Posted by on Feb 25, 2010 in
J&C 
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Its official, I’m 31. Old? Nah. Mature? Hmmm, nope. Ready for what the next year brings me? You betcha!
Thanks to Jessie & West I got an amazing early birthday gift of being an Uncle. Thanks to Crystal, I’ll get an amazing after birthday gift of being a Father. What more could I ask for?
I’ve given it some thought and I’m hoping to that on top of the blessings of becoming an uncle and father, that I’ll be able to accomplish the following in the next year.
1) Be the best father, husband & friend I can be.
I’m certain that the next few weeks & months will be difficult with the lack of sleep and any additional stresses of becoming a new parent. I just hope that I can keep my head out of my ass and be patient with “Uno”, helpful with Crystal and dependable with my friends. I’m hoping all of you out there will keep me honest on this one.
2) Blog regularly.
I’m not going to say blog every day or blog once a week, because I know how spare my time will be. Regardless, I want to keep up this site as a way to keep everyone updated on “Uno” and for me to continue playing with all the fun technology in Wordpress. If anyone has tips on great Wordpress plugins or a lead on a great customized theme maker, let me know!
Continue reading Happy Birthday To Me!…
Posted by on Feb 9, 2010 in
Family,
J&C,
Shopping 
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What do you do when the love of your life will be carrying your child for 9 months? You make her a super sweet gift bag that’s what!
A few months ago I did some research and found a whole slew of recommended pregnancy & parenting gift ideas for women and ended up getting most of them and putting them all together in a stylish diaper bag for Crystal.
Continue reading Baby Momma Bag…
Posted by on Jan 12, 2010 in
Baking,
Recipes 
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I first became acquainted with the Ventura Limoncello brand at Twiistup about a year ago and have since kept at least one bottle in my freezer. I can vouch for the high quality of their limoncello as well as this recipe. I also got to break out my “new” cake pedestal that Crystal and I picked up at a yard sale. The recipe is rather involved, but the cake it produces is quite amazing and a wonderful spring/summer dessert.
Continue reading Ventura Limoncello Lemon Cake…
Posted by on Dec 21, 2009 in
Agile,
Conference,
LA,
Technology 
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The following are my notes from the Agile Comes to LA seminar on Thursday, December 17th 2009. The event was sponsored by AccuRev, Coverity, Electric Cloud, Rally Software, and BigVisible. The event saw leaders from each sponsor talk about how Agile software development techniques and the tools that support them can help you reduce risk, boost the productivity of your existing organization, and cut development costs.
George Schlitz (BigVisible): Agile Hits Ground in the Organization
+ Required, if humorous, reading: You Might Be a CrAgilist If…
+ Educate PMO on new ways to report progress (e.g., Burndown Charts)
+ Educate Compliance/Audit on difference/changes w/Agile
+ Ensure measurements reward the behavior that you want (How do we reward the new behavior?)
+ What does career development now look like?
+ Combine benefits of diverse methods: theory of constraints, lean & agile
+ Don’t measure individuals, measure teams and their success
+ You can’t really create an Agile standard for all teams to follow, just get started w/the basics and let the team determine for themselves what will work for them
Cliff Utstein (AccuRev): Automating Agile Software Development Processes
+ AccuRev – process driven SCM software
+ Product quality is fixed, business requirements persist (increase?), resources may be cut, little/no schedule relief
+ increase throughput by improving software development processes: automating & optimizing
Behrooz Zahiri (Coverity): Managing Software Quality in Agile Environments
+ The earlier you find a defect, the cheaper it is to fix
+ Cheapest to fix: in development; more expensive to fix: during integration; even more expensive to fix: during test; most expensive to fix: during production
+ Static Analysis – like a spell checker that finds your most difficult bugs
+ Coverity helps identify bugs for open source projects at scan.coverity.com, 11,303 defects have been fixed since March 2003
+ Coverity supports C, C#, C++ and Java
Martin Van Ryswyk (Electric Cloud): Making Agile Work
+ Continuous Integration = Agile; checkin & get instant feedback on integration problems
+ Fast builds (“espresso” builds), automated builds & test on-demand
+ Access for developers/QA/etc. to schedule builds, on-demand builds or stimulus builds
+ Auto build after code checkin to get fast feedback on build integrity/code quality
+ Include pre-flight tests to help reduce build failures
Alex Pukinskis (Rally): Case Study: Customizing Agile Tools for Project Success
+ Current fave book: The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald Reinertsen
+ Three meetings: daily scrum, scrum of scrums & regular retrospectives
+ New Rally build due out 12/19 will allow for setup of different types of dashboards built on roles (developer, manager & executive)
+ Remove obstacles for team members ASAP to limit overall delays
+ 100 day delay starts with multiple 8 hour delays
Additional notes from discussions:
+ Look into Bamboo to help with Continuous Integration/automated builds
UPDATE (7 Jan 2010 @ 12:32pm PST): I’ve added links to the presentation files.
Posted by on Nov 17, 2009 in
Agile,
Conference,
Technology 
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Last week I attended a PDMA LA roundtable discussion on “Transitioning to Agile Product Development“. The discussion was moderated by a PDMA LA board member and featured the following panelists:
I was hoping to come away with some lessons learned and best practices on transitioning an organization to an Agile one, but the discussion ended up being more of an overview of Agile as many in attendance were unfamiliar with some of the basic concepts. I did manage to meet some interesting people and continue building my local Agile network, but not quite specifically what I was hoping to achieve, silver lining I suppose.
Regardless, the following are my notes from the event. Note that I’ve tried to note the panelists initials where I can attribute my note to them:
- S.D. – continuous feedback from customers on demos; requirements flexible, time & resources/costs are fixed
- Basic tenets outlined in Agile Manifesto
- S.D. – 8hr workday creates a certain # of defects, 10hr workday creates 11x more defects than an 8hr one
- Comment that Scrum helped elect recent governors of VA & NJ
- The Standish Group found that 7% of features affect a customers buy/build decision, 13% will affect you vs. competitor decision, 64% no one cares about
- S.G. – Contracts can be written w/Agile adjustments instead of hardcoding features/cost/date, Mary Poppendieck has some resources on this
[Jeff Paul - here are some references I found: Agile Contracts by Mary & Tom Poppendieck, Agile Contracts pitch by Mary in 2005, Lean Contracts essay by Mary in 2002]
- Should be constantly improving processes
- Understand # hrs/resource & # hrs/sprint and estimate user stories better
- Check out Reed Hasting’s presentation on Slideshare
- Check out the Business Agility whitepaper on the Enthiosys.com site
- Assume a single project team to get to Agile process & show benefits to help transition larger org
- Get good coaching & training
I hope to attend more events in 2010 and will do my best to summarize them here… cheers!
