[dba-VB] FYI: SCRUM/Agile - Born To Cycle

Salakhetdinov Shamil mcp2004 at mail.ru
Wed May 27 11:48:25 CDT 2009


Hi All,

... Continuing the subject of 90 minutes SPRINTs 3 times  a week for a new Northwind.Net project and where to find that time:

- Linda Rising gives a real life example of a women-writer who did write a whole new book in 90 days using several 90 minutes "SPRINTs" per day - before that she tried to multi-task in small time chunks constantly switching between writing book(s), doing some other work, answering phone calls, reading/writings e-mails etc. - the end result was lower...

- I recently started to walk everyday for approx. 90 minutes on a seaside of Finnish Gulf where I live (before I did get watched Linda Rising's presentation :) ) - did I have got some time limitation now for my development work or other things? Nope. I noted I'm spending now less time for reading/writing e-mails and for browsing Internet than before - and I have the same or more time for main work and experimenting/self-education when needed, and I'm getting more healthy/fit with every my walk on seaside :)

I mean I suppose that finding time for three 90 minutes SPRINTs within a week is possible for everybody here if they really interested to do something real... together... there is such a good opportunity now... there is a proof for doubtful ones - running northwind.codeplex.com that - a proof/evidence that teamwork as we did it with all its inevitable errors and inconsistencies still could bring really useful and interesting for many people results....

Now is your time to decide - keep spending your time multi-tasking doing main work, browsing Internet, reading/wrting e-mails, hanging in newsgroups, watching TV, trying to do some self-education in the modern development areas... or to free some time to make "cool" real life reseach&development things together working just(?) 90 minutes three times a week but in focused not-interrupting mode - the latter is not "must have" requirement but why not try to do it like that just once for the next small WPF project?

Thank you.

--
Shamil

-----Original Message-----
From: Salakhetdinov Shamil <mcp2004 at mail.ru>
To: "Discussion concerning Visual Basic and related programming issues."<dba-vb at databaseadvisors.com>
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 19:59:56 +0400
Subject: Re: [dba-VB]
FYI: SCRUM/Agile - Born To Cycle

> Hi Gustav and all,
> 
> Thank you for your joyful note, Gustav :)
> 
> I posted the link on Linda Rising's presentation on QCon 2008 to point on an interesting fact/proven by many experiments investigation she is "cycling" through: I mean that to be productive one better work in 90 minutes long non-interrupting cycles, and then make a break for 20-30 minues switching on doing something very different. She is also noting that human's brain multi-tasking is unnatural activity and in long run it not only harms one's health but it also doesn't result in overall higher results/outputs achieved - in fact the opposite is true - the overall results/outputs are lower, the quality are lower also etc. ...
> 
> And now getting back to NorthWind.NET :)
> 
> As far as I see there is no that much activity here retrospecting this project. That's a pity as without retrospection making another project the same way would result in the same errors and incosistencies.
> 
> Still I wanted to make some Northwind.NET follow-up projects but this time doing really teamwork with nearly equal share of workload and this time using 90 minutes long (daily) SPRINTs scientifically approved by Linda Rising's experiments :)
> 
> I'd propose currently freeze doing WinForms development in Northwind.NET project as it nor did bring active discussions here nor did it result in many downloads from northwind.codeplex.com - I'd propose to make some "cool things" instead as WPF desktop Northwind.NET application development for starters using ordinary ADO.NET Datasets to communcate with backend or ADO.NET Entity Framework or I can make (mainly by generating) a custom ORM layer...
> 
> I do not know is that a generally well known fact or not but doing WPF even a developer without graphic artist's skills can develop really high level (animated) visually attractive "cool" GUI with many "skins" which can be changed even on-the-fly etc.
> 
> I'd go for that project in the case we can make a team here of max 7+/-2 developers but the team members have to commit they will spend 90min x3 = 4.5 hours/week: if they will commit but then in the very beginning of the project/in the middle it will happen they all quit or will not work commited time amount of 4.5 hours/week as it happened to Northwind.NET v.1.0 then I'd suspend such a project in a team waiting for the team to rearrange to have again full crew of 7+/-2 developers working and communicating actively...
> 
> Another project if WPF is not that attractive/appealing could be ASP.NET with AJAX and MVC Framework but for ASP.NET we have to have a graphic artist in our team to make nice looking interface and also for ASP.NET we have to have a publicly avaible ASP.NET test hosting site - I currently have one but I cannot use its MS SQL databases (I have only two leased/rented) for public projects as they are used for my own/my customers' test projects and as extending the set of available MS SQL database is costly. There is also mySQL database on that site but I'm almost zero level with mySQL, and I'd avoid using it...
> 
> I'm open for other proposals...
> 
> All in all a WPF project looks here currently the most interesting opportunity as the end result could be really nice looking GUI so unusual(?) for MS Access interfaces/VB6 and VB.NET/C# Winfroms interfaces, and as WPF development knowledge should pay back well when one will have projects in the area of XBAP and SilverLight development - quite promising modern development areas.
> 
> I personally have experience in developing one WPF project from scratch and another one legacy rather advanced I got for some fine tuning of its GUI - IOW we will not start from "blank list" here - I will be able to answer some questions. Although I must say I haven't not that much data binding in WPF - as far as I know it is not that advanced in VS2008 as WinForms binding is...
> 
> I'd recommend books on WPF subject - "Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed" by Adam Nathan and "WPF Recipes in C# 2008 (A Problem Solution Approach)" by Sam Noble at all.
> 
> I'd also note that if we will make this new project we have to decide what to do with SVN: the issue is that to publish the sources from Mark's SVN Server to CodePlex one requires quite some manual error prone work - I have done that publishing several times - every time it took 2 or more hours - we can continue doing that manual publishing but then again we have to share that manual work by every team member: and that manual work looks rather high overhead - therefore before starting the new project we or should find a way to automate this publishing or switch to CodePlex SVN server, which is not so useful as Mark's one during parallel development of the same project as it (CodePlex SVN Server) doesn't allow to lock files etc. I could be missing something - please correct me if I'm wrong but for Northwind.NET I have spent more than 10 hours just to publish the code from Mark's server on Codeplex server: without file's locking feature we will have to be careful while working!
>   on the same code - communicating often just to not overwrite each other code editing (no we will not loose it but time to get it back/coordinate if one other's edits are overwritten could be rather time consuming per se) - and communication on technical tasks as "watching each other edits" could be also rather high overhead...
> 
> As the last point of this message I'd give a refence on another interesting IMO information:
> 
> http://www.infoq.com/articles/Grid-Azure-3-David-Pallmann
> 
> "Grid Computing on the Azure Cloud Computing Platform, Part 3: Running a Grid Application" - this is a grid application written using WPF and C# and running on Azure cloud - we can do something like that in the future I guess although I'm not sure can such a test app be hosted./un for free or not...
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> --
> Shamil
> 
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