It´s funny… In March 09 i wrote about a “work person” exiting the elevator saying that “Scrum doesn´t work on large scale Oracle projects“. Now, 9 month later i found myself about to try just that.

For most of this fall i have been working as the lead architect for a large (I call it large when it is designed to handle 45 000 000 transactions/week) national tracking system for the food industry in Norway based on the EPC IS standard. We evaluated the requirements and landed on Oracle as a technology partner.

After beating IBM in a close head2head BID race for the  system we ´re now ready to begin the project initialization process and we have through the whole process had the goal to use scrum as project methodology. We have put together a great team of highly skilled engineers and developers and we know that there are two fixed factors, price and project end date. This is going to be fun! Continue Reading

I have just been on summer vacation on Naxos in Greece, and i brought along uncle Bob´s (Robert C. Martin) book “Clean Code” to read on the beach. A couple weeks earlier i had been to NDC 2009 listening to him talk about what makes a developer or programmer a professional. This, the book  and all the other great sessions on code quality and agile development  got me thinking – what statement can i make as a programmer, developer and software engineer to show the world “I am a professional!” and what would be simple enough to not be constraining?

So, between the great door of Naxos and the mountain of Zeus i wrote down 6 simple guidelines in what i call “The agile developer´s manifesto“. These guidelines will help me improve myself as a developer, software engineer and solution architect.

These are guidelines, not rules that yield punishment if “broken”. I´ll try to follow them in my daily routine and also try to help others see the benefit of them. Continue Reading

The daily scrum

While taking a leg-stretch AFK at work today I was walking with the senior developer in our new development team for a startup project. I’m appointed  scrum master for the project and  asked him at what time of day would be  best suited for our daily scrum standup meetings, and he’s answer was “Let’s keep it floating and do it when everyone’s not bussy”.

I could not disagree  more! – Even tho we are a small team, with a base of  3.5 developers and one UX resource, inside  an environment where you almost have to hide while  juggling other departments or projects requesting you in meetings  and “emergency-just-fix-this-5-minutes-max-thingy’s” . Continue Reading

On friday a colleague of mine wrote a nice article about how to writing agile use cases after we had a discussion about how we should write effective use cases that also maintain the need for documentation.

 We are both excited about working with agile methods and we will be writing some articles in our respective blogs about our effort to “agilize” our development projects.