Agile methodologies may find their comfort zone with co-located teams and with customers that are at hand for giving quick and valuable feedback. Is it possible to keep agility in distributed teams scenarios, where the customer is miles away and testers at the other side of the world? What are the main challenges when face-to-face... read more
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... read more
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... read more
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.... read more
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... read more
During the last trip I’ve found some signs of SaaS evangelism around Seattle area: Tenant-based security applied to restaurants restrooms in downtown Seattle: "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... read more
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... read more
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... read more