volume of a Rayleigh curve.
4. So, when your defect rate peaks and starts to diminish, factor the peak as 40% of all defects found, then use regression analysis to calculate how many defects are still in the code and not found yet.
By regression analysis I mean if you found 37 defects at the apex after three weeks of testing, you know two things: 37 = 40% of defects in code, so code contains ~ (37 * 100/40) = ~ 93 errors total, and your finding about 10.2 defects per week, so total testing time will be about 9 weeks.
Of course, this assumes complete code coverage and a constant rate esting.
Hope this is clear.
Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com
Need a good software requirements specification (SRS) template? Use an industry-standard SRS. Can't find one? Well now you have-get it here for free. Enjoy!
Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com
Want to visit ground-zero for data security? Experts from SANS, MITRE, SAFECode, EMC, Juniper, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Symantec, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division last week presented a listing of The Top 25 Most Dangerous (Information Security) Programming Errors. Expect to see future government and big-money RFP's mandate these items be addressed.
Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com