« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
July 29, 2007
17 Thoughts on Scrum
Scrum is a development process most recognizable by its 30 day sprints. Brightcove uses Scrum for all of its development. I recently went to a course from Ken Schwaber for the exalted title of Certified Scrum Master (which comes with its own secret handshake). From my notes on this course, I've written some thoughts on Scrum, which are below.
The notes below aren't meant to encompass all aspects of Scrum. For a better overview, read the Scrum wiki page, get Agile Project Management with Scrum, or take one of Ken's courses (which I highly recommend if you can get your company to send you).
- ScrumMaster is a silly name on purpose to make sure it's not a Grand Title. ScrumMasters are there to try to help the team become self-managing.
- Scrum should be results orientated, not effort driven.
- If at all possible, start with the "right" way to Scrum and then customize later. Usually the changes that are requested show a problem within the organization.
- Team self-organizes as needed. Some teams won't need their own ScrumMaster in time and will only need the ScrumMaster to remove impediments.
- A common bad and wrong assumption is that by telling people how to do things, they'll work better.
- Don't make Scrum an iterative death march.
- Backlog shows the remaining time. Don't confuse this with time worked, which is simply not a part of Scrum.
- There needs to be one product owner, who can report to other product owners and listen to the team. One product owner leads to a single decision point.
- The team owns all aspects of development. It's not features owned by engineering, testing owned by QA, etc. There's not the normal functional groups as there is for waterfall but rather a shared "done".
- It's important to keep Scrum teams together, as they are much more effective in time. Also, after a few sprints, teams are better at determining their velocity.
- If a team is dependent on people external from the team, then it can't reliably commit to tasks.
- Scrum doesn't make a lot of sense for R&D or other open-ended experiments. This isn't to mean its not for prototypes but rather that its not really suited for basic research.
- Development often shows too much unneeded coding details to the business side without giving enough visibility into progress. It's the worst of both worlds.
- Development should give the risk to the product owner and not try to take on risk that isn't rightfully theirs.
- If we celebrate the amount that gets done, then the more done isn't done and future sprints slow down.
- There's no such thing as a failure of a sprint. There can be a failure of a product but not a failure of a sprint. What gets done has gotten done and the product owner will make choices based on the new reality.
- Expand on "done" so that tasks don't have later ramifications. Make sure everyone knows what "done" is.
July 27, 2007
The Best Aftermixes So Far
Two Brightcove interns, Rene Dongo and Oliver Anderson, have put together a list of their favorite Aftermixes and favorite Avril Aftermixes. Here's some highlights for your Friday clicking:
A Buzzword QuickDemo. There's something very meta about this use of Aftermix.
concaf lionel richie. Just wait a bit with this one... someone had way too much fun with audio commentary.
LOLCATS Supermix. The meme may be over, but the cats live on.
Avril Aftermix. The main bug mentioned in the comment in this video is fixed.
CSS' Birds RMX. I just like the flying dogs.
Intern War. This epic was created by another Brightcove intern, Max Gold. This will also be the basis of some upcoming Aftermix tutorial videos we're releasing.
July 25, 2007
Remixing and Complexity
Here's two articles I've been thinking about lately, especially in how they relate to Aftermix:
Posted by Brian at 12:58 AMScamming in Au Bon Pain
While trying to finish my speech for 360Flex at Au Bon Pain, I witnessed one of the oddest things I've seen in awhile.
The whole second floor of the restaurant (the Au Bon Pain near MGH, for the Bostonians reading) was full of people trying to schedule interviews or interviewing potential "employees", people who mentioned they had no money and were looking for a second income. It's hard to explain, but it was like a scene out of Glengarry Glen Ross, trying to keep people on the phone for as long as possible, using every trick I could think of to get people to go to some conference. We asked an employee why all these people were allowed to run the place as an office, and they said they've had a lot of people complain and were talking with the police. But "they couldn't kick them out since they bought something", which makes no sense to me.
I'm a bit tempted to go back there tomorrow myself, but I don't see that I'll have time, especially since I plan to go to Joey Lott's talk at BFPUG.
July 8, 2007
Why 360Flex Seattle?
Unlike a year ago, there's a lot of conferences these days where you can learn about Flex. So why head to 360Flex Seattle?
Besides it being a Flex-only conference and having great speakers, the last incarnation of the conference should send you to this one. Was 360Flex San Jose the first Flex-only conference? I think so, and even if it wasn't, it felt like it. New and old Flex experts, large parts of the Flex team there (with Matt hitting me a few times), meeting pre-Adobe Ryan Stewart, beer, and good sessions.
So check out 360Flex Seattle. I'll be going and be presenting on Aftermix and its creation.
Brightcove On HBO
I was just watching Entourage and saw the Brightcove player in a fake TMZ video. Watching it on a tiny TV, I was squinting to see if the icons were the Brightcove ones. It was was, uh, an interesting video to have Brightcove showcased.
Update: And here's a clip of the show, now on TMZ.
Why You Should Proofread Emails
Sometimes I'll reread an email before I send it out, especially if it's something going out to a lot of people. I think someone at Verizon is wishing they had proofread:
