Tag: linkedin

Categories
Agile

Agile: Retrospective

The retrospective. The cousin of the “postmortem”. Why not a postmortem? Because our project didn’t die. We want to reflect on what we did right, wrong, how we can improve, what did we learn.

What is the retrospective? I like to have a 15-20 minute section before “review” and “planning” in the Sprint Planning Meeting. Everyone goes around and says what can we do better? What did we do bad? What did I learn? Capture the thoughts and feelings of people and look back at the last retrospective and see what you did this sprint to improve on last sprint.

The hardest part of this “retro” seems to be 2 things, depending on team. Some teams find all the *bad* things and list them out. Some just find all the *good* things and list them out. You need to have a balance. Some things always go better, some worse, so put them out on the table.

If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you are now, or where you are going.

Categories
Product Reviews

office.live.com – Docs in the Cloud

For a while, there have been offerings from Google (Google Apps/Docs), Zoho, and others, and recently, Microsoft jumped into the “online office” game with office.live.com.

Pretty cool. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote in the cloud. Limited, but you can create docs, share them, edit them, with *no software* installed on your system. Good in a pinch, good to sync some docs up that you might want to edit, good on a relatives computer that doesn’t have office.

Where have I started to use it more though? OneNote. What is OneNote? Well, before Office 2010, OneNote was installed as a separate application with Office. Kind of like Visio. My biggest problem with OneNote was that I was stuck to my laptop, or whatever. Had to be on the actual box.

Now, you can create a OneNote notebook in the cloud, and edit it in the browser, or on your machine. OneNote also has some cool features, like

“You can now share your notes with other OneNote users in real time by hosting or participating in shared note-taking sessions. Over a live connection, you can work together on a project or share a read-only copy of your notes with an audience.”. It also integrates nicely with tablet/bamboo and mic/text/voice recognition, as well as Outlook and meetings, etc. Integration everywhere.

I actually like OneNote better than Evernote – but Evernote I can get on my computers, web, iPad and iPhone. Yes, there is a OneNote iPhone app (MobileNoter) but you have to install a client, blah blah. Should just work over the cloud.

Anyways, if you need office online in a pinch, try office.live.com, but also check out OneNote and using it with others to share/read notes in real time, really cool features.

Categories
Agile

Agile: Scoring

Once you have your stories defined and you are ready to “score” them, there are some things you need to keep in mind.

What scale are you going to use for scoring?

I use 1,2,3,5,8,11, and 13. Why? Well, that is just what we used when I started doing Agile, and it seems to work 🙂 Fibonacci + 11. I know I probably should change it so it kind of goes along with the more mainstream numbers that some 3rd party tools and other people recommend. Maybe, someday 🙂

1 is the lowest, 13 the highest.

At first, the team has no idea what a 1 or 2 or 8 or anything is. It takes time. Over time the team gets a gut feel for what a 1 is, or a 3, or whatever.

Don’t equate points to time! No, a 1 isn’t an hour, or a day, or X. It is a 1.

What are points?

Well, I try to explain it as time, effort, complexity, outside factorness, craziness, etc, etc. You kind of have to bundle all those things up and say, yea, that is a 2. It is more than a 1, less than a 3. Each team is going to have a different meaning for what a 3 is.

During your sprint planning, what you want to do is give everybody a pack of “planning poker” cards so they can score as you go through stories. (There are also web apps for virtual teams, iPhone apps instead of using planning poker cards). As you get done reading the story, and answering any questions, the team should “score” – show their cards. If they are all the same – great! You have a winner.

If some are different, then you discuss or come to an agreement on why some do’ers think it should be higher or lower, and get a score at the end. Example? 6 devs, 4 say it is a 2, 1 says a 3 and 1 says 1, well, most say it is 2, do the other 2 devs agree? if so, you can mark it a 2. If not, you might discuss why. The one dev saying it is a 3 might say, “what about this an that” and then everyone realizes, oh yeah, it is more than 2, and you go with a 3.

What happens if you see 13’s?

What I try to do is say – if you score it a 13, then the story is too big, you should break it up into smaller stories. With that logic, you should never have a 13 on your board.

The biggest thing to remember is that the team is going to have to take a few sprints to get used to the scoring, and understand how stories fit into points. You ARE going to over and under score – it is just reality. But don’t adjust the scores during the sprint. Things just tend to work themselves out over time. What you can do is capture actuals at your retrospective and compare to what the original scores were. The team might get a better idea on what they should be scoring things then. Another thing to try is a scoring guide. After some time, you can say “every story we do that involves making a new button on a form is usually a 2” so then if you have a story like that, and the team scores it a 8, or they don’t know what to score it, you can look back at your guide and say -hey, we usually score these 2’s, so is a 2 ok?

Who scores?

This is a good question, who should score? My opinion? Just the do’ers. The scrum master shouldn’t score, and product owner/analysts shouldn’t score. Just the do’ers.

What do you do with the points/scores?

You track your daily burndown, and your “velocity” per sprint. More on that later.

Just remember, think of stories as being scored by points. Or bananas. Or stars. Just not hours 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Facebook Graph API – Getting Friends and Gender in C#

I recently blogged about the Facebook Graph API and if you have the Facebook C# SDK you can start making applications.

After I had my Facebook app set up, I started making a C# Console application to just get my friends and see what I could do. Here is a snippet to get my friends and their gender.

       string token = ;

            Facebook.FacebookAPI api = new Facebook.FacebookAPI(token);

            JSONObject f = api.Get("/me/friends");

            KeyValuePair friends = f.Dictionary.ElementAt(0);


            for (int i = 0; i < friends.Value.Array.Count(); i++)
            {

                Console.WriteLine("Friend #" + i.ToString());

                JSONObject friend = api.Get("/" + friends.Value.Array[i].Dictionary["id"].String);

                Console.WriteLine(friend.Dictionary["name"].String);

                try
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(friend.Dictionary["gender"].String);
                }
                catch(System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException knfe)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("No Gender Specified");
                }

                Console.WriteLine();
            }


            Console.ReadLine();

There is a probably a better way to do this, but getting the JSONObject back and then getting the values you get back from that, I just kind of brute forced it. Also, handling friends that don’t have information set, the quick and dirty way was to just catch the exception. I know there has to be a better way but for now it works.

Categories
Product Reviews

Goto Meeting vs Whatever

I have used a ton of “meeting” apps. Live Meeting, Goto Meeting, ATT Web Conference, TeamViewer, etc, etc.

Best of the best? My opinion? Goto Meeting. Easy to setup, easy to use. Just works.

There is also an iPad app! I have used a couple of times and it works great. Whenever some *other* meeting software seems to fail, Goto Meeting works.

Not saying there isn’t room for improvement, but it just seems to always work. I have had to use it to step in when LiveMeeting fails, or ATT web meeting fails, etc. It is a pretty awesome product and if you have a chance to use it, I would say go for it, You won’t be disappointed.

Categories
Agile

Agile: Priorities

Agile .. priorities…

what are they?

The product owner or people driving your features/bugs/issues of your scrum team need to set priorities of your stories. How do they do that? Simple:

5
4
3
2
1

Now here is where it gets crazy. People always ask: What is high? What is low. Stupid question.

1 is low. 5 is high. numbers just work out that way. I find it funny going into a project or team or whatever and they are like, it is priority 1!!!!! really? so 1 is higher than 5? What crazy math are you using? 5 is higher than 1. Always. Just do it.

Anyways, the product owner set’s the priority. 5, 4 – you pretty much always score/do first. 3/2, get to when you can, and 1, well, those are wishlist/nice to haves, and you get to whenever. They usually sit in the backlog forever.

What happens when you have multiple product owners or you do stories for multiple product owners? Well, they set the priorities of the stories. If there is someone above them, they might over rule. There might be a “steering” committee meeting or prioritization meeting to set priorities of all the stories in the backlog.

The team/scrum master shouldn’t be guessing on what to do, the priorities need to come from somewhere above or someone driving the project from a business perspective.

1,2,3,4,5

Lowest
Low
Medium
High
Highest

Whatever you choose, your stories need to have priorities, and they need to be set by the right person.

Categories
Agile

Agile: Bugs

Agile can make things work for your process, you can get a ton done, but one question everyone has is “What about bugs?” or “What about things that come up during the sprint?” Oh noes!! Agile can’t handle it.. Agile will fail us.. fear not..

  • If you can, wait till next sprint
    Of course, if you can wait, wait. Don’t interrupt the current sprint, don’t get in the way of your do’ers focus, wait on it, assess it, analyze it, verify it, validate it, make sure you understand it instead of jumping in quickly and screwing something else up. Most times unless it is a HUGE showstopper, you *can* wait.
  • If you must, handle it. Swap something out
    If you can’t wait, then you should swap something out. You can’t just keep adding things to the current sprint, you will overfill your capacity. You need to swap something out. If this is a critical bug, it must be more important than *something* on your current sprint (that you haven’t started yet). If you are near the end of the sprint, then wait till next sprint.
  • If not a bug, but a request – First Option
    if it isn’t a bug, but a high priority request, you know the ones, from the president or god or you know. Well, then the first thing you can do is go to that user and say “Hey, we can do this, but we are going to move something out of the sprint that you requested.” If they say “Hey, no way, I want it all done”, then you respond “That isn’t the way it works, you need to move something out to move something in, or you need to wait and see if we get ahead where we *might* be able to pull something in, is that acceptable?” and then you think to yourself “someday these users will learn to think farther out than 2 days in front of their face”
  • If not a bug, but a request – Second Option
    So if you get this “god” request that *must* be done, but the user doesn’t have any existing stories to pull out, well here is what you do. You need to find a comparable story from someone else to pull out, and then you have to get that person, and the requester together and ask “Hey person we already committed to, is it ok if this other guys request bumps you out of the queue/sprint?” and if the person is ok with it (they usually are) then you can swap, if not, well, tough luck to the late request, they need to wait. (You can see from this process you need to learn to say “No”.
  • Last Resort
    the last resort, and I hate this option, but it seems it usually is the one that gets done the most. You just do the request. You fit it in, you work late, you do something different or something else takes a hit. The person gets there request, but no one learns from the process, since they think they can still request anything at anytime and get something from you, instead of learning to plan out a bit.

I’m sure there are infinite permutations of things you can do and situations you need and will need to deal with. The above is just a broad look at some the more recurring situations.

What you can learn from Bugs or Requests that need to be done *now!* is this:

There is always a way to adjust and handle things. Nothing is written in concrete. “Responding to change over following a plan”

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming

OData is the New Hotness

Not sure why I didn’t look into this sooner. OData. Open Data Protocol.

Not many providers, but this has huge potential. First off, PowerPivot can consume OData feeds! See the “From Data Feeds” button 🙂

I used it to download Netflix’s whole library. I tried to download StackOverflow’s data (http://odata.stackexchange.com/) but had no luck. Either got errors or it was taking forEVER!

But, you can see how easy it is to create an OData API for your data? Scott Hanselman did it for StackOverlfow in 30 minutes. This opens up HUGE oppourtunities for apps and ISV’s to expose their data out for end user and other developer consumption.

You can see all the “producers” here: http://www.odata.org/producers .. I am sure there are more, just not on the list.

What a cool easy way to expose your data as an “API” out there.. Excited to see how it is used (Pivot Viewer, Power Pivot, etc) and what people do with it.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Product Reviews Ramblings

One Thing About the iPhone 4..

I still love it. Like I said, I don’t use it as a phone. But I have noticed something different (And I blame AT&T for this – working for cell phone company for 5 years, I blame the carrier :))

In Madison/Sun Prairie, I get 3G ,works great, no issues. When I drive out to work, in the big city of Waterloo, WI – there is no 3G, just Edge/2G. I noticed that the phone is just “Searching..” or low bars – trying VERY hard to connect.

What I did was turn off 3G and it was at FULL bars. So once I get to work, I turn off 3G, and once I leave, I turn it back on.

What it is, the phone is hanging on to the 3G signal from the big town of Sun Prairie, and tries, tries, tries its hardest to hold on to that. Bad handoffs or something. The cell sites aren’t handing it off gracefully to the Edge/2G network, so I have to force it.

Go figure.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Fun with the Facebook Graph API

Lazy Sunday afternoon, so I decided to dig a bit into the Facebook Graph API. What is the FB Graph API? Well it allows you to create an application and use OAuth to connect and then get information about yourself and your friends and do things in Facebook using JSON objects and requests. Easy way to read/write from Facebook.

But, the kicker seems to be getting things started. To start, Facebook has documentation and links and wikis all over the place, so it is hard to get a handle on what you want or need to do.

First you need to create an application. Once you do that you need to set up some things so you can actually use Facebook data.

Once you have that done, you can see your apps here

You will want to take note of a few things and change some settings..First might be to put your app in “sandbox” mode:

Also, under “Authentication” you might want to change Authentication Callback URLs.. and then under “Connect” change your “Connect URL”, and you want it in form http://blah.com/

So to test your app and see what you can do, you need to know your

ApplicationId
API Key
Secret

now, you can make unauthenticated calls to the Graph API, try it..

https://graph.facebook.com/56011561

That’s me. You should be able to see public info on me (don’t try it in IE, it pukes.. Chrome it was working. You might need to be logged into FB)

Anyways, if you want your app to be able to get more than the “public” unauthorized view, you need to make some calls and get some access tokens..

First you need to get an “access code”

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=&redirect_uri=&scope=user_photos,email,user_birthday,user_online_presence,offline_access,friends_birthday,friends_education_history,friends_hometown,friends_location,friends_relationships,friends_religion_politics,friends_likes,friends_interests,friends_groups

You can see in that URL, you have to supply your app id, and your redirect url. Keep it simple, your redirect url should be something like http://blah.com/ .. don’t have querystring params..

If you have things set up, facebook should authenticate you, and ask you to allow your app to have permissions to pretty much “EVERYTHING” on your profile and friends info. To see what “extended permissions” you can use, see here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions

You *should* get redirect to your redirect_url with a param in the url called code=

Grab that code, you will need it.

Now to get the access_token

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id=&redirect_uri=&client_secret=&code=

once you hit the above URL, with the code from step one you will get an access token

take that token, and then try

https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=

you can also get your friends ids

https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=

Once you get your friends list, you can use their id's and get info back from the graph.

If you get errors or did something wrong, you might have screwed up your first requests. There are sites and forums saying to add type=client_cred - don't do that, it doesn't work. It will give you a shorter access token, which doesn't work.

Once you have all that working *MANUALLY*, then check out Facebook's officall C# sdk for the graph - http://github.com/facebook/csharp-sdk

Basically then you can replace the access token there with your token and test things.

Then just tie it all together in an app so you can do it programatically, but that is for another blog post 🙂