I’m looking forward to speaking next Tuesday night at AgileCville about range estimation in Scrum. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to attend AgileCville meetings regularly, so I’m excited to reconnect with everyone. I hope to see you there!

AgileCville
Date: Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
Time: 6 PM to 7:30 PM
Venue: OpenSpace
455 Second Street SE, Suite 100
Charlottesville, VA 22902

Last Friday OpenSource Connections held one of our regular “hackathons”, where OSC developers get together for a day and work on a development project of our choosing, and then at the end of the day, present our work to each other. A hackathon is a fun event where we each get to explore some technology we are interested in, and see how far we can get in one day with it.

This time, we decided to mix up the way we do hackathons. We added in a theme, voting on the best project, celebrity judges, a gift certificate to Best Buy, and even a trophy! The usual elements of time pressure, creativity, fun, caffeine, and a beer at the end of the day were still present.

At the end of the day: Scott Stults was crowned the inaugural OSC “Code Ninja”. Congratulations Scott! In a moment I will describe a little more about the hackathon, but first, let’s all sit back and enjoy this impressive photo of Scott with his prized trophy. Scott is making a feeble attempt to strike the same pose as the karate-guy on the trophy.

For the hackathon, we started the day by meeting at the Nook for breakfast. Then we headed over to a conference room at CitySpace where we set up camp for the day.

The theme of the hackathon was “time”, which meant that you could build any application you wanted, as long as there was some element of time in it. The app had to be built in the 7 or so hours of the hackathon, and judging began at 4:30pm. The applications were judged on three axes: Innovation, Business Utility/Usefulness, and Completeness. Each person voted on all the projects except for their own, giving 1-5 stars for each app on each of the three axes. The project with the highest total number of points was the winner.

To add another dynamic to the voting, we invited “celebrity judges” to join us at 4:30 and they had votes as well. Our celebrity judges were Glenn Wasson and Brian Wheeler. Glenn is an architect at SAIC, and is perhaps most famous for being one of the founders of “The Oracle of Bacon” website. Brian is famous for the Charlottesville Tomorrow website.

Both judges were excellent, and very gracious with their time since we kept them there until nearly 6pm on a Friday night. Thanks Glenn and Brian!

We had a variety of applications built. Caleb worked with Html5 to build a dynamic graph for tracking stocks. Michael worked on extending unit testing frameworks in Visual Studio. Eric built a website where you can send your server logs to, and it will stream out audio sounds that you can listen to which indicate what types of messages are being logged (errors, info, etc). Youssef and I teamed up to build a droid app and deploy it to my phone. We had some cool ideas, but ended up scaling them down to building an Agile standup meeting timer. It made my phone vibrate, which was of course extremely cool.

Despite that coolness, and despite a strong challenge from Eric, the inaugural code ninja is Scott! Scott didn’t just win because he was the only one of us to prepare a powerpoint presentation about his app (that actually lost him a few votes I’m guessing – yuk yuk), but because he made wiki’s exciting! Scott used SPARQL in Semantic Media Wiki SMW+ to show how we could track our projects at OSC and see timelines of who is working on what project.

Thanks to everybody for a great time – I’m looking forward to the next hackathon! I understand that Scott has removed family photos in order to place the trophy in a place of honor at his home, and so I wish the next Code Ninja the best of luck in wresting it away from him.

I am looking forward to presenting at Agile 2010 this year, and I was very pleased to find out that my session proposal on Range Estimation in Scrum has been accepted. Here is info about the session, and I hope to see you at the conference in August!

Building a More Accurate Burndown: Using Range Estimation in Scrum

Traditional Scrum burndowns are based on single point estimates of how long a task will take. However, single point estimates are inherently faulty and inaccurate, and they encourage underestimation. Learn how to incorporate range based estimation techniques into your Scrum burndown, and better communicate to your boss or clients what a project is really going to take. Arin will back up this thesis with academic and industry research, real world examples, and an engaging presentation style. Participants will leave with concrete tips & templates for using range estimates in their projects.

Process/Mechanics

The first part of the session will focus on the pitfalls of traditional estimation techniques, in particular single point estimates. This will involve audience interaction as well as citing industry and academic research. Next the session will move into a discussion of range estimation and how that leads to better accuracy. Then I will present specific advice for how to use range estimates in common Scrum practices like Scrum poker and the burndown. Along the way I will show examples of how our company has been using this practice with clients over the last year, and some best practices that have come out of it. The techniques will be fairly simple and easy to adopt, but provide power results in estimating more accurately and better communication with managers and clients.

Potential pitfalls and best practices of range estimation will also be discussed. For example, some managers are reluctant to accept range estimates, but they can be convinced when a demonstration is made to them of how it better communicates risk and allows them to make better financial decisions on the viability of a project.

This topic started for me with a paper I wrote in my Masters in Management of IT program in 2009 at the University of Virginia, and now has become regular practice at OpenSource Connections. I am also pursuing further research on the topic with two professors from the University of Virginia (Professors Ryan Nelson and Mike Morris of the McIntire School of Commerce). Any preliminary findings or papers from that research will also be woven into the presentation.

I have proposed this as a 60 minute talk, but it could also be made into a 90 minute Tutorial with relative ease. In that scenario, I would bring more hands on activities to encourage participants to really see the value of range estimation in their projects. I have experience with those types of sessions from helping to teach corporate education classes at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I would use that experience to make sure things are kept interesting.

It’s my intention for this session to take the relatively easy-to-use but underutilized practice of range estimation, and make it so compelling that participants will want to apply it right away on their projects. This will be done through a combination of good research, real world examples, engaging presentation style, and practical tips.

Learning outcomes

* Why single point estimates lead to underestimation
* Why range estimation reduces natural biases
* How range estimates better communicate a project’s impact
* How to use range estimation in Scrum Poker
* How to incorporate range estimates into a Scrum burndown
* How range estimates impact project decision making

For those registered on the Agile 2010 site, you can also see this session here.

beCamp 2010 is almost here! April 30th and May 1st are just four weeks away!

If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. beCamp is Charlottesville’s version of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon—organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. Realizing that the most energizing parts of any tech conference are the ad hoc conversations that take place in the hallways between the sessions, beCamp facilitates these types of interactions for an entire event.

As of this writing, we are at 87 campers! To participate, just add your name to the wiki page!

A big thank you to all our sponsors, including at this point,  Hotelicopter, Google, Perrin Quarles and Associates, NRAO, and University of Virginia ITC.  Interested in supporting the Cville tech community?  Check out our needs at http://barcamp.org/sponsor-beCamp-2010.

Today, Microsoft announced that it was abandoning development of the FAST search engine for Linux and Unix.  Given that Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for FAST, the move is an apparent revelation of a strategy to get non-Windows based users to move to an enterprise Windows platform rather than to continue to support FAST.

This move seems to be risky.  The Microsoft bet is that its FAST customers are more loyal to FAST than they are the operating platform, and the perception of switching costs are higher for moving from FAST to another enterprise search engine rather than the opposite–a loyalty to the operating system and a perception that search engines are interchangeable.

Microsoft might be right for most of its customers, but this announcement will certainly be grist for the mill in IT departments over the coming weeks.  Many companies built their IT infrastructure around a Linux-based platform, and being forced to change to a Windows environment may be a pill that is too hard to swallow.  The alternative will be to look to other search engines, which can do nothing but help Solr and Lucene.  With an established user base, enterprise grade support packages from companies like Lucid Imagination, and a significantly lower total cost of ownership than the FAST + Windows package, Solr will appeal to many a CTO who might otherwise have continued to gladly pay the licensing costs for FAST but is now forced to reconsider his or her decision.

Rather than supporting FAST on both platforms at the cost of a few developers, Microsoft may lose many more customers and revenues because of its insistence on one platform.  It will be interesting to see how companies like Lucid respond to the new opportunity.

From the Meetup site:

We’ll look at the thriving Ruby ecosystem that has grown up around integrating with Solr. From Ruby gems that integrate with Solr like solrb and rsolr, to general search solutions like acts_as_solr and sunspot. We’ll also look at a complete “shrink wrapped” catalog solution for Solr using BlacklightOPAC.

You’ll lean the basics of getting started with Solr, and an understanding of what Ruby solutions are available to simplifying adding great search to your site!

As usual, food and beverages will be provided.

I’m very pleased to be speaking to Richmond SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) next Wednesday October 14th, at 6:00 pm at Anthem BCBS in Richmond.  The address is 2015 Staples Mill Road in Richmond.  You can find more details and register online at:

http://www.richmondspin.org/home22222

Here’s the brief on my talk, which is based on my recent talk at Agile 2009.  I hope to see you there!

“Strategies for Persuasion on Adopting Agile”
By Arin Sime, Senior Consultant with OpenSource Connections

Do you want to know why Agile is sometimes a preferred methodology over a Waterfall method?  Arin will present 12 different methods for convincing a “traditional client” to use an Agile project plan. Based upon his own experiences with a wide variety of project styles, he will also present several definitions of each of the environments, well as results gathered from a survey on how to sell Agile. Some stories and best practices from other sources will also be covered.

When: August 25, 2009 from 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Where: Michie North Building Room 324 across from Barracks shopping center.

RJ Bruneel will show his Stock Watch Flex app which uses Google Finance for customers to be able to watch their stock portfolios.

For more information about the meeting: http://groups.adobe.com/posts/93f0df3964

For more information about the CVille Adobe User Group: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/2aec1514da