First of all it officially confirms agile’s position amongst respected management methods – as part of the mainstream. I wrote about it at length recently, so I’ll just point out here that PMI’s move spells the end of the “agile revolution” in one sense. Just like the Linux revolution before it agile came with a promise of radically reshaping the workplace. It will in some places, but overall (and just like Linux) it will not completely eradicate its older alternatives, but rather become one of them – another respectable, mature tool for managing projects/teams.

Some, more radical agilists will perceive it as a failure just like some Linux activists perceived the fact that Microsoft Windows is still with us as a failure. As agile becomes part of the norm it will cease to be revolutionary – revolutionaries will not be happy now, especially when they will see tie-wearing consultants prepare people for PMI’s agile cert exam.

For me it is a sign of agile’s success. This is how the body of knowledge in any field grows – from time to time there is a new trend, new idea that comes in but for the most part it doesn’t completely invalidate all of the methods and knowledge that was amassed before it arrived. Here we see the field of management being enriched with the integration of the agile approaches and techniques into it.

On the tactical/market level PMI’s move is a logical consequence of Scrum Alliance’s failure. Ken Schwaber’s departure in 2009 and events that surrounded it marked the end of Scrum Alliance as an energetic movement able to reshape the certs market and establish itself as a key provider of project management knowledge in the field of software development. The lack of leadership after Ken’s departure and shortsighted concentration on protecting revenue streams of existing CSTs have proven to be fatal mistakes not only for the Alliance, but for the Scrum movement as a whole. Ken’s new initiative – Scrum.org – had to be started from scratch and it may well turn out that it came too late to save Scrum certs as valuable propositions in the long run.

Whatever the future will bring PMI’s move is a game changer for all providers of agile certificates. Given PMI’s reputation, size and resources as well as experience in managing certifications it has a good chance to win the market for agile certs with its new offering. Of course it doesn’t change much for us, practitioners, ideology-agnostic pragmatic managers who will just continue to employ the best methods we know to get things done.

Obviously, I needed a webinar solution to do this. Choosing which one of the many webinar/web meeting platforms available to use turned out to be quite a process. I share it here to help others who may have similar needs.

My requirements were pretty simple (or so I thought):

• good for both demos (showing how to click around Banana Scrum) and presentations with traditional narrated slides (for the Scrum group),
• easy to use for both presenter and participants,
• recordings of good quality, preferably editable with standard tools, for subsequent posting on the pages,
• event management (registration form, sending people e-mails with calendar attachments, links etc.),
• cheap.

All in all I’ve looked at following platforms:
- Cisco’s WebEx,
- DimDim,
- Microsoft’s LiveMeeting,
- Cytrix’s GoToWebinar.com,
- Adobe Connect Pro.

I already evaluated WebEx back in 2006. Back then I even signed up for a paid account and had major problems with it (it didn’t work on a Mac, poor sound quality, didn’t have dial-up lines in CEE etc.). Since then it is said to have been improved technically a lot – the problem is it is way too pricey for a single host of small events (<100) like me. After looking at the prices it I didn't even bother to register for a demo.

I also looked at Dim Dim briefly. I even registered for a free demo, but the presenter UI hanged twice and I did get 500 errors when trying to access meeting organizing panel a couple of times I gave up on them. I didn’t even run real webinars on it – didn’t want to fight with technical problems while having real participants on line. So Dim Dim is a nice name but it needs a lot of improvement – as of now it is technically not reliable enough to be even considered.

Finally, I did sign up for free trials of Citrix’s GoToWebinar and Microsoft’s Live Meeting and I’ve run a couple of real webinars using each.

The main difference between the two is that GoToWebinar is a simple screen share, while Live Meeting allows also content (PowerPoint presentations, pdfs, images) to be pre-uploaded on the site before the webinar. The uploaded content is then processed by Live Meeting servers, scaled and (I think) pre-downloaded and cached on the client.

The effect is very good – as a presenter I can switch slides back and forth, and with almost no delay they switch on attendees’ computers without any loss of quality etc. And if I need to demo something I still have the option to share my screen or just one window etc. Sound quality was also very good and while files produced when recording were huge they could be easily processed with various free tools.

What I liked about GoToWebinar was the overall simplicity of the UI of both the site and the presenter toolkit. You can pretty much start using it within five minutes without reading manuals or watching training videos.

The Live Meeting’s admin UI is so ugly and unintuitive it reminds me of the very early web apps from late nineties. It is not easy to use all the power Live Meeting has with its horrible UI. In contrast, with GoToWebinar’s few features everything is simple and easy to set up. I think that despite Live Meeting’s technical superiority GoToWebinar would have won this contest if not for the price.

GoToWebinar is much more expensive than Live Meeting, even taking into account that you have to purchase a minimum of five Live Meeting accounts. Those five Live Meeting accounts still cost less than one GoToWebinar account. And all of this provided you won’t exceed 100 people on your event, if you do GoToWebinar pricing goes off the scale into thousands of USD. I don’t think that just having a slicker UI warrants charging such premium prices, especially considering the very limited feature set of Citrix’s solution.

So, I’ve almost purchased Live Meeting subscription, but then I discovered a huge problem with it which I should have expected from the start: it works only with MS Windows, even on the client side. There is a Java-based web client, but it doesn’t provide audio on a Mac and doesn’t run at all on Linux – so I don’t even why Microsoft bothers with developing it.

Of course, this is normal for Microsoft (they assume everyone uses Windows), but has proven to be a huge problem for me as I run into complaints from Mac and Linux users after the very first webinar I hosted using trial Live Meeting account.

Enter Adobe Connect Pro. Based on Flash it works on all platforms where Flash does, so it solves that problem. It also offers a quite rich feature set – screen sharing, pre-uploaded content & presentations, webcams, chats, live polls, breakout rooms etc. It has no meeting management at the price level I was looking at (less than $100/month), but this can be easily done with simple Google Spreadsheets forms or other tools.

It takes a while to get used to the Adobe Connect Pro’s presenter UI though, where “templates” serve the purpose of changing the screen layout for participants. Also, because of the way the presenter display is structured it is not easy to present from a device with a small screen – like one of those smaller laptops or netbooks. At least a 15″ screen is needed to run the show with any comfort.

Where I run into problems with Adobe was when I finally decided to purchase a subscription. The tool does propose a competitively priced plan ($45 / month) – the problem was it didn’t say anywhere how many meeting participants this plan allows. During my demo period I filled in their “contact me” form twice, but no one ever reached out to me – maybe because I’m not located in the US. Finally, with my webinar approaching fast, I called the local Adobe help line – there I spent about 20 minutes talking to a lady who promised to find out for me how many participants I do get for my $45. Finally I did get that information on the next day via e-mail, but it was already past my scheduled webinar which I had to run with… GoToWebinar (again, Linux users complained, but at least Mac fans were happy!).

To wrap it up: I ended up choosing Adobe’s solution. It offers best feature set for the price at my intended audience size (less than 100 people) and has no compatibility problems of other solutions. High marks for GoToWebinar/GoToMeeting for simplicity but their pricing is too high. If I wouldn’t have to support Mac and Linux users I would probably stick with MS Live Meeting – most powerful of them all, despite its ugly looks.

Updated on 2010-12-08: In the end it turns out I can’t buy Adobe Connect Pro – the competitive price they offer – $45 – is only available in the US and Canada. No way to purchase it on-line from Poland. So for now I keep on using the GoToWebinar.com which doesn’t treat me as a second class customer just because I happen to live outside of the US.

GMail’s “Priority Inbox” is basically a spam filter in reverse. Rather than trying to guess what is junk it tries to guess what is it that the user would really like to read. Great idea – and pretty well implemented.

I was already using a GMail extension called “Multiple Inboxes” so my GMail screen was divided into three regions: the inbox, just unread e-mails and starred e-mails. Priority inbox plugs right into this set up and creates a fourth region – e-mails Google’s filter “thinks” I want to see.

Since I still keep on using an e-mail client (Thunderbird) with my GMail accounts I was glad to find that the “Priority Inbox” is also exposed as an IMAP folder.

So far I’m really enjoying this new feature. Even though it makes me more addicted and dependent on Google’s GMail service it came at exactly right time for me.

I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.

This should be obvious in the context of looking for ways to better run projects, but clearly it is not. The world of agile is full of divisions, bickering and discussions that remind me of good old days of comp.os.advocacy. As Jesse points out, even the thought leaders of the agile community practice very little collaboration that is the cornerstone of this whole approach. Why?

I think there are two reasons for this.

First, for some agile – or, worse, just one flavor of it – has become something akin to a secular religion that gives their lives sense and meaning – the one and only true way to not only run software projects, but also “transform the world of work” and people’s lives worldwide. It doesn’t matter if this attitude is true or faked – believers will fight with each other over slightest details always defending their chosen flavor of agile. They will also savagely attack anyone who dares to suggest agile is just a tool.

Second, once money is added to the mix things are bound to get hot. People have built their livelihoods around teaching and promoting certain “labels” and, naturally, they will fight to protect what they consider to be their turf. This is exactly same reaction as the one we are getting from “traditional project managers” when promoting agile – they feel their jobs are at risk from methods with no room for someone that will tell workers what to do.

Both attitudes are normal and very human indeed, however they should not shape the world of agile. I think most of us – people involved in agile – want to get things done. I’m enthusiastic about Scrum not because I think it will put the whole world as we know it on its head – but because I know from first hand experience that Scrum simply works on software projects. I’m pretty sure there are projects where it would fail – and I would use other, more appropriate methods there.

I’m sure there are more pragmatists like me and it is a good thing that their voice is heard. I signed the Oath.

It turned out to be an interesting experience. Since SA’s bylaws didn’t prescribe a process we should follow, so we had to self-organize and devise a process that would be – in our opinion – fair. It worked out better than – I think – anyone of us expected. We managed to come up with a pretty good selection pretty quickly with just e-mails and two confcalls.

The process was pretty simple – on the first call we decided we want to learn more about potential candidates who expressed interest, especially what they want to bring to Scrum Alliance, so we have created a simple questionnaire for them to respond to. Some obviously didn’t saving us work, but 17 people did submit responses varying in length. As it turned out on the last call all of us took time and read through those responses, some even more than once. Thus prepared we were able to reach a consensus during the second call and present a very balanced list of candidates.

Personally, when reading the submissions, I was looking for concrete vision and addressing SA’s real problems (damaging and unnecessary rift with Ken and Jeff, certification process in dire need of an overhaul – incl. the CST process, lack of vision and openness in what the board does, Scrum being pushed aside by the “Kanban camp’s” marketing efforts etc.) rather than general statements on promoting Scrum etc. I think a board member is responsible for steering the organization in a (hopefully) right direction, not for defining what is Scrum for example (“Scrum Guide” by Ken and Jeff does this well enough).

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the candidates that we selected – the list will be published on the SA site pretty soon.

Now it is up to members to vote and choose, keeping in mind that those two board members will have limited influence and can be outvoted by the incumbents anyway. However, at least they can probably influence the Scrum Alliance in the right way or tell the rest of the members how the board works or what it decides and why.

It is about time to reinvigorate the Alliance and save it from fading into irrelevance – which is what can happen if those pressing points I mentioned above are not addressed – so vote carefully.

Ever since “personal computers” (as they were called back then) made it to people in late 70-ies owners could load whatever software they wanted onto their machines. They could code their own, buy a copy or upload a shared (“pirated”) software. Whatever they wanted. No one knew what they have on their machines and no one could change that.

Apple’s model is that you can only get software from the central App Store run by Apple. Period. You can’t download off the Internet. You can’t buy a box at a media market nearby. You can’t use Open Source stuff from someone’s site. And you can’t make your own – unless you have another full-blown Apple computer and sign up for a special account in the Apple Dev program. That means your machine is no more entirely yours, it’s just a terminal to a store with shiny toys you have to pay for. And Big Brother Steve controls what toys are there.

This also affects the software business by introducing a new risk for software vendors. Normally your sales don’t depend on the operating system or machine maker. They can intimidate you, buy you out, introduce nasty tricks in the OSs new release you will have to work around, introduce their own bundled, free product to compete with yours (IE) but they don’t control your distribution. Host OS vendor could make your life harder but not kill you overnight.

Numerous times I’ve read complaints about Microsoft being a bullying, ugly monopolist – in fact I wrote a couple myself – but even in the maddest fit of furry Steve Ballmer can’t pull the plug on your entire business just like that. Steve Jobs can and will, with a smile. One day you might be selling hundreds of downloads of your app on the App Store and the next day your revenue stream is gone and your business with it. If that doesn’t make Apple an evil monopolist I don’t know what else they have to do to earn the title.

To be fair Apple didn’t invent this model. It was first introduced on a large scale by Amazon with their Kindle device. It is in fact a terminal to a paid library of books you can’t ever really own – you just rent them at a price to read them (I think Amazon’s stating that you “buy” them is misleading advertising). It is the ultimate perversion of the great concept of public libraries on steroids. Apple just applied that first to iPhone with great results and now it tries to do the same with computing. I’m afraid it won’t end with the iPad…

The thing is I can whine on my blog, and so can others, but this won’t change anything. The carrot, the bait is too big for both consumers and vendors. Consumers get easiest possible way to get software, vendors get instant access to huge market. So everyone will, sadly, play along. It could have been done better – for example through a community-run “App Store” or something – but for the time being the only thing I can do is buy a Linux-powered netbook and thus revert to my roots.

This danger for Scrum and community that grew around it over the years is not in the politics and debates, but in their fallout and the “me-too” frenzy (everyone desperately wanting to write and speak about Scrum and contribute or – more frequently – appear to): Scrum risks being diluted in the babbling of multiple voices each presenting his own version. If anything can be called Scrum and if things ranging from metrics to back rubs can be claimed to be part of Scrum, then Scrum ceases to mean anything.

Why it is a danger? Because Scrum’s biggest advantage over the years has been that it was a very definite, distinct method. Scrum meant three defined roles, three defined meetings (later expanded to four by adding retrospectives), two artifacts and a bunch of rules. There were Ken and Jeff and the organization they created defining what it is, there were trainings available and certificates (no matter how weak) backing them. It was therefore a “product”, something you could take, apply in your company and even check if it was done right.

Figuratively speaking Scrum was standing out like a rock in the cloud of “agile”. Agile is a philosophy, an approach – Scrum is something that is rooted in this philosophy you can take and use without becoming a philosopher.

And that clarity was, I think, the important part of Scrum’s success – the reason why most agile teams use Scrum now (or at least try to). If Scrum looses its focused clarity it would slide back into obscurity and irrelevance, back into the agile “cloud”.

Ken was trying to fight Scrum being diluted with his campaign against ScrumBut, and he is still doing it. Scrum Alliance is, as far as I can see from the lineup for the last Scrum Gathering, sliding towards doing everything agile, even everything “soft skill”. This is what community seems to like, maybe being bored with “pure” Scrum. But it is not what businesses will like when looking for methods to use to improve their processes. Businesses need solutions delivering results, philosophies they are less keen about.

In the meantime PMI is still the winner in the business world because it is still seen as a respectable provider of serious, business centered methodologies – and “fad boys” of the Internet Web 2.0 community are already abandoning Scrum in favor of Kanban or Lean. This may be good in the grand scheme of things, but if Scrum community wants to stay relevant it should refocus on providing the clear cut “product” Scrum was until recently.

To that end healing internal animosities, abandoning “soft skills” (including pure nonsense like my “favorite”: back rubs on daily scrums) and shelving dreams about conquering other industries would definitely help. Scrum practitioners and trainers should focus on helping teams deliver great software using Scrum – focus on what we should be able to do best, on our “core” and make sure we really succeed there.

It goes like this:

“The originality and value of the idea protected by an NDA is inversely proportional to said NDA’s length, penalties involved and insistence on signing it.”

In other words, on average, the more harsh and menacing the NDA is the less original and innovative the idea supposedly protected by it turns out to be.

Interestingly, not only average NDAs and ideas fall under this law, but also do extreme cases. For example, I remember one guy who had a 7 (seven) page long NDA to protect his revolutionary idea that turned out to be yet another social network (which, as far as I know, didn’t in the end see the light of day). Conversely, we had a group of high-profile European entrepreneurs who shared with us their truly revolutionary idea (related to multimedia) without even asking us to sign anything.

One may wonder why it is so, but for now I’m satisfied with having observed the pattern. Has anyone else noticed it?

As much as I agree with David’s insight I don’t think his version of the Scrum loop should be used to “sell” Scrum outside of our community. I very much value all the focus on teams and their improvement, but it helps to understand that this is something that is important (and should be!) only for us, sitting deep in the software development community. Clients ultimately pay for products, not for our methodologies, our teams improving or our overall well being and happiness.

Let’s take the case of outsourced development, which I know firsthand. Our clients pay us for the product they get from us, but once the project is done they are gone and I don’t think my team getting better on their project is something that even crosses their minds. And why should it, anyway? Unless they would want us to extend their product or start another project with us there is no benefit there for them. What really counts is whether the product we delivered will allow them to meet their business goals, their commitments – and their bottom lines. So when I work to convince them to forget fixed bids and go with Scrum I don’t waste the attention they give me on telling them that thanks to Scrum my team will get better.

But also if you have your own, in-house teams, building your product then in the long term it is that product that counts more than the teams. Why? Well, because not only your clients don’t pay for your teams, but for the product – you also don’t really own your teams. People change jobs (one call from Google’s recruiters to your best people can make your life very hard, believe me), get sick, even die – that’s inevitable. And (as I have learned the hard way) pampering your best people won’t prevent them from quitting – so is probably not worth it. In the long run – measured in years – it counts how much value your clients get from your product, not how perfect your team has become. If your team is getting better with every sprint but your product doesn’t sell you will hit the bottom hard sooner or later. Yes, your company may be then one of those legendary places that excelled technologically but are no longer around (Commodore, SGI etc.) which may be fine for the employees – they will just change jobs – but is not fine for owners and/or investors who will have to cover the loses.

So, team getting better is a tool, a mean, to get a better product, not the other way around (unless you run a monastery – there indeed work is just a tool for monks to perfect themselves spiritually).

Just to make sure no one misunderstands me: I’m not saying we should forget about team improvement, not care about our workers’ well being, career development etc. Yes, we should do all that and more, help everyone excel in what they do, make sure as much as we can people like what they do, heck, do it with passion and care, using fully their potential. All that is important and valuable. But we should not forget that in the end it is the client paying for a product who makes it all happen. And all our methodologies, frameworks and diagrams, all our “management science”, all techniques and research is aimed at improving efficiency – and that means, sorry to be blunt, getting better products faster and cheaper.

So I think the current Scrum picture is quite right in its focus on the product. And the message is spot on. It should be still used to “sell” Scrum to managers, clients and businessmen. David’s diagram is insightful and fine, but let’s keep it within our world of process freaks, agile activists and scrum preachers.

People usually start their talks with the notion that in the basic time&materials contract (the only truly agile contract if you ask me) all the project risk is on the client’s side and other contract types somehow move some of the risk to the supplier. Some go as far as to say that in a fixed bid contract (fixed time, scope & cost) all the risk is on the supplier side.

First time I heard this I thought this is clever, but over time it dawned on me that this “risk sharing” is as much illusory as is the security of the fixed bid contract. Here is why.

The single biggest risk anyone faces when they build something is that this something won’t fit the purpose it was intended for. Causes for this can be numerous: the needs might have been not understood properly or the idea doesn’t fit the market, the needs have changed or the thing built can’t be used because of defects. Finally, the thing being built may be delivered too late for it to be used as intended.

No matter how hard you try the biggest share of this risk is always on the client’s side, because it is the client who won’t get expected benefits in the end. You may add as many penalties and harshly sounding clauses to a very fixed and rigid contract as you want, you still won’t get away from this risk.

Imagine you’ve spent 3 months writing the initial spec, then next two months on RFP/bidding process, then contract negotiation, then two years on developing your complex software system only to discover at the end of all this that the product is not exactly what you intended, is full of bugs and is irrelevant because in the meantime the world moved on (the usual, flawed, waterfall process). What then? Yeah, you can sue the unhappy supplier all the way, but how much good will it do to your business? You can not pay them and even bankrupt them if they were not careful – will that repay all the lost opportunity? Make up for lost time? No way!

This risk is like a boomerang. I’ve heard someone define a boomerang as a piece of wood that no matter how hard you throw away from you will come back and smack you in the face. Very fitting. The harder you try to move away from this risk with complex contracts the more you will be hurt in the end. You don’t need rigid relationship based on distrust to tame this risk, you need an adaptive relationship with people you trust but can check all the time.

That’s exactly what agile offers: tight control of the product being developed in short inspect&adapt cycles. Instead of trying to write clever penalty clauses and waste time on lawyers clients can closely monitor the progress of the team(s) that build their software. They can spot any problems early on and correct them. Or readjust the backlog to changing situation keeping their product relevant. Or change the team.

I’d say there is way way less risk here. What clients pay with for this is their time and involvement – they have to see test builds at least every sprint, they have to speak to the team, readjust the backlog and overall stay on top of their project. But all the time they have all the tools and controls to navigate the project to a successful end. A fixed contract just kills all the outset.

So, next time when people will again define contract negotiation as risk pushing I’ll definitely interrupt them with my little boomerang analogy, because I feel we must all realize this is yet another (paper) illusion.

After the lame keynote session on Tuesday I decided to sleep in on Wednesday and I missed Harvey Wheaton‘s talk. It didn’t appear particularly interesting on the mini-agenda we were given, looked like another boring life story. My friend Tomek went in, and thanks to him I know I’ve missed a very interesting talk, a real world experience of implementing agile & Scrum in a startup company run by Harvey. Well, next time I’ll be in for Harvey’s talk.

Another session I attended was supposed to be about agile contracts by Peter Stevens. To the surprise of both speakers this talk was squeezed into the same room and time slot with Regina Mullen‘s talk. In effect both had time to speak, but not to take many questions from the audience (crowded, as usually, on chairs and in between). Peter’s talk was a mild disappointment for me. I had a chance to talk to him a few times and I read his blog, so I know he knows a lot more about agile contracting. Maybe he just decided to cut his talk to leave some time for Regina. In any case, I didn’t learn much stuff that I would not know before, but I think it must have been a good introduction for the first-time attendees. One thing I’ll remember from this talk is his story about Zurich trams contract. And it also reinforced my resolution to finally write about my take on risk in client-vendor relationships.

Regina’s talk was, on the other hand, an unexpected, entertaining diversion for me. Though she did include her life story into it (like way too many speakers at the Gathering), she did it in a gracious and humorous way and her thoughts on making lawyers use agile were quite interesting, even though I’m clearly not in her target group (IANAL). Nice talk, I just hope she has a chance to present this to lawyers and indeed change their ways. Part of the challenge throughout my career in the IT world, especially as a manager in the last couple of years, has been finding lawyers that would really understand what we are trying to do before helping us draft contracts, user agreement, licenses and so forth. We need more people like Regina there – I definitely would love to talk to a lawyer who does know outright what a sprint is.

After lunch the best regular talk to attend was probably one led by Nigel Baker (I suppose so, as I know Nigel – it’s not possible to get bored when he talks), but tired of all the Scrum politics over lunch I decided to go to the haiku workshop led by Liz Keogh. I was amazed by the results. I really did learn something new I didn’t know before, and it was really easy. It took Liz a couple of minutes to get us to write haikus, and since then they keep on popping up in my mind on their own. Two examples of the ones I did and really like:

Worn green carpet
carries us all patiently.
Thunderstorm!

Engulfed in our own little worlds
between iPod earbuds.
Autumn leaves.

(Haikus composed during the workshop and sent in afterward can be read here).

I resolved to try and write at least one per day. I think they are more than a diversion – they are a great tool to awaken our pattern-matching R-mode processing (read Andy Hunt’s book for more on L&R-modes). Haikus being by definition based on surprising matches can increase creativity by encouraging the R-mode “search engine” to produce more unexpected matches, useful not only for more haikus.

The event ending session was a big surprise. I expected some energizing talk, so I took out my camera to record it. Instead what happened was that after some small talk and a round of due thanks to different people by Tom Mellor a “wave” exercise was performed. It was so jawdroppingly stupid I thanked God I had my camera out so I had a good excuse not to participate in this idiocy without attracting attention. I kept on recording though and I wonder now whether I should put up this video or not, as I’m afraid it could only damage the reputation of the Scrum Alliance.

Interestingly, most people I talked with afterwards agreed it was stupid, but during the round after the “wave” they said BS like “powerful” or “energizing” – only me and one other guy were honest enough to say it was “silly”. To me it was a clear example that whoever was supposed to lead this session just didn’t have anything meaningful to say, so came up with this thing instead.

I think this failure illustrates a deeper problem Scrum & Scrum Alliance has. Scrum is part of the IT industry’s response to the failure of traditional, waterfall based project management in software development that that is called “Agile”. Scrum is a simple framework for managing requirements, work and team during software development projects. Yes, it doesn’t say anything about “software” as such, but this is where its roots are. In other words – it is a way to manage projects (because, I’d argue, Scrum projects are still managed, even if there is no Project Manager as such) created in our industry.

Now we have to decide – is Scrum just that or is it something more? Should we focus on merging Scrum with technical practices in teams and keep focus on software (which is what Ken Schwaber seems to be doing with his new training program aimed at developers)? Or should it be treated as a industry-agnostic project management methodology that could take on PMBOK, Prince-2 and other heavy methodologies everywhere? Or maybe should it be part of the soft-skills portfolio for coaches, HR etc. together with “waves”, collaborative drawing etc.?

The problem here is that traditional management methods work quite well in heavy industries they evolved in, and there are lots of very good people in the soft-skills department – usually better than ex-software developers discovering their “emotional intelligence”.

In any case a choice must be made before Scrum dissolves into mist. Ken, Jeff and Mike did agile movement a great service by laying out Scrum as a clearly defined, tangible thing as opposed to agile’s vagueness. Scrum was something anyone could start using and derive benefit from following its simple rules – because even ScrumButt was giving more productivity than waterfall. That’s why it was so successful – exactly because of its sharply defined edges and simple clarity. Now this clarity can be lost amidst empty motivational talks and silly exercises lifted out of kindergarten.

I know what I wrote will be harsh for some, but well, that’s what I think. And being a nobody in this movement, a nobody living in a place most of you never heard of I can afford the luxury of being honest. And of course one thing will stand: Scrum itself and other agile methods and practices. No matter which Alliance trademarks what you can use them and be better off in your projects.

To close on a more optimistic note some appreciations:

• Thanks to Boris Gloger and his team: they not only provided real, freshly pressed juice and real, freshly brewed coffee but also filled in where organizers couldn’t in a truly agile fashion. Their idea of just copying the materials on pen drives and handing them to people at the end was brilliant. Plus he paid for the beer on Monday.
• Tobias Mayer: another true agilst, when everyone complained about the lack of Open Spaces and the board said they will make them next time Tobias singlehandedly organized “guerrilla Open Spaces” the very same day greatly enhancing the Gathering experience for many. Also, it is Tobias who told me to go to the haiku session instead of political discussions – thank you!
• Howard Sublett and Cory Foy: Scrum Alliance needs more of you guys, not just 5 hours / month.
• Stefan, Robert and other German friends who helped me find my way around Munich and explained some customs during the beer evening.
  Everyone I talked with during the breaks.

Overall, I liked the event as a whole, I hope next one will be way better – and that clouds over Scrum Alliance’s future will be gone by the time we meet again “somewhere in Europe”.

(There will be one more post in the Scrum Gathering series – about Scrum Alliance as such).

First the talks quality is a bit lower than in Stockholm. Or maybe I did end up in wrong ones because I didn’t choose well. Nothing besides the talks titles & speaker names was announced so I could only guess.

Initial remarks by Jeff Sutherland were delivered with his usual zest, but seemed to be just an incremental update from his presentation in Stockholm and his other talks. Must have been quite interesting for first time attendees though. One thing I picked up there is that I really need to read the original Takeuchi & Nonaka paper that started all of this. And I think it is worth exploring what those guys are up to now. If their one paper started this whole movement, then maybe their other work is also valuable.

On to other first day talks: “Coaching Scrum Teams with a User Centered Approach” with Mike Sutton turned out to be much less interesting than I thought. Two things I picked up there were Prezi presentation software and a book about brain functioning – that is before I left 30 minutes into the talk. Simon Bennett did a much better job with his talk on applying game theory to agile contracting. Though his conclusions were certainly nothing new for me his exercises were interesting and kept the group involved. Also Roman Pichler’s talk was interesting, though his delivery style – slow, calm and quiet – is not what I like. He discussed anti-patterns for Product Owners – or common mistakes made by Product Owners. One point we didn’t agree on is what he called “bungee product owner” – I think I’ll write more on this separately.

As far as the first day goes, though, it was Mike Cohn‘s talk that was the highlight of that day for me. I recorded the whole talk and with Mike’s permission I’ll post it on-line when I get back.

Second day opened up with some guy from Sweden – Petric Palm – telling us his life story and showing quotations from famous people and nice pictures. Certainly not a keynote level talk. I used that time to do my e-mail.

Next, organizers switched sessions – the one I wanted to go to was replaced with a product owner panel discussion I wasn’t all that interested in. When I realized that I wanted to go to Erez Katzav’s session but the room was already so full of people it wasn’t possible to get in. More e-mail then plus an interesting chat with another guy who did not get inside for the Katzav’s talk.

After lunch finally the highlight of day two came: Serge Beaumont‘s talk on tools for product owners (tools meaning practices and mental tools not software tools or anything like it). Learning from the previous sessions I came 20 minutes before the talk so I didn’t have to sit on the floor. Serge talked about ways in which Product Owners can organize their work and collaboration with the team, especially around that part of the backlog that is not yet inside the sprint. Serge’s observation is that once team is running at high speed with Scrum POs quickly run out of backlog or they are not fully prepared at the outset. The cure is to define a READY state for items that can go into sprints – an equivalent of the DONE state at the end of sprint – then build a Kanban-based flow that feeds the backlog of READY items so that it is never empty. Great talk and I’m looking forward to seeing the slides posted.

Finally, the day ended with the Scrum Alliance board – or part of it – answering questions. I have to say that it was a depressing experience. Both Jeff Sutherland and Mike Cohn were not present, I think they have left earlier, which was a surprise. The four board members present were looking sad, devoid of energy and vigor as they sat collapsed in their chairs. Sadly, the Alliance’s support staff – Howard Sublett, Cory Foy and others – looked much more energetic and alert than the board.

Plus the style of board’s answers was like on a corporate meeting: very diplomatic, rather avoiding or deflecting questions than giving any straight answers. For example someone asked if the board will be elected by the membership rather than elect itself. The short answer was NO, but instead of saying so one of the board members went into a lengthy discussion which included a story about some football coach from his college or university or whatever.

In summary it is quite clear that the Scrum Alliance is suffering from leadership deficit. “Improvement communities” are a great idea, but they can’t be an excuse for lack of leadership. After all self-organization occurs around goals, and it is not clear what Alliance’s goals are now. This apparent lack of vision is normal after what happened recently, but it can’t be allowed to last too long. Right now everyone is, I think, willing to cut Tome & others on the board some slack and give them time to find the direction but this won’t last long.

Personally I think the Scrum Alliance should open up, especially to members outside of the “old boys club” (as someone called it), to move ahead. Pushing Scrum outside of software development is IMHO unrealistic and in places wrong. The Alliance should rather focus on improving the quality of projects inside our industry. There is still a lot to be done in this sphere. The complexity and importance of the Product Owner role, for example, has been only discovered over time. The problem of awareness in the industry that is reflected in everyone still wanting fixed bid contracts is an ongoing problem. I think everyone could add to this list.

Making the CSM exam a real test of knowledge as soon as possible would be the first step in the right direction. I think exams should be like PMI’s PMP exams – there are no certified PMP trainers, anyone can train or learn PMBOK on their own, but the exam itself is known to be hard and is administered in a controlled environment to ensure one can’t cheat with a book or search engine. Such a structure promotes honesty and certificate value plus it is much more open and fair. I think this is a good example to follow. In the long term a good structure of exams like this could even make CSTs obsolete – which would help the promotion of Scrum greatly. Right now the existence of this closed club with unclear entry rules is choking the growth, especially in the parts of the world where English is not the primary language.

To wrap up my rant a short list of organizational failures:

• venue: rooms too small, at times crowded – people had to stand in some workshops,
  
• lack of proper events folder or plan – short plan in the conference ID is good, but without a brochure with descriptions of talks and speakers profiles one is left guessing as to what talks are about, it is way harder to make good decisions as to where to go, amazingly this information was even missing from the Scrum Alliance’s web site even though all speakers did submit it,

• lack of Open Spaces – that was a great idea, one of the greatest advantages of Scrum Gathering in Stockholm, don’t understand why it got dropped,
• lack of free Internet – at 1200€ one could expect that (was fixed on the second day).

To ballance it with some organizationa positives:

• all most talks in English,
• food – good and abundant!

I think Nobel Peace Prize’s credibility is now completely gone as the committee could sink no lower. Giving it to someone just based on hope he will do something, just based on his slick talk even before he could really take any significant action, is so wrong and stupid it pains.

But it may be a good thing overall. I just hope the absurdity of this idiocy will help more people wake up from their media-induced slumber.

Ken Schwaber departed Scrum Alliance abruptly, most probably after an internal conflict over the introduction of the CSM exam and he is starting something called Scrum.org. Scrum Alliance is now led by Tom Mellor – a guy mostly unknown in the European Scrum community. And the Alliance announced exams will be introduced Oct 1st as scheduled, but for some unknown time everyone will get a passing grade, which basically is the same thing as before. Last Friday it was also leaked on a discussion group that a new certificate – Certified Scrum Developer – is not only planned, but already offered as a course by… Microsoft. Scrum Alliance representatives on the list reacted with surprise – at the same time this program’s description can be found on Scrum.org.

It remains to be seen how things will develop in the Scrum community. The whole exam fiasco is clearly a result of some internal infighting and it damages the Scrum Alliance’s reputation a lot. The introduction of an exam that is not really an exam and doesn’t prove anything is a typical compromise from the world of corporate politics, much worse than just another postponement. Unclear circumstances of Ken’s departure and his surprising new Scrum-related venture put more clouds over Alliance’s future.

But whatever happens out there amongst the Scrum gurus and luminaries (and whatever they will fight for – if they will) Scrum as a method – a simple framework to consistently deal with complex problems – is as sound and effective as it was before. This is what counts in the long run and what will cause Scrum, I hope, to continue to be adopted despite all the bad things that happen around the organization created to promote it.

UPDATE: Good news – Mike Cohn joined Scrum Alliance’s board! Now, I know Mike and I’m glad he’s back at the board.

Basically, Mr. Shermer thinks that people who believe there may indeed exist some secret groups – especially within government – conspiring successfully to influence politics, society and economy on a large scale are basically irrational idiots not thinking straight. According to Mr. Shermer such conspiracies are very improbable, because in a large conspiracy maintaining secrecy would be next to impossible. Doing that within government is especially hard, because bureaucrats are incompetent and stupid:

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

(my emphasis)

Seems like a very good argument: if someone famous for failing at conspiring says it is hard it must be true, right?

But, seriously: is it really the case? Is it really impossible to create a big, successful secret operation within government – and keep it so for a long time – because people will talk? Let’s examine this claim carefully.

First, it is absolutely clear that such a rule would apply at all only within the context of modern, Western democracies. In Soviet Russia, for example, everything was secret and classified by default, from genocide and mass resettlement of whole nations through the whole portfolio of weaponry development projects to civilian plane crashes. Same happened in Nazi Germany and routinely happens to this day in modern totalitarian states. Who knows, for example, what Chinese government is up to? Certainly not the Chinese people – or shall I call them ‘subjects’?

But even within the Western world large scale secret operations were successfully hidden from public for decades. My favorite example is the Ultra/Enigma case.

Everyone knows the basics – during the Second World War Allies were routinely reading much of German encrypted radio traffic and were distributing intelligence gathered to dozens of Allied commanding officers giving them incredible advantage over their German counterparts.

What’s interesting here is that after the war ended no one knew anything about it until 1973 when Bertrand’s book was published providing the public with its first glimpse of truth. Movies were made and books were written – including scientific research in the fields of history and military tactics – analyzing allied victories in numerous battles without that crucial knowledge. Amazing, but somehow for 28 years everyone involved, on both sides of the Atlantic, was keeping their mouths shut.

And we are not speaking here about a small group of people. Hundreds if not thousands were involved in the operation and knew the Ultra secret. This includes the Bletchley Park staff of a couple of hundreds cryptologists, analysts, technicians and clerks, then hundreds of soldiers in the SLU units distributing the information to commanders (and taking every dispatch back!), commanders themselves and numerous politicians and intelligence officers both in the UK and the US. Not one of them spoke about it for 28 years after the conflict was over.

This makes it even more interesting. It is easier to understand why everyone involved was not talking while the war was ongoing. All were in the military, penalties for loose talk were harsh, press was censored anyway – plus all involved did understand their mission was important and didn’t want to compromise its security. But why after the war? Especially 10 or 15 years after? Germany was divided, part of it was already considered an ally in the Cold War. But somehow no one said a word.

Amazing, isn’t it, Mr. Shermer what Her Majesty’s government was able to do? Maybe they were not as inept as Mr. Liddy?

But even in the US some bureaucrats were much better than Mr. Nixon and his staff at hiding secrets. Let’s just take the case of NSA. NSA – arguably the biggest sig-int organization in the world – was officially created by Harry S. Truman in June 1952. Again, not only the general public, but also large parts of US government – including the US Congress – didn’t even know this organization existed yet alone spied on Americans until 1975 Church Committee hearings. And we are not speaking here about a small organization – NSA employed thousands and its operations spanned the globe with listening posts in Australia, UK, Turkey and other places.

I think those two examples show very well that Mr. Liddy is wrong and so is Mr. Shermer. Conspiracies can be pulled off by government agencies without being compromised for quite a long time even in Western societies of recent time.

Someone may say that both cases are from the secretive field of cryptology and military intelligence. Can there be conspiracies of a different type – ones with political and social agendas on huge scale?

History, again, serves us with an excellent example – Soviet Union and unprecedented social engineering that took place there was exactly a product of such a successful conspiracy. Lenin and his pals were able to use destabilization of Russia following the First World War to grab power, ruthlessly eliminate opposition – and then implement the crazy social agenda they all firmly believed in. No place to explore the details here, but it is a very interesting story in itself.

And yes, it can happen again. One of the fallacies of the modern world is to think that old problems of humanity – wars, dictatorships, cruelty etc. – are a thing of the past, because we are modern – mainly more technologically sophisticated. But technological advancement doesn’t change the human nature which remains strikingly unchanged through recorded history (which is why Greek tragedies are so understandable to us thousands of years after they were written) – it just makes the damage we can potentially do bigger.

Does it mean that 9/11 was an “inside job”? No. It just means arguments of those who say so should be looked at and discussed, not them snared at just for asking questions or having doubts about the official version. History shows that a conspiracy on such a scale is hard to pull off and thus improbable – but definitely far from impossible. But first, of course, one has to know history – without that it is easy to fall for naive simplistic arguments like the one made by Mr. Shermer. Ignorance strikes indeed deeper than paranoia…

On Jun 24^th our daughter, Amelia Weronika was born. She is the sweetest thing that ever happened to me, and both me and me Joanna are very happy that she’s with us.

Since her arrival I have less time to write but more motivation to better use my time, so this blog will be still alive. Stay tuned for more articles on various topics as usual.

Every new programming paradigm or idea coming along since computers crawled out of government labs had “better quality” as part of its promise. Yet somehow we are still surrounded by unreliable, poorly designed software. Making it more graphical didn’t change it fundamentally. And sadly web applications are no exception.

At first at least “hard to use” part was partially solved, because the web interfaces were simple which made them clean and easy to grasp. It also made them fast. Now, however this is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Modern web apps are full of heavy graphics, JavaScript is being pushed to the limits of its capabilities and the result is heavy UIs browsers barely cope with. Opening a few of those modern web apps in Firefox makes it the most CPU consuming process on my system, usually eating lots of memory (and frequently leaking). Frequently sites display errors, get overloaded or otherwise malfunction.

Why it is so? Let me offer two reasons, that don’t exclude each other so both can be true.

First, I think we are all spoiled by the computing power and memory getting cheaper and more abundant. In the past machines changed very slowly. For example the C64 I mentioned didn’t change at all over a period of 10 years, yet software for it did improve immensely. Programmers studied the hardware and by late eighties made it perform things the machine’s original designers didn’t think it would be capable of. That was truly pushing the limits.

Now if an application is a resource hog it is easy to just give it enough to make it run. That’s why each release of MS Office is slower and bigger than previous with marginal functional improvements. Same happened to web browsers and almost all desktop apps. Increase in speed & memory sizes mask the fact that today’s desktop apps are usually bloated and slow, but only to a certain degree. The subjective perception is that they work as fast as the previous generation and everyone accepts that – even though everything should run way faster considering how much the machines this software runs on improved.

Clusters and now cloud computing made it an easy solution for server-based software too – and that’s what web apps are apart from the UI. You can throw a whole bunch of servers on the problem and forget about optimization. And this works, also economically. Sites still make profit on mediocre codebases, because the computing power is cheap and because usually very little depends on web apps. If they break or run slow no one dies and nothing of importance is lost – the impact of low quality is not easily seen. So, there is no economic incentive to improve.

This and overall acceptance of software as buggy (effect of customers being trained for decades to accept dismally poor software from Microsoft) causes buyers of software products to accept low quality as the norm. They learned to live with it and it takes some effort to bring quality into their prospective at all. In fact, I think even some of our clients don’t appreciate all the effort we put into optimization and testing because they don’t see benefits of having a piece of web software that is robust and scalable.

Second, I think many of the web applications today are created by people with little or no education (formal or otherwise) in computer science as such. I think many of “cool web 2.0 kids” have no idea how the computers they use really work inside. I don’t think many of them know for example what preemptive time sharing is let alone are able to calculate the computational cost of the algorithms they use (if they know this difficult word with Greek roots). Very few know and understand the operating systems they use or ever heard of highly available design and other such practices.

Tim O’Reily’s predicted in late 90-ies that easy web technologies (which back then meant PHP and early CMSes) will allow people with little or no technical knowledge to express themselves on the web. And indeed they do – but much of this “creative expression” is, well, crappy software.

All this means that despite everyone saying a lot about quality there is very little push to actually deliver it in web apps. In fact, quality is squeezed out of prospective from both sides. Client’s don’t care for it when they order their web apps and developers frequently don’t have the knowledge necessary to deliver it.

The upside is that this will change as more and more will depend on IT systems that are based on web technology. Crashes, data loss or hour-long “scheduled downtimes” (like Twitter’s) won’t be acceptable. And also the buyers will with time bear the cost of neglecting the quality from the start and – learning from their mistakes – will insist on it in their next project. Which is great news for us, because we already have the knowledge and practices in place to deliver web apps that are also good software. In the meantime we have to keep on educating people that even in web apps quality counts.

First, it will be opensourced and based on an open protocol unlike most of Google products so far. Most corporations won’t use hosted web tools like Google Apps precisely because they value their data and want to retain control over it. They won’t use tools they can’t host on their own servers behind their own firewalls. So Wave is something that can get adopted where Google Apps (and all other hosted apps for that matter) didn’t stand a chance.

But even more important is the ability to integrate almost everything with Wave through extensions and bots. Here lies the real strength of Wave as a corporate solution.

Typically large businesses have already different specialized systems that are supporting their processes – CRMs, accounting systems, ERPs, logistics & order tracking etc. And much of the communication inside those companies revolves around same processes and data stored in those systems. Currently this communication goes in e-mails with data pasted in or attached as spreadsheets etc. With Wave it is easy to imagine integrating all those systems and creating a customized, comprehensive corporate communication environment. People would be able to talk and discuss invoices, orders, reports & other stuff right in their Wave inbox seeing up to date information fetched into context from other corporate systems.

Of course, it will take a while – Wave is still beta and protocol to connect different Wave servers is still being developed. There are issues to fix before Wave will be used and then it will take a push from both corporate IT and companies like us to create all the integration, build extensions, robots etc. But we are definitely seeing something very interesting here. And we are eager to deploy it.

I started with finding out how much energy we really get from our nearest star – the Sun. It turns out there is a number known as the solar constant which describes exactly this and it was measured to be 1368 watts per square meter (W/m²).

200×200 miles is 40,000 square miles, or 103,684 square kilometeres, about 5 times the size of Wales. If we compute the potential power using the solar constant mentioned above we get 141.8 TW (tera watts) from this area. The total energy consumption of the world is estimated to be 15 TW (tera watts) – so far so good.

However, the solar constant is the energy we get from the Sun as measured in the orbit above the atmosphere. As long as we don’t consider energy collecting satellites we have to compute further. At ground level not only absorption and reflection by the atmosphere has to be taken into account, but also the fact that due to Earth’s rotation any given point on its surface is in the dark (not getting any energy) roughly half of the time.

The number we get when we factor all of this in is 342 watts per square meter. With this our 200×200 miles square produces 35.46 TW (tera watts). But this still doesn’t take into account the weather and the variation of solar irradiation related to latitude. Most of the current “developed world” is in the areas north and south of tropics, getting less sunlight. Because of this we can’t assume it will make sense to put all solar panels at the equator. And even there cloudy days happen.

I therefore assume solar generation would occur mostly in the southern regions of the “developed world” and base calculations on this. Different values are published re. irradiation on the ground in those regions. I decided to assume optimistically that what really reaches the ground is on average 275 watts per square meter. (source, source)

But this is just a potential energy – next problem is how effectively we can convert it into something that is useful for us, like electricity. Part of this is that the numbers above describe total energy of radiation coming from the sun, which is distributed along the spectrum (see how), not all of which can be changed into electricity. The other part is the technology we have at our disposal and its limitations. Right now generally available photovoltaic cells operate at 30% efficiency, some experimental systems exist that can get up to almost 40%.

If we now take also this into account a 200×200 square covered with generally available cells would produce 8.554 TW, if we could get Fraunhofer’s cells working at 40% in quantity we would get 11.41 TW.

That means we would need just a bit more than a 200×200 miles square covered (1.31464 more to be exact) with Frauhofer’s high yield cells to satisfy world’s demand at 15 TW. In other words the area needed would be 52 586 square miles – or 229×229 miles square: about twice the size of lake Victoria.

Now, I wanted to check my computations to see if they really add up (this is where I discovered an error in my original post). I looked at solar panels available on the market and computed how much power would the give if they were used to cover a 200×200 miles square.

Let’s take BP Solar‘s BP 3125, to which I was able to get the technical spec sheet [PDF]. According to it this panel produces 125 W of power from 0.876 square meters of cells (36 square cells). That means it generates 109.51 W / m2. If we were to cover our 200×200 miles square with those panels we would get 11.355 TW.

Of course this panel generates this amount of power only if exposed directly to sunlight, which means in reality such an array would produce less power due to Earth’s rotation (it would spend some of the time in the dark) and weather fluctuations. However, amazingly the computations above confirm we would need just a tiny part of the Earth’s surface to produce all the energy we need without any kind of emissions (except those made when making the panels and soldering them together).

The interesting question is then: why are we not doing it?

One frequently mentioned problem is the price of the panels. The cost per installed watt is estimated between $7.5 and $9.5 (source). Let’s assume it at $8 – that would mean 120 US$ trillion to replace 15 TW of power we need. This is almost 15 times the current official US national debt. Even at the current levels of US$ loss of value it is still a huge price tag.

However, no one would expect US to pay for all of it (even though US has been consuming most of oil and is consuming most of the energy). If we spread it amongst all industrialized nations of the globe it should be doable.

Another problem could be availability of raw materials and energy needed to produce required quantities of those cells in the first place. But this a question for a separate different article.

This article existed here for a couple of days in a completely different version based on computations which were based on an error. Interestingly, no one noticed until I started to check them again by computing backwards – that is by taking a real, available solar panel and computing how many watts of energy from square meter it can deliver. Sorry for any confusion caused.

The last episode covers the FOWA conference we both attended that I have blogged about last week.

First, it was hard not to notice the contrast between this conference and the world outside. Ireland is getting hit hard by the crisis and it shows. Taxi drivers were protesting the day we arrived and those that drove us around explained why: they are squeezed hard because demand for their services plummeted and supply skyrocketed as people laid off elsewhere try to earn a living turning their cars into taxis. Everywhere we went we have seen other signs of the crisis – like 1 Euro burgers advertised at McDonald’s. Walking the streets in Dublin you could smell the stale air from the burst bubble.

Enter the conference (ironically hosted in a trade unions building) and you are in a different world. The optimism was maybe not as exuberant as just two years ago, but still defiantly present. That is good – because we’ll all need liberal doses of optimism in the coming months and years. However, an event like this could have been a great moment to discuss how this industry should prepare to weather this coming storm – or even profit from it.

And prepare it should. The fact is that with angel investors disappearing and VCs getting tougher the (all too frequent) usual path to stardom and riches – develop an app, usually free for the end users, sell most of your company to the VCs, who will float it on the stock market, which will allow you to profit immensely from the 10% stake VCs left you with leaving the task of figuring out how to make your app profitable to someone else – is gone for good. And as more and more people get laid off (unemployment in Ireland is officially reaching 10%, so it is in the US) things like yet another social network won’t be high on their priorities.

But that just means only really good and useful ideas, applications people would like to pay for as users, things that will really help people (like, say, innovative job sites) will make it. I waited for the reality outside the conference room to be discussed – and I was sure I will wait in vain when finally at the very end David Heinemeier Hansson took the stage and told the audience few words of truth.

He told them, that days of counting on VCs to give you money for your cool but utterly useless idea are over. That you have to provide valuable service to users that you yourself would be willing to pay for. That what you are doing is a business for God’s sake and you should think of it as such. That you have to contribute valuable stuff to the community and world at large to earn recognition and fame – and it won’t come fast. That you have to believe in your idea no matter what others will tell you. And that you have to work hard and persevere in face of difficulties to get anywhere – which is probably something most people miss when they want to build “next Google”, “next Twitter” or “next Facebook” (When I hear people saying they will build “next” something I roll my eyes).

To all this I’d just add: and even with all of this you can still fail. Brace for it.

That talk was for me one of the highlights of this event. I have never heard Hansson speak before and I was really surprised that he clearly was a guy who did not forget that what got him where he is now was steadfast hard work.

In an event like this many of those attending are wannabes that want to be as rich and successful as those on the stage. Good that someone with a cult status like Hansson reminded them it is not all rosy and cool – but that hard work and overcoming difficulty is how to get anywhere.

Another great talk on FOWA Dublin was exactly aimed at those who follow the success stories too closely – especially design their apps to mimic some other software. This may be a good idea, but usually isn’t and leads to boring software.

Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor of Contrast were trying to transmit exactly this with their impressively smooth and dynamic presentation. I don’t like the UIs they shoved in their slides – I prefer clean, minimalistic design, with no big graphics, no animations, no Flash etc. – but I think FOWA audience benefited from seeing examples of doing thing different. And from the Eoghan’s & Des’ general message: question conventions, question the “standard way” of doing things, question “design standards”, question them all the time.

But “question” doesn’t mean “throw away without considering”. If they are useful for you, follow them, but if you have a better idea – go for it.

Worth mentioning were also presentations on security (mainly for its delivery, as nothing really new was said) by Simon Willison and on accessibility by Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet (a very needed prospective on making the web open to those with disabilities, especially vision impairment).

Overall, this was a great day despite clear organizational shortcomings (crowded venue, rip-off bad coffee, flaky Wi-Fi etc. etc.). I’m sure Carsonified team will improve their events organizational side with time.

Other FOWA reviews:

• Dave Concannon’s very detailed review (will take half an hour to read ),
• Peter Szinek’s laundry list of all organizational shortfalls.

This situation has a broad & long term impact but in this article I want to focus on what it all means for our industry – the IT and especially software development.

Recessions and crises are a time of test. When markets contract only the best will stay, the rest will fail. In other words – those who swim faster and adapt better will survive the storm, those not moving quickly enough or in a wrong direction will go down. It’s not nice, but it is the way things are.

However, IT in general has many things going for it that make it, I think, less vulnerable and having better chances of going through this storm in good shape.

First, it has always been fiercely competitive and thus is more fit than others. IT is widely unregulated by governments, did not receive any protection or intervention and has been largely union-free. It has been therefore much more exposed to the free market than banks or heavy industries. Furthermore, we did go through our own, “local” bust – the “dot.com” bubble burst of about 8 years ago. So IT companies in general should be better prepared to cope with tough times.

But even more importantly as our clients will be squeezed by the same market dynamics of bust and recession they will have to get more effective in order to survive. And to do that they will need more technology, more IT systems to support their processes, more automation and more data analysis to stay on top of things. In short they will need more of what we deliver, not less.

This time, though, with forecasting the future more difficult than ever those systems will have to help companies cope with changing business environment – and that will be reflected also in approach to projects. So companies will look to develop lighter systems and do it as flexibly as possible. That means less willingness to commit to long-term projects and fixed contracts – plus less use of work-heavy technologies.

Startups are distinctly different from established businesses but for us at Code Sprinters they are an important part of our client base. In the coming year and onwards they will have a much harder time finding angels and VCs willing to invest in them. But that means only the best business plans will get funded – and that with this funding an additional pressure for good execution will come. Good will even more than before mean: fast, with good quality and elasticity.

So common theme here for all client groups depending on IT will be more effectiveness, better value and above all flexibility to cope with hard to predict changes.

Luckily for us all the IT did come up with a way to approach things exactly that way: light technologies like web applications, frameworks, open source components etc. keep costs down and make building systems easier. The whole family of agile methods gives much higher productivity plus flexibility to cope with change easier. In fact methods like Scrum and simple T&M contracts will shine in those times.

So the coming storm will be a huge opportunity for companies that – just like us here at Code Sprinters – offer agile approach to build web applications.

I know of course how this kind of argument is perceived: yet another marketer trying to sell his method/product/service by trying to link it to what’s in fashion. Crisis is in fashion now – just turn on a TV – so let’s sell agile as a the magic cure for the crisis. But I honestly believe this is the case and here is some substatantion to my claims:

• agile means cutting down on BS, so less overhead – and who would like to pay for unnecessary documents, work and meetings at the time when every dollar is turned twice before it is spent?
  
• agile teams are open to change – every sprint (2-4 weeks) client can change the project direction, which is a clear advantage at the time of instability when any predictions can be only very general and anyway uncertain,
  
• agile T&M contracts can be cancelled at any time – much more security at a time when budget given to the project today might be taken away few months from now,
  
• plus with an agile team even if you cancel the project you get code that does something, is complete to some extent – which means that even if cancelled early the project has high chance of brining value,
  
• agile teams are focused on highly important, high value items first meaning getting quicker to the point of system being usable,

• good agile teams do good software – that is well tested, well designed, so that it a) will continue on working and b) could be extended further by other team with manageable learning curve.

If we look at web applications we also see clear benefits, especially lower cost and faster development of specialized business systems, both internal and client-facing. I won’t go into details here, because web technologies have been the primary choice for new custom business systems for a few years now.

To sum it all up: IT in general is here to stay, as in these troubled times companies will need more computer-powered muscle than ever, they will need it for less and delivered in a more flexible way. Luckily, the IT industry – unlike, say, banks or car manufacturers – is up to delivering just that. Well, maybe not the whole IT industry, but sizable enough part of it to keep us going. Which is fundamentally good news to open the New Year 2009 with.

So – Happy New Year!

(All the points above assume you know how agile methods, Scrum in particular, deliver those benefits – if you don’t see our Scrum Resources page to get started. Next this month – Prophets of Doom.)

Basically, there are two ways to get employed by Code Sprinters as a developer: either you are an über-geek passionate software developer with projects to prove it or you want to become one and have what it takes (above all: a good mind).

If you claim to be first we don’t expect you to have any certificates or diplomas. Don’t even bother bringing any paperwork with you – we might look at it, but it doesn’t matter. What we expect you to have is projects. If you didn’t work professionally in the field (read: didn’t code for money yet) those can be open source projects or even your own projects done just for fun or learning that you are proud of and can show. Expect us to dwell on this during the interview and ask tricky questions re. languages, methods and tools that you used to make sure what your understanding is.

Few other bits here: if you claim you are passionate about a language or just interested in it expect questions about it on the interview. And nothing disappoints us more than someone who claims to love, say, Erlang, but can’t explain why nor say anything about it. And it so happens that our developers (who participate in the interviews) happen to have wide interests in the field and usually they know much more about exotic languages & technologies than you might expect. So don’t think you can claim you’re passionate about something if you aren’t – and get away with it.

One other point about being passionate: just doing your homework at the university won’t do. People passionate about software usually feel a need to code and enjoy coding more than what is required to get a passing grade on their studies. If you claim you’re passionate about, say, Ruby on Rails but all you did was a homework assignment with a friend in the “web applications” course are you really expecting us to believe you?

Now, you can view programming as just a job for the paycheck and you might feel doing it properly within hours is o.k. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but please be honest with us and don’t say it is your passion. Passion doesn’t just switch off at 4pm.

To be fair: all I wrote doesn’t mean that you can’t climb mountains, sail seas, play saxophone or have a life but just code 24/7 in a basement. In fact sailing and photography are the most popular hobbies in our team, but still each of us did code for fun. And I hope all of us still think coding is fun.

It all boils down to that little bit, I think. If you don’t know why coding is fun – don’t waste ours and yours time. I’d even say: don’t waste your life on something you don’t like, find something you love to do and try to get paid for doing it. You’ll be way happier.

But, as I have mentioned above, there is another way to become part of our team: have a willing mind. Again, just say so – and then we won’t expect you to have tons of projects under your belt or be fluent in Ruby, Python and SQL. However, prepare then for a ruthless check of your intellectual ability. You have to convince us you really want to become a good coder plus you have what it takes to actually do it. So this invitation is extended to those genuinely interested in programming and languages and web applications, just lacking work experience. It is not an invitation to all those that don’t know what to do with their lives and any paycheck is what they are after.

This might sound harsh – and it is. But sorry, reality is harsh and we have projects to complete and clients to satisfy. If we are to take someone on board with little or no experience to show we have to get convinced you have the brilliant mind we look for. Also because you will be most likely thrown into the water and told to swim with little assistance. Colleagues will answer your questions and will be willing to discuss stuff you’re stuck with, but apart from our well stocked library and the initial kickoff week expect little structured guidance. If that doesn’t scare you – click here.

Finally, there is one more thing. All I wrote applies to developers that are the core of our team. But we also look for a graphic/UI designer and a tester. In both cases all I wrote applies, it is just not centered on software. Maybe I’ll write about it at length another time.

Did my talk in the morning – it went reasonably well, did get some very good questions at the end. I think I could improve it now also after what I learned at another talk on the same subject. That talk itself wasn’t very inspiring but the discussion with other participants was very good and informative. Many companies now are thinking how to sell agile software development services, especially how to sway clients away from the fixed bid culture that is doing them no good. Another common problem is how to formulate “agile contracts” – that is contracts that are helping form this kind of relationship. I think we have pretty good standard agreement and model now, but I did pick up a few nice ideas from others that we could possibly use.

Jeff Sutherland had a very interesting lecture on “super-performing teams” that got me thinking seriously on how we could improve the way we measure our productivity. The thing he is saying – and many others have been for some time – that you can achieve more productivity while at the same time cutting the number of hours worked. Seems like impossibility, but from my own experience in agile I know this is true. I just wonder whether we did all we could in that area.

This was also my first time I could see Ken Schwaber in person. In the video from his talk at Google he comes across as a drill sergeant in civilian clothes – when you actually talk to the guy it turns out he is much nicer a person than that. Same with Jeff Sutherland, who also has this kind of military-”warrior”-like appearance – but at least Jeff was actually in the USAF once.

I’m overall positively surprised by the whole event, it will probably be much more valuable for me than Agile Development Practices was a year ago. I think I’ll seriously consider skipping this year edition of it.

This madness boils down to belief that there is no objective truth, and therefore no laws governing human societies. Also, only truth accessible to man is the scientific “truth” – that is current theory backed by empiric verification. And since there is nothing besides what can be seen or measured then there is no purpose whatsoever to life other than pleasure and work to get means for more pleasure. Therefore there is no solid ground to base any moral or ethical reasoning on, so basically “anything goes”: all is good and should be respected if those involved in it like it and feel good about it.

This madness leads probably well-intentioned and passionate people to methodically dismantle our civilization’s foundations and cut off its roots.

Western civilization was built on the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome and was deeply rooted in Christianity. In fact it was Christianity that was shaping West’s values and morality for centuries, that was literally driving it. No surprise here – there was never in history a civilization that did not have a spiritual core and that was embracing absolutely everything. Also, there was no civilization in history that was not protecting family by ensuring its special social status and protecting marriage that creates it.

It looks, though, like we are finally getting one. Supposedly rational modern liberals want to built an utopian civilization with no dominant religion, no set of universally accepted moral values (and any reference to supernatural reduced to vague, easily dismissible “spirituality”) and no family as we know it. Reading some of the voices in this discussion it seems there is nothing they abhor more than Christianity and its values and they strive with great success to remove Christianity’s influence on Western societies.

Given the historical evidence it is very unlikely for this experiment to succeed, but it will have its consequences. The problem is those consequences are not immediately visible, but take decades to surface. Some we can see already, but those are the consequences of changes introduced long time ago. We’ll have to wait, maybe a few decades, for the results of what is being done now.

We see exactly same things happening with the economy, where current crisis is a consequence of a systemic error made decades ago in the US. Of course, few notice because only few are really interested in history. People don’t see real causes of today’s problems because for the most part they lie in the past when most of current population was not even living. Ideas tried before are not recognized as such, but rather welcomed as new – and re-applied perpetuating the problem (like the infamous $700bn bailout).

One commentator in the discussion here, Kevin, said that “the ground which humans have built on for thousands of years is eroding out from under our feet”. Cheer up, Kevin – it is eroding, but for the most part only under the Western Civilization. There are other civilizations – in fact if you look at the map of the world most people live in other civilizations. And all of those civilizations with no exception stick to their traditions and values, which incidentally all include protection of family as the basic unit of society. Of those the Muslim civilization is most visible in the West, because it is in fact slowly taking over Western Europe.

So, the brutal reality is that if our civilization wishes to commit a slow motion suicide the world will just shrug. There may be a crisis when it falls but others will fill the void. In fact many around the world can’t wait when it happens, because they hope it will be their civilization that will be more powerful and influential then. Christianity will survive West’s fall as well, just as it survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the passing of the Carolingian Empire and all the kings and emperors that threaded the Earth during those 2000 years since Our Lord has been here.

Nothing of this is news – I’m not discovering anything in this humble post. Wise men saw this coming long ago – like Pope Pius IX or Oswald Spengler to name just two writing decades ago – and many after them. So the problem now is not whether this is happening – the big question we should consider is: is this process inevitable? Can this be reversed? Can Western Civilization be resuscitated? And if yes – then how?

But even if it is not someone who thinks the biggest issue of our time is to push for mentally disturbed individuals to be allowed to “marry” each other and thus helps West’s “slow motion suicide” in his small way is well… a fool.

For example all Google employees who are Muslim or christian or just believe differently than Mr. Brin find themselves in a strange position of working for a company that has an official position on a moral and political issue that is strongly against their own. One could say this is their problem, but I find this troubling.

Is it right for a company manager or even founder to impose his views on all of his workforce in this way? Isn’t this arrogance (as rightly pointed out by CMR)? After all he is not representing those people in any way when it comes to issues like this one. Would it be ok if Mr. Brin said that it is official Google position to support Obama or McCain for president? Would that mean he represents the votes of his employees?

Again, I believe private corporations should be allowed to hire whoever they want or do jobs/projects they want (so I find a recent case of prosecuting a photographer for not wanting to cover a homosexual “marriage” outrageous) or have their own criteria for benefits etc. But all this is quite different from publicly weighting on a piece of legislation pertaining to moral or social questions.

Next, someone called me paranoid for even suggesting that Google’s search results and not only results might be affected by their management’s views. A few words on this one too.

First, please notice that over-reliance on Google can affect your worldview anyway – which is something I wrote about long ago. Notice too, that Google is dealing with lots of content, they are not only delivering search – they also host web sites, they host videos, they host groups, they gather and process news (through news.google.com) etc. They have immense power over what is getting through to the majority of Internet users, especially in the English-speaking countries. This power goes unnoticed, people concentrate on press and TV – but truth is newspapers circulation is down, and TV is evolving towards Internet, not away from it.

Now, call me paranoid all you want, but I find this combination of power and strong political views troubling. I have no proof that Google is meddling with search results as such, but considering supportive evidence I don’t think one can rule this out and continue to trust them.

What supportive evidence? Well, there is even a page on Wikipedia devoted to Google’s censorship and you can easily find cases of troubling disappearances of content from Google’s sites:

• Censored by Google Alerts – Crossed Crocodiles on AFRICOM,
• Google Censors Media Outlet Supportive of UN Whistleblowers.

Then there is the case of Google’s refusal to run pro-life ads while at the same time running abortion clinics ads. This is clearly using the power they have over what contents get through according to their own beliefs and views.

Reasons why all those things happen might be different, but those are all examples of power Google has over content. As I wrote above – add strong opinions to power and trouble is likely.

To sum it all up: I think Mr. Brin has stepped over the line he shouldn’t have crossed. At least for me it means I can’t trust Google anymore to provide fair and equal treatment to all opinions in their handling of web content.

Of the sites I’ve found I reviewed the following: Cuil, Powerset, Clusty, Jux2 and Viewzi.

Of those I like Clusty and Viewzi most.

Powerset is merely an interface to Wikipedia, which is, I think, rather pointless as Wikipedia has a great interface already.

Jux2 simply combines results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search in one Google-ish list of results. It has one feature that can be handy for SEO types – it displays rank of each of the results in each of the original engines. But, I think, there are many SEO tools that do it much better than Jux2 and other than this it is unimpressive. Thumbs down on this one, too.

Cuil is interesting, however the results are ordered in a way I don’t get. How Cuil ranks the results (determines what is important and what is not) is clearly different from other engines, which is a big plus (shows some innovative thinking). I’m not sure, though, I like the effect, because what was ranked best was not what I’d describe as best. On the other hand on my test searches Cuil did return a few pages no other engine did, which is another advantage. This means I’ll keep Cuil in my Firefox search box for those extensive searches when I really want to unearth any piece of info on a given topic that I can lay my eyes on.

Clusty on the other hand tries to organize the results in groups it calls clusters. On some of my test searches they were helpful, on some they were meaningless, but I think they are a good idea overall. The tab with domains is a nice way to see at a glance where there are many sites about a given topic, which is also nice.

Clusty is merely organizing results from other search engines, but it offers different profiled searches – searches for jobs, blogs, images etc. – using different source engines, which makes results interesting. Good starting point, I’d say, when looking for something on the web – especially if you don’t want to see it through Google’s goggles (Google is not included as one of the source engines).

Last of the engines I reviewed today – Viewzi – is different only by its user interface. While it is largely Flash powered (which is a drawback) it is kind of cool. It offers different graphical views for presenting the results and really I like the Web Screenshot view. It allows you to see the pages found without opening them in other windows or tabs, which makes it much much easier to decide at a glance whether a given page is worth a visit or not. Nice for lazy evening searches.

Last but not least there is our own little experiment at searching – the Sprinters Search. While not as useful as the sites above – after all this is just a concept demonstrator – it shows what I’d like a search engine to do – recognize what I’m after and explain to me what it is, while at the same time return the traditional relevant page results.

In any case – it is good we are not stuck with Google. Let’s not allow our mental inertia and habit to use only them – let’s look around for search companies that just provide searches – not try to shape the society.

Here are some pictures from the post-wedding photo session.

Now, this would have been a great achievement in the early seventies or late sixties. It was a great achievement when the Viking crafts landed on Mars. It is nothing to be proud of that three decades later all we are capable of as a civilization is sending just another robot. This lander may be more sophisticated than the Vikings but it weights roughly half their weight (350 kg vs. 572 kg) – which means we can now haul less mass to Mars surface than 30 years ago! And it will have more sensors etc. but what it will in fact do will be a large repeat of Vikings – dig some soil, analyze it, snap some pictures around, measure the winds.

The sad fact is that no man left low Earth orbit since December 1972 when the last Apollo mission was launched. And even the probes sent are less numerous and smaller than those sent thirty years ago. The space programs of major Earth powers have went stale or were abandoned. NASA facilities in Cape Canaveral smell like an old museum and they in fact are one. Shuttles were a failure, even though no one admits that and no replacement is in sight. The most powerful launch vehicle developed – the Russian Energia rocket – was abandoned too.

I don’t know why it is so, why our progress into space is held back. There may be many reasons for that – ranging from social to all kinds of conspiracy theories. However, in any case I can’t stand media applauding menial landings of small probes as great achievements. This is not fair and real journalism as it lacks historical background that would put those “achievements” in prospective.