Monday, June 30, 2008

Color me Certified

So I took this class that results in my being certified as a Scrum Master. The class was good. Joe Little and Jim York tagged team the instruction. They both bring a lot of experience from Lean Manufacturing, Scrum, XP, and Agile Development.
Even though Jim recommended a low tech approach towards tooling (he likes cards on a whiteboard), I am interested in exploring computer aided environments. We used to call them CASE but that is a term not used much anymore. Having developed some CASE tools in my day and wanting to see how Agile could be used by geo-distributed teams I want to see what can be done in that area.
As far as Scrum itself... I like the concept a lot. From commentary during the class it seemed that there are a lot of variations in how it is applied. Since I come from a background where a lot of model content is created before code is written I want to see how a best practice team goes from User Story to Code. The book says that during the sprint the Team does analysis/design/code/test on each User Story. Are model fragments created? If so do they persist in a repository? Are they reuseful by other team members? If so, it seems that a RUP like approach is being taken with a timebox on the cycle.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

SES Rides Again

Back in 1990 CGI bought the company I was working for (Yourdon) and after about one year laid me off with some of the other company leadership. My wife and I decided to stay in Cary NC so I hung out my shingle as an independent consultant and called my company Software Engineering Strategies. I helped clients with methodology decisions, and worked on a number of emerging technologies such as object orientation. Eventually this led me to a job at IBM in 1994.
Well, now I am back in a similar situation having left IBM a few months back and have resurected the old SES name and even updated the old business cards.




So what has changed?
1. At IBM I became a subject matter expert on wireless technologies.
2. The Software Engineering process is changing to a more agile process with teams distributed around the globe.
3. The internet (specifically) Web2.0 is changing the way we interact as people.

I would like to explore how these three topics can potentially converge into a next generation software development process/tool.