NicoPaez’s southBlog

Every Friday at 9 o’clock we have the “Friday Presentations”. Any Southie can propose a presentation, there is no restriction about the topic, so you could be watching someone talking about dynamic languages or sharing his experiences during the last PDC. However, most presentations talk about projects that are currently executing or that we have executed lately. Each presenter has a slot of 15 minutes to talk about the topic he chose. In general we have one presentation per Friday, but in some occasions we have 2 presentations.

Once presentations are finished we have an “Open Discussion” space. We sit in a circle and any Southie can propose a topic for discussion. After introducing all topics, we vote them and the TOP 2 voted topics are discussed. The open discussions topics are generally related to our daily practice, improvement opportunities, update on different things, etc.

Both, the presentations and discussion are recorded and published in our network to allow any Southie to consume them later if they could not make it.

All these effort is coordinated by the communications team lead by Julian Scopinaro.

Personally, I found these spaces very useful; they help to keep us up to date with things that are happening in the company and also allow us to talk about improvement opportunities.

This is part Southworks’ culture.

Below some pictures from the last Friday.

We shipped it! The product is now complete. It is not yet in production environment because the Go live!is scheduled for the end of January. Working on this project has been a very pleasant experience and weperformed a smooth delivery as well.

A few numbers of this project:

• 44 stories completed
• Representing a total weight of 97 points
• In a timeframe of 5 iterations
• With an iteration lenght of 1 week.

There is one post pending about this project that I will write after going live.

Today we started working on project A2. Project A is still in progress but the work remaining is enough for one dev, so  together with the customer we decided to split the team in two. Diego will continue working in project A for 2 weeks while Gabriel and myself will start working on project A2. Both projects are related, not at the code level but at business level and that is why we splitted the team in two instead of having a new team doing A2. This afternoon we had a review & planning meeting with the customer where we showed the progress on project A and we set the vision and overall context for project A2.

This is one of the things that I find interesting an different compared to previous work experiences: projects run fast, maybe in two weeks. So you need to be sharp, execute, deliver and get ready for the next challenge. Weekly iterations help and communicating status daily is crucial to steer the direction if needed.

To be continue…

We have just finished the second iteration and we are on track, we completed all the committed items and also some others that we found during the iteration. At the same time are working in a ISO complain way (that is what our complain checker says).

One interesting characteristics of this project is that we are working on a solution based on a open source product. During this two weeks we have found some issues on this product that we had to fix, but this didn’t affect our scheduled. At this moment we are almost ready to integrate the UI styles that are being developed by another company, I think that will be an interesting challenge.

To be continue…

Today we did the iteration review (it should have been last Friday, but our customer decided to move it because of Thanksgiving day). We completed all the committed items and some more. The review meeting was short (less that 30 min),  we had prepared a slide deck with 4 slides to highlight some facts of the past iteration and some important stuff about the next one. During the meeting we browsed the application, we reviewed the backlog and we agreed the scope for the next iteration. After the review we did a retrospective, and here we are now starting our second iteration.

To be continue…

We are in good shape, the customer confirmed that we are going to take care of developing the application and go live process.

Today we deployed to staging the first drop of the application. To set clear expectation with our customer we added a disclaimer message on top on each page.

The link “See drop details” takes the user to a page were the deatils of features/modifications are listed. This first drop includes 4 out of the 6 story commited for the current iteration.

To be continue…

Today we (GabrielSZ, DiegoM, TimO and Lito) started a new project (aka project A) and I decided to (try to) write a post every day telling the story of the project. As you may image the first day our activities were:

• Kick-off: a short meeting where everybody get familiar with the project goals, timeframes and restrictions.
• Planning:  the customer gave us a VERY rough idea of his needs and we took care of “backlogize” them (convert into a backlog the customer needs). This is usually misunderstood so I want to be very explicit: we clearly identified user stories, we estimated them and prioritized them according to the customer criteria. Finally we published the backlog for the customer to “play with it” (without modifying our estimates). Based on this backlog we will start our first iteration.
• Research: the project has some technical challenges so we had to make some research (just a couple of hours) before the planning, to be able to estimate.
• Setup: we made the infraestructure request for the project (repository, lists, tracking system, etc.)

To be continue…

During 19, 20 and 21 of November took place in Buenos Aires the 3 rd Argentine Smalltalk Conference. Among many international visitors there were Dan Ingalls (one of Smalltalk’s creators) and Stephane Ducasse (author of the famous book: Squeak By Example, and creator of Pharo).

The conference’s opening was in charge of Hernan Wilkinson, and inmediatly after him, Ducasse gave his session titled: I have a dream…. let’s make it come true. It was a really interesting session where Ducasse shared the vision that lead him to start Pharo project. Other interesting session were James Foster’s Introduction to Gemstone, Smalltalk in the pocket by Esteban Lorenzano (who talk about building applications for the iPhone) and 40 years of Fun with computers by Dan Ingalls. This last session was a review of the main projects Dan participated during his life. He finishes the session showing us his current work at Sun Microsystem developing the Lively Kernel (something VERY interesting I will be writting in short.)

My session was on Friday 20 th and I shared the stage with Carlos Fontela (my Senior Faculty). There were about 50 people!! a number over our expectations.  We talked about our experience at FIUBA, teaching object-oriented programming using Smalltalk, Java and agile practices. The slide deck used in the session is available here. And if you want to know more about our sesion I will be writting some more details in my Spanish blog.

Enjoy it!

During last week, Shaggy, MartinS and I, went to Brazil to attend this conference organized by the Latin-American Conference on Agile Development Methodologies. The three of us were speakers. Ariel presentation was “Agile PMO” (you can find more information in his post after the conference). MartinS talk about “High maturity agile practice”, a very interesting topic for those with experience in agile methods.

I was on charge of a workshop about planning and estimation and I am very pleased with the results, I wrote some more details about this workshop on my Spanish blog.

The keynote speakers were Brain Marick (signer of the agile manifesto), Daina Larsen (president of the Agile Alliance) and Roy Singham (founder and CEO of Thoughtworks). Other important speaker where Joshua Kerievsky (author of Refactoring to Patterns).

The conference were excellent and I could enjoyed it much more than the previous year.

At the end of the conference while of conference committee was doing the retrospective with Diana some friends and I have a talk with Brian Marick. I asked him what were in his opinion the skills a tester should meet to work in an agile team. He answered that there are 3 required skills:

1. Be able to understand the business.
2. Be able to automate tests, what in most cases requires some programming skills.
3. Have a good capacity of doing exploratory testing. In some point this ability could be even more important the 2.

Finally the committee announced that the candidate city for the next conference (agiles 2010) is Lima, Peru.

Here we are (from left to rigth): me, Shaggy and MartinS.

Shaggy recorded our session, so as soon as they be available I will add a reference to them.

Last Saturday I attended to this important event at Universidad de Palermo where I was speaker together with other 6 southies : (MatiasW, Mr. Salias, Ejadib, BetoO, JohnnyH and DiegoP). I am not sure about how many people attended to the event, but I can say that all the session I went were full.

All the speakers were asked to record their sessions, so I think Microsoft will publish them in the next weeks.

Meanwhile, If you want to know about what I spoke, the slide deck I used for the in my presentation is available to download here.