Clive Skipper's Blog

It appears that Apple have removed one of the ways to charge iPods and iPhone in the latest generation (3GS iPhone and 3rd Gen iPod Touch).  Previous version have allowed charging through either the USB (5V) or Firewire (12V) connections in the standard 30 Pin cable.  Now only USB is supported.

The result is that any device that uses the Firewire to charge will no longer charge.  This includes Speaker Docks, In Car Adapters and Mains Chargers.

I have personal experience of speaker docks (Klipsch) that are advertised as supporting charging on all 30 Pin connectors that do not charge, obviously attempting to charge over Firewire!

There is a solution available from Apple.  It is called a Scosche Passport.  There are various available to fit different applications (Docks, In Car).

On Saturday 21^st November 2009 I attended the Agile Coaches Improv session in London.  This event was truly excellent.  Those who know me, you would expect that an event involving Improv would be a challenge.  Acting or being impromptu in front of a group of peers on topics that I am not comfortable or confident with is outside my comfort zone.  It was a challenge in such a positive and rewarding way.  The child in me was released and I felt free to explore Improv.

So a big thanks to Mike Sutton and David Harvey for organising the event.  Most importantly a huge thanks to Tom Salinsky ( of the Spontaneity Shop)  for facilitating and teaching in a truly engaging and accessible way.  I cannot stress enough how liberating and open Tom’s approach is.  He is an excellent teacher, coach and facilitator.  Finally thanks to all the attendees for making the event a success.

On the train home Plamen Balkanski and I tried to summarise all that Tom had covered during the day.  There was so much.  He really made us work.  Below is a summary of the “games” we did throughout the day.  This list is not comprehensive and I may well blog a summary of the game details at a later date.  I am sure we have forgotten some of the games!  The game names are mine not Tom’s.

Word Games – Speak out when pointing to an object.

Pair Responses Games – Positive offer and partner response.

Explore Status Games – Explore the extremes of status.

Group Status Games – Further exploring extremes of status as a group.

Picture Pair – Drawing pictures in pairs.

Letter Pair – Writing letters (Dear John ....) in pairs.

Hat Games – Pluck the Hat from your opponent.  (Thanks to Plamen for almost knocking me out whilst playing this one!)

Discussion Tag Games – Just like Wrestling tag team, but with conversation!

Mime Games – Mime talking whilst someone talks for me!

Avoid the “s” – Talk using words without an “s” in.

The 3 Word Game – Talk in sentences of 3 words.

New Choice Game – My conversation isn’t good enough try again.

The Bop Games – Someone in the circle trying to get out.  For those who attended - Pair Programming J

Taken at face value the content presented was engaging, funny and well thought through.  But what is the value to an Agile Coach?  Well for me Tom showed us some excellent techniques for breaking down the barriers in a team.  To engender a relaxed and happy team who are more at ease with each other.  Tom also highlighted the concept of status and how our approach to status can have positive and negative influences.  This knowledge can be used in our day to day understanding of our teams and the individual interactions in the team to assist in the coaching of the team to higher levels of continuous improvement.

I found the day truly enlightening and I cannot recommend enough that you attend once of Tom’s workshops.

It has been while since I have published a list of interesting blog posts.  For this I apologies.  I have been busy with our new Scrum Management Tool.

First on the list is Tobias Mayer’s very interesting observations the differences between Developers and Testers.  I am not sure I agree with the gender separation, but the underlying development mentality observation is very interesting.

Second.  I always enjoy Mike Cohn’s blog posts.  This one made me chuckle.  Agile is all about micromanaging.

Third.  I like this idea from Rob Bowley as an alternative approach to running retrospectives.

Last for this issue, is the news that Ken Schwaber has left the Scrum Alliance.  Scrum Alliance announcement.  Tobias Mayer’s view.

Just recently I have been the ScrumMaster on an interesting project to create a new tool for the agile and scrum development community.    More details of this will be published in the near future.  In the meantime I thought I would share a new take on the release burndown chart.

On this project we conducted a lot of release planning to determine the product owner’s priorities for the functionality.  When doing our release planning we came across a problem with the sheer size of our product backlog and projecting delivery dates.  The total story points was in excess of 700.  Our project sponsors asked numerous difficult and challenging questions about what we could deliver and when.  The simple response of it is the Product Owner’s responsibility to determine the priority and when we can ship just didn’t wash.  We needed a level of confidence about a ballpark timescale and the usability of the product.

To overcome this issue I proceeded to create a variation on the release burndown chart.  We had already invested a lot of time in establishing the MoSCoW priorities for the complete Product Backlog.  In doing so we had created a list of acceptable functionality that needed to be shipped as part of the first release of the tool.  These were our Must haves.  The revised burndown mapped the various MoSCoW totals onto the burndown.  This indicated to us in which sprint the product would be shippable with the level of functionality acceptable to the Product Owner.

We continued to use the burndown to track our progress to against the Must haves deliverable.  Reflecting increases and decreases in the total estimate, as estimates for the stories changed, new stories are added as the Product Owner’s vision changed.

The fundamental underpinning that made the information on the burndown valuable was to always address the Must haves above all other stories.  In our case this was simple as the top of the product backlog was populated with Must haves.

Here is an example of the burndown we used:

Post writing this blog I came across a similar approach detailed in Mike Cohn blog here.

It has been a while since I did an post on other useful posts.  So here is a quick summary:

- The first blog post is a very good analogy on refactoring by Rob Bowley.  This one made me smile.

- Should bugs be on the backlog by Mike Cohn is very interesting, especially as this is exactly the approach I use on my projects.

- This is an interesting discussion on Project Management and Agile by Mike Cottmeyer

- Interesting lessons for parts of the business that are not development focused.

and finally:

- Mike Cohn has started something.  Cash for Clunker PCs

Well it was great to see a number of familiar faces at the South Scrum User Group meeting on the 22nd June 2009.  Including some colleagues from iMeta Technologies.  As always we had a very interesting discussion.

We covered a number of items before starting the main discussion.  Firstly the name of the group.  Plamen has been in discussion with the Scrum Alliance (SA) to have the groups details included in the SA website.  SA had suggested that the title of South UK was too broad ranging and we should adopt a more local title.  The discussion ensued on what name would be appropriate for a group that covers Southampton, Bournemouth, Poole, Salisbury and beyond.  We decided that the group we be renamed Wessex Scrum User Group.  After the meeting Plamen has arranged for the group to be visible on the SA website here.

Plamen has also arranged for Geoff Watts to come to the group in the near future.  Watch the group’s linkedin group for more information.

The main topic of the meeting was “Continuous Integration – How Far Do You Go?”.   Again we used a Mind Map approach to documenting the discussion and thoughts from the group.  Below is the resulting Mind Map.  Interestingly the topic is not necessarily a Scrum topic, but we were very careful to tie back Agile principles to the concept that were discussed.

Just a quick reminder that the next South UK Scrum User Group will be held on Monday 22nd June 2009 at the Inn on the Furlong, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK.  The event is free!  So please come along.

For more information please go to the Linkedin Group here.

Wednesday evening eight like minded individuals gathered at the Inn on the Furlong for the South UK Scrum User Group.  The topic of discussion for this month’s meeting was “Planning”.  To facilitate the discussion we used a mind map.  The resulting mind map is below.

I am very interested to hear what the current ALM tools you use and what they don’t do for your team.

What features would help your team?

Do the tools support your Agile or Scrum process?

Do the ALM tools deliver value for distributed teams?

What can’t technology deliver that whiteboards, manual taskboards etc. can?

Here at iMeta we have used a number of the market leading products, but always felt that there were lacking in some way.  Our experience has highlighted a number of areas:

We found that the tools  varied in their approach to implementing Scrum.  There appears to be two extremes of the scale.  At one end the tools that you need to understand the supplier’s interpretation of Scrum to be able to use their tool.  These tools typically have very little configuration potential to align the product to our teams approach to scrum.  It is surprising how different tools interpret what would seem to be a very standard process. The other extreme is a tool that is totally configurable.  This requires you to implement the Scrum process in the tool.  Maybe I am lazy but I just want something to work out the box!

When working with remote teams communication is lost in the various gatherings of the team.  The issue can be simply technology limitations such as bandwidth creating lag.  We have tried keeping the team looking at the same part of the system by using Skype or a teleconference.  Typically this didn’t work.  We also tried using remote desktop solutions.  Again with little success.

If you have something to contribute email me or leave a comment.