At NNUG on Wednesday (28 of February) I will have a talk
about CMA Contiki’s experience with Scrum after 2 months (3 sprints). Frank
Botnevik from Amitec will start the show with a talk about SOA, WSCF and his
experience around this. Go here
to register for the meeting. Hope you find these topics interesting and hope
I’ll see you there.

I’m using SmarterStats for my blog statistics and have been annoyed by two things for a while. I get no statistics for bandwidth and referers. I looked around on the web and found that these things are actually not logged in IIS by default. I found this article describing how to enable it in IIS 6. Now I had to find out how to do the same thing in IIS 7. As I and others have mentioned earlier, IIS 7 in Vista don’t have much UI yet, so most of the work is done in config files. I checked out the schema and came up with this:

<sites>
  <site
name=“Default Web Site“ id=“1“>
    <application
path=“/“ applicationPool=“ASP.NET 1.1“>
      <virtualDirectory
path=“/“ physicalPath=“…“ />
    </application>
    <bindings>
      <binding protocol=“http“ bindingInformation=“*:80:“ />
    </bindings>
    <logFile
logExtFileFlags=“Date, Time, ClientIP, UserName, ServerIP, Method, UriStem,
UriQuery, HttpStatus, Win32Status, ServerPort, UserAgent, HttpSubStatus,
BytesSent, BytesRecv, Referer“ />

  </site>
</sites>

After these changes I went into SmarterStats and found values for both bandwidth and referers. Fantastic!

I’ve just registered for a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
course in Oslo. The course will be held from March 28-29. See here for details.

The course is held by Danube
Technologies, the guys behind ScrumWorks.
If you haven’t heard about this tool I absolutely recommend you check it out. I
like the simplicity of the tool, the ease of use and it’s free. In short it has
a backlog and a sprint. To move items to a sprint you just drag/drop from the
backlog into the sprint, as simple as it gets. They recently came out with a Pro version of the tool that is not
free, but I haven’t tried this yet.

My team has just finished our first iteration (Sprint
in Scrum).
One of the problems we encountered at the end was what to do when the tasks run
out? Not that it’s a “real” problem, because there is always something to do
(outside the Sprint), but it feels bad. Is there a recommended Agile approach?
For us bugs was the solution, because somehow they’re always there. But when I
say bugs I’m thinking of the kind of bugs we already know about before starting
the sprint, not having high enough priority to be included.

My first thought was that the end of the Sprint would be a
great opportunity to make sure that the implemented features was truly finished.
Do an extra check and maybe some refactoring of the code. I was hoping that
this “extra” time would make the quality of our product better and we would
avoid the previous unavoidable: Rushing on to the next task without making sure
that everything works and ending up fixing and finding all the bugs at the end,
resulting in breaking the deadline because there are too many bugs.

One of the reasons for running in to this issue (running out
of tasks) was a mistake about our testers. We didn’t include them on the first
Sprint. Several reasons for that which I’m not going into now, but we soon
found out it was a bad idea. Ideally the testers should have started testing
functionality as soon as something was marked finished. This would have resulted
in some new bugs, which would have kept the Team busy and made the features
closer to the real completed state we were looking for.

So if any of my readers have anything to contribute with
here, now’s the time. Would love hearing from you. I know some of you are so Agile
that you probably don’t even read this bit because you’ve already started your
comment…

An office with a view…

I have moved myself into an office, away from the
development team! Me and the Team are not physically connected anymore. If they
shout my name, I will not hear them… If I call for them, I’ll be met by a
drumming nothing.

Here are some of the questions that went through my mind before
I moved into my own office:

How will I know what’s going on
with the Team? How will I get hold of the ideas and suggestions that spring to
life from thin air while the Team’s working? How can I continue to work and
still be influenced by the Team when I’m not there? Will I become more
efficient working from an office? Will anybody come to visit? Will I now become
that sad looking guy that people say “hi” to without ever getting an answer?
Will I gradually lose my motivation, start making other plans and ending up as
a consultant again? Will my company now raise my salary to the same level as
the guy who previously had this office? And the most important question… Will
the Team lose my respect now that I’ve decided to become one of “them” (the
suits)?

As you can probably tell this was not an easy decision for
me. I have done this in the name of science and with an open mind willing to be
convinced of something I don’t believe in. This is an experiment and here is a
glimpse of what I’ve experienced these last two weeks.

On my first day I wrote a note
saying: “I’m so bored, I’m so f#¤&%g bored. No one to talk to, no one to
bother… How am I going to work in these conditions?” And in huge letters at the
bottom it said: “Be strong!” In the upper left corner there was a very personal
note that I’m not going to tell you.

I used most of the day to get
comfortable in my new surroundings. Since I’m an architect I can’t live without
a whiteboard, so I found one and smashed it on the wall. I then removed some
drawings left behind by the previous owner’s children (nice, but I’m not quite
there yet). When I was about ready to start my day, it was over. I went home
and complained to my girlfriend.

I used the next few days to send
email to people letting them know I was sitting in this office. I hadn’t seen
many people since I moved, so I though this email would help. It didn’t. I just
had to admit to myself that I’ll be stuck here for myself for a while. I then
started to look at the current and upcoming Sprints (ref. Scrum) and
started to work. And the next thing I remember is that the lights went out. The
time was 6.30 pm and I was the only guy left. Wow! Where did the time go? I
went home.

By now I’ve started to notice
that the days are getting shorter. I don’t know how it happened, but this
office is in another time zone. I’m still looking for the knob on the wall to
slow things down, but it’s not to be found. I’ve screamed out loud “Beam me up, Scotty”
a couple of times, but nothing has happened so far. Even the hourly sessions of
fussball has been
reduced to once a day (at least I have one social activity). During a day I
have more visits to the zone, than I
usually have in a week. 

So am I saying that having your own office is nothing but
good? Have I found Mecca? Have I just been playing around for the last 10
years? Yes, I have.  It’s been fun, but
now it’s over. Time to grow up and become a responsible human being! Or is
there something more to this?

I’m an extrovert person (according to this guy) and I like being around
other people. If I’m alone for too long I get restless. This also means that I
like talking to people, being part of and contribute to conversations. This
makes a group of developers an ideal setting for me. So my problem is that I don’t WANT my own office, but I think I need
one. Based on my experience described above I think you understand why.

What about the rest of the Team? Should they have their own
offices to? First of all I think people
who like being more by them self and are not as extrovert, have more to gain of
being part of a team than I have. Why? I think they very often have better ability
to concentrate on what they’re doing, getting into the zone and still be able
to respond whenever their neighbor ask them questions or what not. And even
more important, they are able to get back into the zone again very fast. So
what do they gain from being part of the Team? One guy told me that sitting
with the Team is just more fun! It’s
motivating and you learn quite a bit just by being there. And if your team is
doing Agile stuff, I think it’s mandatory in order to get the team spirit you
need to be successful at Agile development.

One last thing about my role in the Team is that I’m not
very often working on stuff that the Team is working on. I do a lot of
research, specifications, talking to others about ideas and having my own
whiteboard discussions. In fact when I think of it I might be a disturbing
element for the Team, so they’re probably glad they finally got rid of me.

To conclude this rather long tale, I’m willing
to change my mind and admit that for me having an office is a good thing.
However, I still think that for a developing Team to have success they need to
be grouped together. Not necessarily the whole Team, but at least in smaller
groups.