transientis.com - António Melo’s transient moods

It has been very nice to blog. Really.

Unfortunately, due to (unforeseen) private reasons, I’m estimating that in the forthcoming months I will not blog here. I’ll probably make seldom exceptions to this (yet another) rule, making here some announcements, for example.

Regards.

Here is an un-ordered list of some (current) rules I impose to myself. This does not mean I think other people should follow them. These are my rules to myself only.

• I shall define a fixed time to arrive at the office everyday, in the morning (9 o’clock).
• I shall not bring pet projects to the office. Pets belong to home.
• I shall define a time limit (20 minutes, time permits) per day for non working tasks, like news catchup, etc. I shall go home earlier if I want to do it.
• I shall treat with respect everyone, even if I think someone does not deserve my respect.
• I shall not play computer games at the office. Period.
• I shall not blog at the office. Period.

What a nice post from Hugo Ribeiro.

Reading it, I decided to share some thoughts about this subject. I’ll try to show examples from my day to day experiences. I’ll try also to make my own interpretations of why some things work out while others don’t.

I think the problems arise right from the start, with the teams’ composition. Having a team with the wrong team members will make everybody uncomfortable. Say you are starting a new release and have to create the teams. How do you define how many teams will exist at a given moment, what is the size of a given team and what pigs belong to it?

Having a wrong team composition will most probably lead to some or all of the following situations during the scrum meetings:

• Pigs will think “The project has a so tight schedule and here I go waste my and everybody’s time”
• Pigs will think “Why the hell is Mark saying that? Who cares?”
• Pigs will think “After lunch I must go the bookstore buy my wife’s present. What shall I buy? Hummm, let me see…” - yes, people will be physical in the meeting and they will even be standing up, but their minds will be far away.
• Scrum Master will systematically say, one meeting after the other, and usually to the same set of pigs “Ok, Joe, what you’re saying is not in the scope of this scrum. Please move on, as the meeting is already taking too long and we have a iteration to finish!”. I’ve been there, I’ve seen (and done) that.
• Pigs will think “Now it is my time to talk, but what exactly should I say? What I’ve done since yesterday’s meeting has almost nothing to do with what these girls and guys are doing. If I say everything I’ve done, they will tell me it is not in the scope of the project or scrum. If I just say the few things related, it will seem I am a real slow worker or am lazy. And I want to discuss a problem (an impediment) I’m having and this is the only meeting I go to.”

There may be a number of reasons that might be the causes of this. Here is my own view in the form of an (incomplete) list:

The team is too big. I think it is really difficult to have productive scrums with 8 pigs. With time it might be possible, but if you’re starting to follow these practices, I would suggest to have smaller teams.

The team has the wrong pigs. You should sometimes make a reality check, to assure that the scrums taking place make sense. For example, if you have 3 people talking about feature A and 4 people talking about feature B, you’d better create two independent scrums. And, of course, it is possible for a given person to be a pig in more than one scrum in the same day.

Not everyone has the scrum culture. It takes quite a time to get used to and to understand its benefits. But, as time goes by, it turns the other way around - you feel lost if you haven’t any scrum. And if the company already use scrums, new employees get used really fast.

Pigs’ personality. As in all aspects of life, personality really matters. So carefully choose the people you employ.

Scrum master not being able to enforce the 3 scrum rules (in summary: what have I done since yesterday, what will I do until tomorrow, what are the impediments for me to get the job done). For me, this is a hard point. In the past we’ve tried to follow this rule strictly. Basically we almost could not discuss the problems - we had a two columns (subject / set of name) paper sheet that the scrum master would fill as needed, to schedule follow-up meetings. Eg: “Disabled Job is re-enabled on system start-up” / “Peter, Mat, John”. Then, after the scrum, he would have to guarantee that Peter, Mat and John really had the meeting and agreed on a solution design. Nowadays we discuss the problems in the meeting and agree either in a solution direction or, if not linear, we identify Peter, Mat, John and John is responsible to get the meeting done. As always I think what is needed is good sense (I’m not saying I have :)

Note 1: in my company, we use the term Iteration to refer to a two weeks’ time slot. This is basically the same as a Sprint in the Scrum Agile Software Development Process.

Note 2: we also use the original terms “pigs” and “chickens”

Just two links
whisher
FON

The 21 st or 22 nd of last month was an interesting date to me. It was, somehow, a turning point.

This might be a transient mood :), but since that day I decided it would be nice trying to start a blog, I’ve bought a wireless router, two external disks for backups (more on this probably on another post) , choose a name for my blog, started the blog in Blogger, bought a domain name and hosted it in a cPanel server, dropped the first blog and set up a WordPress powered one (the one you are reading) installed through the built-in Fantastico installer. Uff, I’m tired!

On the other side, I was thinking buying the wireless router and an external disk since ever (maybe 2005) . And it was mostly the inertia that prevented me doing it.

I really would like to have a deeper understanding of my brain.

For the record, my site is hosted in 100mp.com, and, until now, I’m very happy with it.