Ágiles 2010 Report #04: More presentations and IBM Rational

Keynote speakers called the attention of most people, Kanban was one of the topics that was present in many sessions but there were also many other presentations that also disserve to be mentioned.

“Can agile be adopted in great organizations?” was one of the initial sessions and presented 4 different visions about different topics related to the question presented. Among them Tiago Garcez discussed about the importance of generating an environment of trust and collaboration and Martín Alaimo presented his experience with regards to evaluations comparing the well known by all set-personal-goals/evaluate-performance/act-based-on-results with an evaluation based on group results.

“Being Agile While Trying to Do Many Things At Once” by Robert Walsh presented the challenges he faced adopting agile in a company where many projects were executed simultaneously by the same group of people. Apart from developing functionalities to new products they were responsible of the maintenance of about 20 interrelated products that requested enhancements. In this presentation he explained how working in pairs, over the most valuable requirements independently of the project and making releases frequently permitted be responsive to changing needs from the stakeholders.

In one of the last presentations Omar Mezarina, IBM Rational Software portfolio responsible for Perú, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, presented IBM Rational.

 Omar Mezarina, IBM Rational Software portfolio responsible for Perú, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay

IBM Rational offers a collaborative environment that helps people and work groups to achieve their best performance. This environment is designed to interconnect development teams, that could be dispersed, and increase the individual and group productivity making possible the reduction of the software development cycles.

We talked with Omar and Armando Castillo. Armando had been in Uruguay the previous week working with TCS on trainings at KDC and after presenting details about the product recommended visiting http://jazz.net/ where more information, examples and trials are available.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM @Knowmax. Foto de Evelyn Veliz

Ágiles 2010 Report #03: Sufficient Design

The second key note speak was from Joshua Kerievsky and was about what he calls “Sufficient Design”. In this really funny and interesting presentation he presented different cases, with totally orthogonal contexts, that used to show we have to care about our clients needs to identify what really add value to them.

 Joshua Kerievsky starting his preesentation “Sufficient Design”

In order to explain what “Sufficient Design” is he previously wrote in a blog “When I consider the quality of software design on the products we write and sell, I do so from the dual perspective of business owner and programmer. As a business owner, I pay attention to our user's success and our revenue. As a programmer, I pay attention to our software process and code quality. Balancing these perspectives is a practice I call Sufficient Design.”

Find more details about “Sufficient Design” at Industrial Logic’s blog: bit.ly/9zPwKd

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM @Knowmax. Foto de Abner Ballardo

Ágiles 2010 Report #02: Kanban

Among the more than 40 presentations at the event there were many that mentioned or were dedicated to Kanban: “Aplicando Kanban numa organização CMMI3 “, “Scrum y Kanban más allá de proyectos de software”, “The Lean Pyramid – The Equilibrium of Agile Forces”, “Kanban Game” and specially “Catalyzing Lean: the value of creating a limited WIP society in your organization”, by David Anderson.

 David Anderson selling his book: "KANBAN, Successful Evolutionary Change For Your Technology Business."

The method was presented, examples about experiences were discussed and an excellent workshop using the “Russell Kanban Game” helped understanding the concepts simulating the daily challenges a project face and how to deal with them with Kanban.

As it is presented in an InfoQ presentation by David Anderson “Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer and innovates on accepted agile management practices by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence”.

In his Agile 2010 presentation he explained how important were the Lean concepts that people like Mary Poppendieck has been presented over the last years but how difficult was to conduct a strict Lean project even when most people agree with it philosophy. Kanban seems to be a response were Lean principles are followed and are easily adoptable to face project challenges.

  David Anderson in his presentation"Catalyzing Lean: the value of creating a limited WIP society in your organization."

More information about this may be found here: http://bit.ly/9buQ5P

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM@Knowmax. Foto #1 de Gustavo Quiroz

Ágiles 2010 Report #01: Artful Making

The event started with a key not speak from Lee Devin. He made a really interesting presentation about concepts he presented in his book “Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work”.

Keynote speak by Lee Devin

Among those ideas it was the importance of identifying which are problems and which are difficulties in our projects. In a previous post in a blog he wrote: “A problem has a solution. When engineers solve it, the problem goes away. It’s a question raised for solution with fixes, tests, and checklist updates. In contrast, a difficulty has no solution. A difficulty wants you to sit with it, address it, not solve it. Artists know this world of the difficult very well. No definitive fix, test, or checklist will suffice. Sitting with and playing with the difficult is simply part of the knowledge work of the artist.”

About working with difficulties he wrote: “We need to address difficulties not by point solutions, but by applying “AND” thinking, creating large containers of possibility. We must embrace the art of the possible. In the case of the actor, this comes in the form of rehearsal, ensemble and release that ultimately leads to the actual performance. In the case of the engineer, this work comes in the form of design spikes, set-based engineering, and tests. In both cases, experiments create space around difficulties. The art of the possible broadens the team’s or troupe’s innovative outcomes.”

More details about these ideas may be found here: http://bit.ly/b2tAHq

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM@Knowmax. Foto de Gustavo Quiroz

Agiles 2010 Concluded successfully

Agiles 2010 conferences concluded being the succesful event we all expected. The level of the different presentations was really high not only due to the well known speakers as Lee Davin, Joshua Kerevisky or David Anderson but also because of the knowleadge shared by the Latin American community.

More than 200 people participated and the general feedback was excelent not only as it was a great opportinuty to share knowleadge but also beacuse it helped empowering the local community. It showed the value, knowleadge and possibilities we have in Latin America and something interesting was that instead of having a closure panel were the important keynote speakers from abroad discuss about something this panel was integrated by representatives from the different latinamerican countries and present and future of agility in Latin America was discussed. Keynotes took this extremely well seeing that agility in latin america is constructing its own way.

In future posts I will give more details about the different presentations I participated. There was an interesting viriety of talks and workshops around Kanban and, as an example, the Kanban book that David Anderson promoted in the event s was sold out. We definitvely will talk deeper about this in the following weeks.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM@Knowmax

Modificar booteo en Mikrotik

De las cosas que uno puede esperar hacer pocas veces en la vida una es modificar el booteo de un ruoter Mikrotik. Para hacerlo hay que seguir los siguientes pasos:

1. Installar Putty
2. Conectarse al Mikrotik por el serial
3. Abrir Putty, seleccionar “Serial”, ingresar “115200” en “Speed” y seleccionar “Open”

1. Enchufar Mikrotik a la corriente y presionar algún botón antes que pasen 2 segundos.
2. Ingresar “o” para acceder a “boot device” y seleccionar el dispositivo de booteo según se requiera.

Ubuntu vs Dell: recuperando el bootloader

Ni una semana me llevó lograr que mi nueva delln5010 quedara inutilizable con una pantalla negra sin opciones al bootear… ¿Razones? al instalar Ubuntu 10, reiniciar en Windows 7 e instalar algún patch el Data Safe que traen instaladas estas Dell me hizo fleco el menú de booteo que instala Ubuntu (Grub).

Solución: Bootear con el CD de Ubuntu, recuperar el bootloader, entrar en Windows y desinstalar Dell Data Safe.

Los pasos para recuperar el bootloader están clarísimos aquí.