Matt O’ Rama

My First Agile Project Part 12: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Our Retrospectives

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

Picture courtesy of cliff1066 on flickr

Welcome to Part 12 of My First Agile Project. Inspired by Peter’s recent 5 minute retrospective article, this time I’ll be talking about our retrospectives, which we termed our GBU or Good, Bad, and Ugly meetings. Our vendor brought these GBU meetings to us, along with the Scrum methodology, and while we weren’t doing everything by the book (not a surprise if you’ve read any of the other parts of this series) I think they were very valuable and still light-weight and easy enough to be adapted for other teams looking for retrospectives.

Read on for more on how we ran these meetings, what we got out of them, and what we’ll be doing differently in our next meetings.

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Rands on Managing

Rands (not sure if that’s his real name or not) is one of my favorite internet writers. His website, Rands in Repose, is one of my favorites and he posts great stuff on Twitter as well. His article for today is on moving from an engineering role to a management role and it’s one of his best.

Management: Trust So You Can Scale

I’ve thought about moving from a programmer to a manager. I’ve taken on sort of an unwritten team lead role on my current team and I’ve thought in the past about whether or not I’d even want to make that leadership role more permanent. I don’t think I do right now since I’m still focusing on becoming a better programmer but if the chance were presented, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I’d be a good manager at my current company since there’s a lot of HR nonsense and politics that I wouldn’t have the patience for. If being a manager we just a matter of leading a team of professional programmers, that would be awesome. I kind of do the parts of management that I enjoy now, just unofficially. I help my teammates get things done, make sure everybody is happy, help them get books and supplies they need, etc. But dealing with HR is something I wouldn’t enjoy and would probably be bad at. Reading this article is a good, real-world, primer on the issues and I’m glad Rands of all people wrote it since his sensibility seems close to mine, just with more experience.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs unexpectedly announced he was taking a 6 month leave of absence from Apple today due to his ongoing medical problems. I very much hope Mr. Jobs is okay and he returns to the company he founded and rescued. Steve Wozniak, his co-founder in Apple, is one of my personal heroes and Steve Jobs has always held a special place in my heart because of his partnership with Woz and his central place in the history of computing. My family’s first computer was a used Apple IIe and even though I wasn’t always a Mac fan, I’ve really admired what Apple has done since Jobs’s return. He, Woz, and Bill Gates are at the top of the list of people who invented the personal computer and in very real ways the world we live in today, as well as the device and industry that has given my life focus and meaning since I can remember.

Get well soon Mr. Jobs.

Mind Bites

Mind Bites

Absolutely fascinating set of psychological findings set against Flickr images. Really worth clicking through and reading.

Java Exceptions

10 Best Practices with Exceptions

Exceptions are one of the big areas of Java that I still don’t feel like I have a good handle on. I mean, I understand what goes on and why I need to throw or catch them pretty much. But when it comes to where specifically to catch, to throw, what to do with the exception, etc., I’m a little foggy. I’m going to sit down with this and some of my code and go through all the recommendations and see what I can learn.

Also, I hadn’t heard about this WikiJava site before but it looks like there’s all kinds of good stuff there.

Not Me

A Chevrolet van driven by Matthew Grommes, 24, was pulling out of the business’ lot and turned into the path of Watts’ motorcycle.

Motorcyclist Dies In Collision; Van Driver Ticketed

Wow, color me surprised. My Google alert for webpages where my name appears came up with this today. I’ve seen a few other Grommes’ (even one with my Dad’s name who writes computer books) but I’ve never seen a Matthew or Matt before.

Agile Stand-up Meetings

Stand-up meetings are a healthy part of the daily routine. They are a useful forum to keep everyone up to date with the happenings of the team, escalate any blockers that may have arisen and set direction and focus for the days activities.

However, in practice they can easily degrade to daily habits, where each person talks, no one listens and nothing is accomplished. Observable signs that this is happening in your team:

Improvements to the standard stand-up meetings

Our project started out with excellent stand-up meetings. Even though our team was about a dozen people, they never lasted too long and were very informative. Over time though, as our project moved through different phases we took to doing longer meetings and moved them from the beginning of the day to 11am. Hopefully once we move off this project and recommit to our Agile system we’ll go back to real stand-ups and I’m for sure going to look at using some of these tips.

My First Agile Project Part 11: A Tale of Two Dark Clouds

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

Picture courtesy of iowa_spirit_walker on flickr

And now, a story about physics. I’ll get to programming in a second though, I promise. In 1900 Lord Kelvin (of the Kelvin temperature scale among many other things) spoke at the meeting of Royal Institute in London. There was a consensus at the time that physicists had succeeded in discovering almost everything knowable about the universe. Kelvin was one of the believers in this idea and also one of the most powerful and influential men in science. His speech at the Institute was on 2 ‘dark clouds’ he saw on the horizon, 2 experimental results that didn’t fit in with what they knew at the time. Since they thought they knew almost everything, Kelvin was confident that these clouds would be found out and moved past sooner rather than later. What he couldn’t have known was that within the next decade, those 2 dark clouds would revolutionize not only physics but would literally lead to the invention of our modern world, including the computer you’re reading this article on.

Read on for how this story relates to Agile projects. Although if you’ve been on a sufficiently large project, you can probably see the connection between things on the horizon that seem small and end up having a huge influence on your project. In this part of My First Agile Project I’ll talk about a part of our project that seemed like a ‘dark cloud’ and ended up being a tornado tearing through our town.

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The Year of Reinvention: Learning how to dress

The first real step I’ve taken in my year of reinvention is to try to figure out how to dress less like a lazy geek and/or slob. Since I’m a geek and know nothing about fashion besides that I like tshirts, I started like I normally do with new projects and researched the topic like crazy. I spent way too much time reading various websites on men’s fashion to see what the basics were and what I liked out of that stuff. I finally read a book I bought awhile back as well.

For my web research, I used my favorite new tool, Evernote, to keep track of what I found. Evernote’s Firefox add-on lets you clip parts out of websites and store them in a special notebook in Evernote. Then when I went to Old Navy (the first place I could think of that might have the clothes I was looking for despite never having had shopped there before, surely a triumph of advertising) and pulled up the notes in Evernote on my iphone. Yes, I’m a geek. They were having a good sale so I was able to go out on a limb and get a number of things I wouldn’t have otherwise bought for not too much money.

I’m still trying to get used to wearing long sleeves instead of my t-shirts and polos. But overall I’ve been happy with my choices. So far I think I look a little more polished without sacrificing my personal style and I’m fairly comfortable. I credit a pragmatic attitude and baby steps with this. If I had tried to jump whole-hog into everything I saw in my research, I wouldn’t have been as happy. So far so good.

2009: The Year of Reinvention

Thanks mostly to Arthur C. Clarke and his books, both 2001 and 2010 have always rung of The Future to me. Thus, I’ve decided that 2009 is going to be a year spent in preparation for My Future. I don’t know exactly what this means yet but so far I’ve been trying to think of things I might need to work on this year.

I’ve always liked the old quote of Thoreau’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and a recent issue of Warren Ellis’s comic Doktor Sleepless talked a lot about reinventing (or just plain inventing) yourself so in that spirit as well I’m reexamining how I do things and reinventing myself at least a little bit.

So throughout this year, I’m going to be posting a little bit on my progress; what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, etc. Part of my plan is definitely to blog more so if this stuff isn’t interesting hopefully I’ll be posting enough for you to find something to like.