All posts by Craig Murphy

Project Management

Project management – a series of postings

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This is an early announcement that I will be publishing a series (i.e. more than one) of posts in the Project Management category.

Each post will cover a specific topic; the first post will cover Decision Making. The posts are my own musings and are based on what I have either seen, been told about, read about or experienced/witnessed (over the last 15 years). Both good and bad issues will be covered.

I might get the order of the topics wrong, however I’m hoping that writing them down will mean they’re not buzzing around in my head – you may or may not be surprised to learn that writing can actually be therapeutic. Once something has been written down, your mind immediately starts thinking about other stuff, well mine does (usually) and since I’m planning a lot of education for June/July, clearing my mind of some thoughts is a good thing.

The first post will appear later this week.

Project Management, Scrum

Agile project management using TargetProcess

I’ve just finished reviewing TargetProcess for The Delphi Magazine.

TargetProcess is a fully integrated “on-line” tool that aims to help us manage the lifetime of a feature and it does so in four key areas: requirements management, project planning, project tracking and bug tracking. What makes TargetProcess unique from traditional products in this space it the fact that it is centred on “agile” approaches to product development. Agile approaches tend to be iterative approaches, focusing on lots of small product releases as opposed to one major release like those we see with traditional “waterfall” development methodologies.

I was pleased to see TargetProcess offer direct support for Scrum, eXtreme Programming, releases, iterations, user stories, tasks, bugs and time allocation. It goes a long way to help us convince folks who are used to the waterfall model and all the frequently unnecessary upfront planning associated with it, that the flexible world of agile can be managed with the bare minimum number of artifacts and without the need for a fixed project plan. In other words, TargetProcess might help you sell agile to those who don’t believe it works. (Further discussion about “selling agile” can be found here.)

Anyway, you’ll need to subscribe to The Delphi Magazine if you want to read the full review!

Follow the TargetProcess blog here.

Microsoft Adverts

Microsoft Office Advert

Andy Swan has an occassional “Todays blog was brought to you by” post that revolves around unicode characters. So if you want to blame anybody for my next wacky idea, blame Andy!

Wherever possible, I intend to take a photograph of any Microsoft advertising that I see. I don’t know why, I’ll ask Andy if he has a reason for his obsession.

Here’s the first photograph, seen at London’s Victoria railway station:

Microsoft Office advert

Developer Events

Post-DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper (2)

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For those who turned up at my DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper session about Managing Iterative Development Using Scrum you were privy to my ‘Scrum’ flavour of the Dr. Who trailer (found here).

I recreated all the sound clips such that I could put my own Scrum-isms in at the right points:

Do you wanna come with me?

‘Cos if you do, then I should warn you,

You’re gonna see all sorts of things: projects delivered on time, on budget, even ahead of time and under budget.

It won’t be traditional, it won’t be set-in-stone, and it won’t be waterfall.

But I’ll tell you what it will be, a change for the good.

Anyway, if you didn’t like it, please be grateful I didn’t do something that involves this video clip (26MB) – this is the one that took out the Ministry of Defence e-mail servers. Whilst on the subject of this video, Clarke has re-posted some directions that might be of use. (Mr. Thomson reminded me that he blogged about it before Clarke and that some editing might have taken place between the two versions…)

Developer Events

Post-DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper (1)

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper: it’s all about community – join a community or user group today!

Well, here I am eight days after the event itself finding the time to blog about it. Many others have got in before me, namely:

Benjamin Mitchell
Simon Software Stuff over at harriyott.com
BizTalk Benjy otherwise known as Santosh Benjamin (it might be the other way around!)
Charles Cook
Plip
Ian Cooper
Mike Pelton (ok, so it’s a pre-event post, but I liked Mike’s writing style!)
Ian Smith
Barry Dorrans
Jon Rowett – thanks for the positive feedback!
Dave Oliver – thanks for the positive feedback!
.net mobile blogs – thanks for the positive feedback!
And of course, the Channel 9 forum has some feedback that I’ll pick up on for next time!

I was very pleased with the day. I was especially pleased with all the support that Jonathan Hodgson provided – Jonathan set up the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper web-site in record time (if I didn’t know better, I’d think Jonathan had too much time on his hands!) Incidentally, Jonathan gets married in the summer – congrats! Also worthy of a special mention are Sarah Brown, Melita Walton, Karen Allen and a whole host of backroom folks who rarely get thanked: chefs, security, audio-visual folks and hosts/hostesses.

Out of 250 registered attendees, 170+ turned up: to the other 70 or so who didn’t turn up, we know who you are!! (See you all at the next one!)

Volunteer to speak!
Whilst I didn’t actually make it to any sessions, except my own (which was kind of fortunate for the other attendees!), the feedback has been excellent. A follow-up event looks like it will happen (although I can’t tell you when just yet).

In preparation for a follow-up event, I will be happy to receive e-mails from “would-be speakers”, volunteer speakers, or any community member wishing to speak at a similar event. And if you happen to live in Scotland, I’m sure ScottishDevelopers will provide you with an equally relaxed and friendly speaking environment!

In both cases, drop me an e-mail to register your interest – let me know what topics you would be interested in speaking about. (My e-mail address can be found via here.)

Managing Iterative Development Using Scrum – slides and backlog
A lot of folks asked me (either in my session or afterwards) about tool support for Scrum. My slide deck made mention that most tools were either web-based, still in development or were rather expensive. So here’s an update:

VersionOne – VersionOne, built from the ground up to support iterative development, is the leading project planning and management tool designed specifically for agile software development. Enabling today’s most popular agile methodologies – Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, DSDM, etc. – VersionOne has been helping teams simplify the process of planning, tracking, analyzing, and scaling their agile software development efforts since January 2003.

ScrumWorks – ScrumWorks™ is an Agile process automation tool that enables teams to self-organize and maximize productivity. ScrumWorks™ is based on the Scrum process, a leading Agile development method, and can be applied across industries including engineering, marketing and sales, new product development, and software development.

Older Scrum stuff.

Linda Rising had an excellent article in IEEE Software called The Scrum Software Development Process for Small Teams. She also had an article in STQE magazine about the Daily Scrum Meeting.

General

Bluebell Railway trip…

Our first visit to the Bluebell Railway was on Friday 13th May. Unluckily, it was a dreech (wet, miserable) day, a trip on a steam train was thoroughly unappealing. As a result, we found ourselves wandering around the shopping Mecca that Brighton isn’t (my wife can find shops anywhere, thankfully the rain slows her down!) I’m sure Brighton has its attractions and it’s probably a lovely place to visit when the weather is good. But, since the weather wasn’t nice, I didn’t think much of the fact we were out and about in a wet town that was unknown to me. Why couldn’t we just go to the pub, at least until the weather cleared? It was a Pizza Hut lunch, carefully discovered by my wife, despite my attempts to thwart her finding it…sometimes the stomach can be a marvelous motivator when it comes to walking long distances! C’est la vie!

Anyway, we returned to the Bluebell Railway on Sunday 15th May to find a re-enactment of our boys returning from The Second World War. The sun was shining, the jazz band were playing period tunes at just the right volume and all around us were guests wearing period outfits. The military, of course, took full control of the situation, ration books were issued, travel tickets and particulars were checked. We, the general public, became immersed in a drama that took us back to 1945, we became actors, we (all) helped make the day. Except for those of us with digital cameras…we took our 21st century technology back in time to capture the moment. The re-enactment made the day.

The Bluebell Railway offers you the chance to ride on authentic steam trains running on a timetabled schedule. Departing from Sheffield Park, briefly stopping at Horsted Keynes before terminating at Kingscote. There are some good pictures here.

The Bluebell Railway is definitely worth visiting if you are looking for something to do whilst here. I can strongly recommend visiting during a re-enactment…check their web-site for more details. Further information can be found here.

Actually, thinking back to the day itself, there was one thing missing: beer. I couldn’t find beer anywhere!

Here are a few photographs, trimmed for posting here…it seems that even text messaging was popular back then, as one of the photographs below demonstrates!

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There are more photographs of the Bluebell Railway here.

Michael Taylor has some great pictures over here.

Book Reviews, General

Book review – ADO.NET and System.Xml v 2.0: The Beta Version

I’m pleased to announce that my review of ADO.NET and System.Xml v 2.0: The Beta Version has made it from its original publisher, The Developers Group, to daveandal.net…and beyond.

You are free to publish this review on your web-site subject to the original author and original publisher being acknowledged and referred to.

Learn more about the book and read my review via this link:

http://www.daveandal.net/books/7124/

General

How to “BlogCast”

Mark has some great BlogCast advice that links to the BlogCast repository. (Mark’s post is also available here.)

If you feel the need to add sound and movie clips to your blog posts, or simply wish to use small movie clips to demonstrate something or educate folks, Mark’s advice and links should prove very useful. I’ve created a small BlogCast myself and can confirm that it’s really easy to do.

Bandwidth permitting, watch out for BlogCasts on this site, “real soon now” as they say 🙂

General

Free Developer Event – 14 May 2005

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Further to my earlier post, I am pleased to announce that the session list and agenda have now been finalised.

If you haven’t already signed up (why not?) please visit the event’s dedicated web-site.

Attend DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper to learn more about Scrum, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Refactoring, Web Services in .NET 2.0, ADO.NET 2.0, .NET Custom Attributes, Web-Site Security, ClickOnce Deployment, FxCop, Developing for the Compact Framework, ASP.NET 2.0, Patterns of Data Access in .NET, Selling yourself as a developer, SQL Server 2005 CLR and the Mono project.

General, Project Management

Reactive or Proactive?

I found this over at Frank Patrick‘s blog.

Unfortunately, it’s rather close to home for me. Invariably, my To Do list for the day has items carried forward to the next day. This happens despite good efforts to avoid being an e-mail monkey (I try to check e-mail at three specific points during my working day, morning, noon and departure time less one hour). However, sometimes the ‘phone rings and I hear: “did you get my e-mail?”. Doh!

And then there’s the ‘phone. Folks don’t do it on purpose, but they do make a ‘phone call without realising that what you’re currently working on is important to you and has to be completed by 1600. Sadly, they expect you to give them your full attention. Your priority is explaining this schedule pressure to them such that they can call you back at a more suitable time…however the interruption still hits hard. I won’t mention my mobile ‘phone’s operator name, but suffice to say there are plenty of everyday places that I can’t get coverage! (So finding a spot with no mobile ‘phone coverage is easy!)

The location of my desk doesn’t help, it’s really close to the office’s kitchen door, so there’s a lot of human traffic…and I’m sure you all know what happens when office-folk see an IT guy: “oh, that reminds me, have you got a quick minute, my PC is doing something peculiar”. I usually respond with “a minute’s 60 seconds” and soon end up spending over 5 minutes away from my desk. I can only guess that “quick minute” means “more than 5 minutes”. Anyway, I digress.

I also suffer from being too helpful. It’s difficult to tell work colleagues to “clear off and raise a helpdesk call” (I was advised to use stronger language, but I’ve dumbed it down for this posting). Of course, with well-known colleagues, we do go through the ritual of “clear off”, “raise a helpdesk call”, etc. and it’s followed by some humour and a “quick minute” of my time.

So, I’m afraid to say that I find myself being too reactive. I am,however, going to take Anita Sharpe’s advice and see what happens (although I’m not sure about the shutting my computer down at 2030!)

Meanwhile, what am I trying to say in this posting?

  1. We can become less reactive if business takes the opportunity to educate users such that e-mail becomes a communication tool, not a stick for prodding folks into action.
  2. Should we make some or all of our schedule publicly available? Scrum promotes this visibility for project related progress, perhaps I’m hinting that we should adopt Scrum practices in other aspects of our lives?
  3. Other folks have priorities, we should respect that. Without wishing to boast, I only use the ‘phone when it’s absolutely necessary and I normally ask the person I’ve called if it’s a good time to speak. Scheduling and priorities are important, we should make a point of telling folks that “now is not a good time, can I call you back later” – try it, you’ll be surprised how receptive folks are to this.

If you thought that some of this posting sounded like time management, you’d be right: I’ve read a handful of books on TM, perhaps it’s sinking in now!

General

Securing a new PC

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of securing a brand new Dell PC that belonged to a work colleague.

The said PC came rather well protected, McAfee’s internet security suite was installed and appeared to be working. It would continue to work until July, when the 3 month trial expired. What then? Well, most users cringe when their PC asks them for money, so it’s very likely that the trial will be allowed to expire gracefully. The sudden appearance of spyware, etc. would be less than graceful.

So, amongst other things, I removed the McAfee trial software and replaced it with the free edition of ZoneAlarm and Grisoft’s AVG anti-virus.

I must say, it’s nice to see ZoneAlarm at work. I have a firewall in my Netgear router and find myself shielded from the automated attacks that are so popular. Over the course of the 30-minute securing exercise, we watched no less than 200 inbound intrusion attempts…all nicely blocked by ZoneAlarm.

zonealarm

Incidentally, when ZoneAlarm announces that an upgrade is available, my advice is this:

  1. download the update to the Desktop or other well-known location
  2. disconnect from the Internet, i.e. drop your Internet connection – if this means physically pulling a USB or network cable out of the back of the PC, do it
  3. install the upgrade from the well-known location – ZoneAlarm will turn itself off at this point, thus opening your PC up to the Internet’s nasties if you were still connected
  4. after the upgrade, re-establish your Internet connection

Watch out for a forthcoming article/post covering security software in more depth!