Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Tue May 12 14:36:03 CDT 2009
Hi all Still recovering from a second instance of the flu (not H1N1A) within 6 months (what did I do?) browsing hundreds of messages, I'm a bit late on forwarding this from Shamil which was trapped by some stupid spam filter somewhere on the 10th of May: Hi Mark and All, This project was started as SCRUM one, which (SCRUM) implies a lot of teamwork and a lot of feedback. So far it was not that much (as expected) teamwork (mainly on evaluation/start-up phase) and almost none feedback. We have to handle these issues right now - and I'm asking for your advise how you wanted to approach those issues and to effectively solve them. Let's call the current phase of our project a retrospection phase, and let's have it deadlines set for two weeks: 11-MAY-09 - 25-MAY-09. All and every opinions and proposals are very welcome. Let's freeze work on v.1.5 and v.2.0 during these weeks - I personally can't handle quickly them alone as I have to work for my customers, and making v.1.5 and v.2.0 as a team is looking now questionable (please correct me if I'm wrong) as we do not have currently a team with intermediate/advanced C#/SQL development qualification and personal tutoring of beginning C# developers, which can be done currently only by Gustav and myself, is very time consuming. As well we do not have active discussion on detailed v.1.5 and v.2.0 functionality and in SCRUM the requirements are defined by ProductOwner/stake holders/customers/external audience/market demands not by the SCRUMMaster/SCRUM team developers (as developers tend to do more what they like to do (fun and sometimes tricky programming) not the real life software development - we all know that from our own experience ) If you look at the project downloads/pages views/visits stats here: http://northwind.codeplex.com/stats you'll find that we have got 500+ downloads during last 20 days - that's not bad at all. But from that 500+ downloads we have got just one review and link (from Alex Dybenko), and we have got linked by Jim Lawrence from AccessAdvisors site. The 500+ downloads show that there is an interest of developers to the subject of this project but absence of feedback is confusing (here) as I wanted to have this project to be feedback/market demand driven not just as exercises in teamwork/learning by doing experience. Of course exercises in teamwork and learning by doing experience are useful but without active feedback we risk to end up doing "mad scientist exercises" not learning/demonstrating real development stuff applicable in real life business software development... How well feedback works shows the fact of my contacting with Alex Dybenko and giving him an url to northwind.codeplex.com (that time without "Welcome", "Mission Statement" etc. info and having just Northwind.NET with MS SQL backend) - I must say first reaction of Alex was rather skeptical but after I added "Welcome", "Mission Statement" etc. (and Arthur and Gustav edited this text), and I have also made downgrading Northwind.NET to use MS Access backend, as well as ASP.NET reporting sample with MS Access backend, then added COM callable classlib contacting web service - after that I have got positive feedback from Alex and he blogged on our project and also Jim Lawrence referred northwind.codeplex.com from AccessAdvisors web site - as you can see just one feedback contact resulted in "some fluctuations" of our roadmap, which brought 500+ downloads... I do think that the most important task now is to get active feedback, which will make corrections to our roadmap and which will drive our development: the best tool we can use now is the "Word Of Mouth" to persuade developers who get our stuff downloaded to give us active *constructive* feedback (as Alex Dybenko did) for us to "convert this feedback" into even more interesting stuff to get downloaded by developers and used by them not only "to individually dig out into samples" but to have the stuff ready to be applied (with some rework/additional work) to their everyday (IT development) business tasks... As for tutoring our team C# development beginners - as I noted above doing that personally is very time consuming - the idea is to somehow make this personal tutoring/coaching publicly available (that public availability will bring even more feedback I expect), and we can do that by publishing short sample videos. But making such videos the way I did it by taking screenshots, then putting them into MS Movie Maker, then adding comments etc. is not looking as the right/professional way to do (and is time consuming) - I suppose that using Camtasia Studio (http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp) would be more effective and would produce more useful videos. And we can make such videos as a team by sharing the tasks: one gets prepared scenarios, one gets video recorded, another one with native English makes voice recording, another one makes all kinds of video effects etc. But Camtasia Studio isn't free (USD299) - if it would be possible to get a shared license for our team (just for USD299?) I'd not mind to invest some money in purchasing it... What do you think about all the above? Please make your proposals how to activate feedback - please "brain-storm" this issue assuming we have unlimited resources - when analysing proposals we will sort out/put on hold proposals we can't work with now because of some limitations... Thank you. -- Shamil >>> marklbreen at gmail.com 09-05-2009 13:06 >>> Shamil / Gustav, do I need to go anything for you for this project at this point ?