Summertime .. so all we do is to ski-roller. High time for the snow to come back and cool it down a bit. I found that pic a long time ago on I have forgotten what website.

(Source: XP-mailinglist; thoughtful post by Ken Schwaber) Scrum is purely a project/product management process that can be applied to software projects, hardware projects, marketing projects, and any mix of the above. It does not contain engineering practices or any specific work practices. It is instead a way to maximize the ROI of work.

People who use Scrum in software development environment often adopt one or more of the XP practices to improve the engineering practices of the develpment organization. Scrum calls for an increment of potentially shippable product functionality every iteration. This means a fully cleaned up, refactored, tested, documented ready to go increment. Many organizations are incapable of this. It is easy to bring in XP practices because they are excellent and both Scrum and XP are pretty radically agile.

Project managers using Scrum are called ScrumMasters to differentiate the type of work they do ... they facilitate, manage the process, and optimize the team's productivity. They don't tell the team what to do, nor do they set of pairs of programmers, or parse out user stories. During the iteration, the team is entirely self- organizing ... whether it is doing software development or anything else related to the increment of functionality they are building.

XP seems to focus on team productivity... doing something the right way and as productively as possible. Scrum does this some, but instead focuses more on doing the right thing, getting ROI from building the 20% of the functionality that is necessary to get the value and maybe not building the rest.

We've implemented Scrum without telling the customer, users, or stakeholders. We've done this in one day. We seduce them into iterative, incremental development where they collaborate with us on what to do next. XP seems to require a steeper implementation curve with less acceptance from the users and customers. Scrum can't keep the customers away.

Estimating is a subtle diffrence that points out the XP and Scrum dividing point. XP works hard to estimate very finely defined stories, and to measure and improve these estimates. Scrum keeps the requirements more broad, more in general user terms that are analyzed during the iteration. Estimating isn't as important. The team does what it can, and gets better and better at figuring out how much it can do each iteration as it learns each other, the business domain, and the technology - iteration by iteration. We care more about delivering business value that having defensible estimates, which become meaningless in a collaborative setting.

Scrum also has a formal methodology that lays out how to scale Scrum to any sort of project with any number of people in any number of locations ... all based on the optimized 7 person team. This is an important mangement requirement, but not so important to an engineering discipline like XP.

I feel we are blessed to have such compatible practices and processes to apply to our software engineering projects.

"The Linux Incompatibility list is a wiki project that attempts to document hardware that is incompatible with Linux rather than list what is compatible. In the wiki, it is possible to add alternitives so as to push hardware manufacturers to make good binary drivers, publish specifications, or even better, publish open drivers."

I asked David Guembel, one of the fathers of the software to email me a short describtion:

 On an abstract level, the idea behind our ganymede system is simple: To make
 an application run under Wine (a free Win32-API layer and Windows
 executable loader), it is neccessary to know what parts of the Windows API
 are actually required by that particular piece of software. Software has a
 modular structure - in this context, a module is a Windows executable
 (.DLL, .EXE, .OCX etc.) - and every module provides (exports) certain
 functionality and requires (imports) functionality from other modules.
 Thus, ganymede internally creates a dependency graph of an application's
 binaries. This method is static and does not require anything but a fresh
 installation of the software to be analyzed.

 Before x-raying a Windows application, ganymede parses and stores an
 analysis of the soure code of one or more Wine versions. It automagically
 determines the implementation state of the APIs provided by Wine. During a
 software analysis, the functionality required by the Windows application is
 compared to what Wine provides, and missing or incomplete APIs are
 reported. By storing Wine versions and the dependency structure of the
 analyzed applications in a database, automatic or manual re-analysis with
 different Wine versions is possible. Via the API ganymede itself provides,
 the collected data is accessible in several ways. One application of that
 API is our tool named sysiphus, which uses ganymede and a GUI-based
 approach to semi-automatically determine the best possible Wine
 configuration while providing for the possibility to re-use already
 licensed Windows DLLs to fill the gaps Wine still leaves.

1) Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.

2) Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.

3) Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.

4) Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Are you a slacker? So am I. Do you browse the Web, read the news, and write email all day in stead of working? So do I. Does it make you feel miserable and apathetic? Do you tell yourself to stop browsing the fucking Web and get some bloody work done? Do you have absolutely no discipline? I know your pain.

But recent technological advancements have made it possible… There is a cure for your disease!

Years of slacking at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology have resulted in a brilliant 461-line Perl script (which includes 130 lines of comments for free!) that makes it all possible! Your productivity will dramatically increase!

Today, I present Lockout: The Self-imposed, Computer-aided Work Enforcer. This program will help you get some work done by not allowing you to browse the Web. It won’t allow you to do anything but work. It’s a miracle! Your colleagues will respect you, your Ph.D. adviser will compliment you, and your boss, if you have one, will probably not notice the difference! It’s amazing! Scroll down! Read more!

Get the program

 I'm developing an executive dashboard, and I haven't been satisfied
 with the business graphics that are widely available
 (e.g. gauges, dials, stoplights). I decided to make a "Zen" version
 of a KPI status indicator, using as little color as possible,
 and incorporating E.T's innovative "Spark Line" metaphor for display
 of trends. The graphic below shows the proposed KPI display across
 the top of a browser screen with a descriptive example in the middle.
 Any feedback would be wonderful!

 Comments: Because of complex KPI names (e.g. This Week versus Last Week
 Sales (All Divisions), KPIs were labeled with Roman numerals.
 Balloon help could display the KPI name when the cursor brushes the
 KPI indicator.

link