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My talk at the Rose City SPIN last night went very well. We had a small core of dedicated people. Lots of good questions and we could dive into the specifics. Thanks to Rhea for doing a great job organizing the event.
You can find my presentation here.
I also wanted to provide some links to some of the books and sites I referred to during the talk.
Using Lean for Software Process Improvement
Dates/Times: Thursday, June 11th, 2009; Networking @ 6:00 PM; Seminar @ 7:00 PM
Location: OGI School of Science & Engineering, Paul Clayton Building (building #2 on campus map), Room 401
Abstract
Lean manufacturing concepts have been around a while and have proven successful in the manufacturing and construction industries. Recently the software industry has taken some steps in the lean direction as an outgrowth of the agile software movement. Fundamentally, lean presents a toolkit for process improvement. This presentation will cover what lean software is, how it fits in with the other agile approaches and specifically the software kanban - a lean approach to managing the flow of software from idea to the customer.
Speaker Bio
Wayne Allen is the VP of Software Engineering for Integrated Services, Inc. who is the leading supplier of point of sales solutions for the Quick Lube and Car Wash industry. Wayne has a passion for the craft of software engineering that he has developed in his 20 years as a programmer, consultant, manager, executive and small business owner. This passion has led him to the new crop of "agile" software development processes such as XP and Scrum. Wayne is a regular speaker both nationally and internationally on the topic of agile software development. You can read about Wayne's thoughts on software development at blogs.consultantsguild.com.
A Special Treat from PNSQC
Plan on coming early! In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) the SPIN meeting will have pizza provided by PNSQC beginning at 6:00 pm.
PNSQC is the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, a group of volunteers interested in Software Quality. The Mission of the PNSQC is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. As a non-profit, it seeks to promote software quality by providing education and opportunities for information exchange within the software community.
How to Register
This is a FREE lecture sponsored by the Rose City SPIN. To register, please go to: http://www.cpd.ogi.edu/course.asp?n=09-SPIN-0610
The seminar will be held in room 401 of the Paul Clayton Building on the OGI campus. The Paul Clayton Building is Building #2 on the OGI Campus Map.
Rose City SPIN
The Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) is a monthly forum for networking, mutual support, and promotion of effective software practices. We exchange practical experiences, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and war stories about the technical, business, and human facets of software process improvement. The Rose City SPIN serves the software development community of the Portland/Vancouver metro area. Whether you work for a large company or a small one, corporate or self-employed, industrial or academic setting, you are welcome at the Rose City SPIN.
Once a year I get to be a guest speaker for Wil Wu's Software Engineering class (MIS 488).
This year's class was great. Lots of good question and a nice level of engagement. You could tell several of them were really thinking about how Scrum is so different than a waterfall style approach.
As promised here are the slides I used.
My talk at PADNUG last night went very well. We had standing room only, with many new faces. Rich and Jason run a great meeting - thanks guys.
There were a few requests to post my "slides" which I have done. Be sure to check out Prezi, the company who is making this cool presentation tool.
I also wanted to provide some links to some of the books and sites I referred to during the talk.
Update 3/28 - I forgot to give credit to Karl Scotland for a couple of the diagrams - Sorry Karl!
The situation:
Things have been slow for a year. Next year isn't looking any better. Not that this is a unique experience. The company is generally fine, but with everything on a downward trend we want to stay healthy financially.
My budget is about 98% people. The other 2% was examined closely last year, and while I was able to take out another couple of tenths, it just wasn't going to cut it.
My team doesn't have performance issues to speak of, so there is no easy out.
I've made my decision and acted on it. A challenging part of my job, but maybe the least enjoyable.
For those of you in my position how do you choose what to do?
It is always interesting how when you are working on a problem, someone else in your sphere is solving almost the same problem. Jason posted yesterday about installing ODBC on Ubuntu for Sybase which was one of the challenges we had as part of my previous post about getting Sybase's ODBC/JDBC bridge working in our multi-platform environment.
Say you're working on an enterprise class system. Developers work on Windows and Linux. Servers run Linux. Not so unusual.
Now enter Sybase SQL Anywhere. Aka Sybase ASA or iAnywhere.
First off there are 2 different JDBC drivers. JConnect (jconn3) and the iAnywhere JDBC driver (jodbc). It turns out that only the iAnwhere driver actually works with the high availability option (although not documented).
Also it turns out that the iAnywhere driver is really an ODBC bridge and you have to specify another driver in the JDBC URL.
While a little confusing at first due to the lack of documentation eventually you can dig up an example.
jdbc:ianywhere:driver=SQL Anywhere 10;dbn=mydatabase;eng=myserver;
Everything works and you move on with life.
Except that eventually you want to deploy your new code to the server. BAM nothing works. All sorts of errors about no suitable driver found.
After thrashing around for a few days you discover that the JDBC URL must be different on Linux! (this is the only page on the Internet that specifies this).
jdbc:ianywhere:driver=libdbodbc10.so;dbn=mydatabase;eng=myserver;
Of course your application now works on Linux, but not on Windows.
Now if I were writing my own code that needed to talk to the database there wouldn't be much problem as I can use one of several techniques for figuring out which driver I should be using.
However, this URL used to configure some enterprise reporting tool which uses that same URL whether doing local report development or running from the server.
So now I have 3 options.
While option #1 is enticing (I like developers to have a local copy of all dependencies if at all feasible). Feasibility plays into the picture here because of license costs.
Option #2 is certainly doable, but I am not a big fan of adding the overhead of administering another server and keeping it in sync with all the others.
Options #3 is simple and works well. However, DSNs represent another thing that needs to be set up on every developer and qa system. This also breaks my rule of being able to check out the source tree and go, even on a new computer (for reasons of continuous integration and easy new team member set up).
Ultimately we will go with #3 because it is low cost in dollars, and low cost in time (we'll write an Ant target to do the DSN setup).
Now wasn't that easy? It only took 3 days to work through in real time.
Agile Open NW 2009 has been scheduled for Feb 10-11, 2009 at the Ambridge Event Center in Portland, OR.
I'll be there again. If you are anywhere near Portland and have an interest in all things agile, this is a can't miss opportunity.
Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, presents Agile Open Northwest 2009.
We invite you to our third annual conference. Our first conference in Portland brought together members of the Northwest Agile communities. We held our second annual event, Agile Open Northwest 2008, last year in Seattle and enjoyed another great success.
Please join us this year as we host 100 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our theme "Agile for Real."
Your commitment to arriving at the beginning and staying until the end both days will ensure we build on conversation after conversation as we engage important questions like:
When an organization chooses a transition to agile, what really changes?
The Northwest has a wealth of practitioners with years of real-world experience with agile methods and self-organizing teams. Agile Open Northwest offers an opportunity to strengthen our community of practice and co-create the future for agile development in our region. Feel free to browse the list of currently registered participants.
Your hosts designed this event to allow practitioners like you to meet in self-organizing groups where we can share our latest ideas, challenges, hopes, experiences and experiments. We follow an Open Space format to foster collaboration and allow the conference to take its direction from the participants themselves.
A comment from a previous attendee:
"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair
I'll be speaking at the March 2009 Portland Area .NET Users Group (PADNUG) meeting.
I'll be covering a different project management approach to product line development that includes:
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