Ariel Schapiro’s Blog

I had the chance to speak at the second Latin-American Conference on Agile Development Methodologies, running now in Florianópolis, Brazil. I’m having a really good time attending to some talks offered by great personalities of the Agile movement such as Brian Marick who gave an excellent opening keynote, Diana Larsen who’s talk about generating trust in teams I found really exciting, Roy Singham (founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, Inc.) who made from yesterday’s closure keynote an inspiring message of South America opportunities in the years coming and Dave Nicolette, a guru of agile metrics who’s work I follow very closely.

My session was about a process of measuring cross-project indicators that an agile company can follow once they are compliance with the baseline of measurements such as velocity, code quality. More details here.

Two collages from Southworks spoke at this event too: Martin Salias gave a high level view of practices to follow after succesfully adopting agile culture and practices, while Nicolas Paez gave a workshop around agile estimation and planning. We filmed our talks so I guess some time in the future they’ll be published.

If you follow (or intend to follow :)) agile practices and didn’t get the chance to go to any edition of Agiles, I really recommend you don’t loose the next edition (country to be defined) and in the meantime contact your local agile community for other local events.

Stay tunned for more updates!

Last Tuesday I attended to June’s meeting of an agile practitioners group called "Agiles" (Spanish). The topic for that meeting in particular was "How do you start your projects?". Overall product planning and project, team and process setup were some of the activities discussed as part of the first iteration of an agile project.

The format for the meeting was similar to a Lightning Talk; in this case a series of time-boxed presentations and Q&A (7 +3 mins). Presentations were very interesting, but especially I always find this kind of talks formats very effective: as opposed to long open discussions, they help the audience to get quickly to the point, have a fare amount of questions and then move to the next presentation. This way the audience (customer?) gets added value after a short iteration, in this case of 10 minutes. Any similitude with agile goals?

July 14th meeting will be around estimation in agile projects and they’ll use the same Lightning Talk format.

Last Wednesday I participated in a panel called “Agile: Mission Impossible?” where I presented one of Southworks’s case studies where we successfully implemented Agile methodologies (Scrum + XP mix) in scenarios out of the Agile comfort zone.

We had good feedback from the audience, as well as lots of questions from people facing similar scenarios. Let’s summarize the case study presented…

“Your mission, if you choose to accept it…”

Apart from the goal of delivering a mission critical product implemented with emerging technologies, the case study in particular that I presented had the following constraints:

1. “Distributed²“: The whole team was divided in 2: Southworks team (1 architect + 1 lead + 2 devs) and the client’s team (3-4 devs). These teams were distributed in space, separated by 360 miles. But they were also distributed in time: their working hours differed in 2+ hours.
2. “coached to coach”: Goals included the adoption of agile methodologies by client’s development teams up to the point where they must be ready to coach other teams within the client on successfully implementing agile.
3. “Agile = 0″: The client’s team had no experience in agile methodologies or tools such as TDD, pair programming, refactoring, etc.
4. “Tech = 0″: The client’s team had no experience in the models their where going to implement such as S+S or the technologies they were going to use: MVC, Ajax, WCF, Linq

The approach

After accepting that “mission” we used the product we started to build as the real-world scenario for applying a coaching roadmap that consisted of a mix of:

1. Global (team + stakeholders) methodology understanding
2. Continuous teamwork practice
3. Ownership enforcement
4. Partial team rotation to foster the knowledge transfer

The results

As part of the results of the case study, the product was delivered on time, on budget, with “over-delivery” features. The client’s team had learnt and successfully implemented agile methodologies as well as the new technologies, which they successfully started to apply to other projects in their organization.

Have you ever worked on similar scenarios? How did you solve them?

Last Thursday was the time for Argentina to launch Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. This event was part of the launches wave that started back on the 27th of February when Steve Ballmer presented those products in Los Angeles California.

This event in particular associated the heroes happen {here}campaign with a popular sport in Argentina: the soccer. The main event was a soccer match between professional soccer players and a team made of Microsoft developers and IT pro’s. As part of a big analogy, the software team used Windows Server 2008 on their defense, SQL Server 2008 on their middle field and Visual Studio 2008 on their offensive and that strategy allowed them to won the match.

Some pictures from the event

Soccer match between professional soccer players and a team made of Microsoft developers and IT pro’s. You can see Alejandro Ponicke as a DT in the background.

Jorge Garcia, Augusto Alvarez, Matias Woloski, Ezequiel Glinsky, Johnny Halife and me: watching the soccer match.

Augusto Alvarez, Paulo Arancibia, Miguel Saez, me and Johnny Halife

During the last trip I’ve found some signs of SaaS evangelism around Seattle area:

1. Tenant-based security applied to restaurants restrooms in downtown Seattle:

1. "Try before you buy" experience in Chinese restaurant             (in Sea-Tac airport):

Has any of you found any "SaaS hints" anywhere else?

Last week I’ve been participating on the design of the upcoming TS (Technology Specialist) certification exams for WF 3.5. (formerly known as "70-504: TS: .NET Framework 3.5 - Windows Workflow Foundation")

The sessions have been organized by the Microsoft Learning team and hosted by Howard Dierking, who did a great job on helping us to discuss about the most important aspects of WF to test.

He explained the refactoring of the exam stack and how having TS exams which are specific to a single technology and then PRO exams which are more scenario oriented can help software companies on measuring their applicants skills.

From left to right, the Subject Matter Experts that worked on that design sessions are: Ariel Schapiro, Serge Luca, Alfred Myers, Brian Myers (author of "Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation" book) and Mark Dunn.

It was really interesting to see how many points of view around the same subject help enormously in the design of an exam; good work guys!

Two more southies (Matias Woloski and Johnny Halife) participated in the WCF design sessions that took place one week before WF’s.

Fred Chong, Gianpaolo Carraro, Erik Weis and Matias Woloski gave a 3-day workshop on SaaS, at Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

Attending Microsoft employees and ISVs used a SaaS reference application based on LitwareHR to get inside of the architectural challenges solutions for data model configuration, tenant provisioning, workflow configuration and security.

Check Matias’s post for more details.

Last Friday Roberto Schatz, Ramiro Iturregui, Matias Woloski and I introduced SaaS at Buenos Aires Microsoft HQ.

Audience was mainly ISV’s, some of them already implementing SaaS ideas and looking for more guidance.

After making an introduction of the main ideas (the long tail, architecture challenges, etc.), we role played LitwareHR demo (one guy from the audience played "Contoso’s" CEO role and another one "Fabrikam’s") and we showed some "behind the scene" code details and diagrams.

After finishing, architects and developers from the audience came close to make more questions so the discussion went on.

Some feedback received by the end:

• People who went to see what is SaaS: now have less doubts, with more information to get their organizations involved.
• People who went to get some SaaS implementation guidance:
  • liked the xaml activation approach for dynamic business processes: many of them haven’t used WF and some said they would use LitwareHR xaml activation code as reference.
  • focused their questions on critical data isolation and dynamic business processes
  • one ISV told Matias they implemented datamodel configuration by the use of views for retrieving tenant’s entity data (like in LitwareHR), but discarded it due to performance issues. After reading the multitenant data architecture article they implemented a "separate schema" approach (each tenant data in separate tables) with a database pool.

I’ll be speaking about SaaS on next Friday’s Technight to be held in Buenos Aires Microsoft Headquarters.

Roberto Schatz, Ramiro Iturregui, Matias Woloski and I will introduce SaaS, discuss about its business model, technical challenges and we will take a look at Litware HR, the SaaS reference application published in February.

If you will be in town by Friday, you can register to the event here.

(Brief reference in Spanish)

See you there!

Last week me and many southies attended the full-time first Certified ScrumMaster course in South America organized by the Scrum Alliance.
It was an inspiring experience for me not only because of the simple basis of Scrum and the huge impact it can make on Software Industry but because of the energy  that many of us discovered during the course that can lead many projects to success.

I´d like to thank our trainer Tobias Mayer; Alan Cyment who brought Tobias to Buenos Aires, and of course every attendee that made those 2 days a very rich experience.

We made a product called “Scrum in a box”… you can guess what kind of framework we used to build it….Scrum! That kind of product forced us not only to learn Scrum the right way, else to think all the time about artifacts, meetings, roles and flow of Scrum; all of this being part of that…

Here you can see a team gathered at the Backlog wall on the far left, me in the middle and another team (in this case my team: Garcilaso Jordana, Angel Java Lopez, Juan Gabardini, Cludio Schicht and Mariana Gomez in clockwise order) working on the 4rd sprint of Scrum in a Box. ¿Can you spot our tasks posted on the wall behind me?

Here are all the brand new CSM and Tobias on the top-left corner.

Finally, if you are interested in Scrum, you shouldn´t miss the following:

• http://www.controlchaos.com/
• http://agilethinking.net/
• http://www.agilealliance.org/
• http://www.scrumalliance.org/