Refactoring for sale

Among the technical list given by Mikael Boman in his post dedicated to product owners, "Practice #4: Refactoring" is for sure, the most difficult to agree with. Version control system, Continuous integration, Automated testing are concepts around tools, consequently their deployment has a visual, understandable, palpable result, so there is no worry justifying their costs.

If you don't get the Practice #6: Collective code ownership, wait for a few years until developers leave your company and then you will get it.

Simple design:
While the indicated article focuses on product owners, the simple design concept is obvious to many of us, but developers could feel it as a bridling of their creativity. While we all need to establish a software knowledge culture, where ideas around code design and patterns are understood, we face a dilemma when it comes to asking for simple creation. I didn't find a good way to recommend, but practices like pair programming and code review can mitigate the ugly and the glittery code. A developer conversation while looking at the code, will free the product from the lack of conception or avoid the all "design patterns" in one "software product" idea.

Refactoring:
Previous to entering into the agile/lean world, I didn't find a proper solution to justify a moment to improve the code. Then, based on Lean concepts, I felt desperate because spending time on refreshing the code could be understood like a waste. But the only reality resides in understanding the technical debt and the product complexity.
Some people will argue the refactoring must be embedded in the development tasks and will state that concerned developers will perform this activity by themselves. But such behaviour could hide the iceberg from the product owner or give him a great argument to play the ostrich.
Refactoring must be understood, and the product owner must commit to spring cleaning the code.
If some tasks related to code refactoring are present in the product backlog, it means:

• Developers have an understanding of the code, so the concerned component is not something anybody would touch anymore due to its ugliness, but only a huge number of code lines that smell bad.
• Product owner has stepped back, understood the complexity of the component and admitted the technical debt must be lightened,
• The regression linked with the refactoring will be mitigated by guardrails, like unit tests or user scenario rechecks by testers. Because the testers will have to valid the refactoring tasks, they would have discussed the impact and the use cases affected by this work with the developers. They will not discover the regression nightmare later after a refactoring decided by the developer on his own.
  

Sources:
Pragmaticmarketing: Six technical practices you should know about
Scrumalliance: The top six technical practices every Product Owner must know about
Wikipedia: Code refactoring
Wikipedia: Design pattern
Martinfowle: MF Bliki: refactoring
Theagileexecutive: Technical Debt: Refactoring vis-a-vis Starting Afresh « The Agile Executive
Infoq: Refactoring is a Necessary Waste
Agileinaflash : Agile: In A Flash

Enterprise social software

Last century, I used to send to my colleagues a constant flow of emails with links I considered relevant to our work. Experience has shown me that pushing information to people doesn't mean they assimilate the essence of the content. Worse, if you send too many messages they will get ignored and after filling up your colleagues' mailboxes, they will tend to automatically bin them. Pushing information is definitively a waste of time for both the sender and the receivers.

While the enterprise's knowledge is supported by the enterprise content management, the availability of web tools has led many organisations toward Enterprise social software.

A blog for a project, for a service or for the general news, are surprisingly adopted without an effort of persuasion, where the traditional content management tools have failed. Easy to use, and effective with a small amount of writing are the main characteristics of this technology.

A wiki is a group of web pages that people can edit just by clicking on a button. Current wikis have a WYSIWYG interface that most users are comfortable with, a good improvement from the first wiki.

But wikis are the best for collaboration. Watch the following picture directly copied from the wikinomics blog and you see which waste has been eliminated.



















Wiki adoption in the Enterprise is something different from the uptake of blogs. If you want to succeed in deployment of wikis, you will need to step back, get the good people and avoid classic mistakes and that's what you'll find on the wikipatterns website.

Sources:
Wikipedia: Enterprise social software -
Wikipedia : Knowledge management
Wikipedia: Enterprise content management
Wikipedia : Wiki
C2.com : Wiki History
Wikipatterns.com : Wikipatterns - Wiki Patterns

Happy new year 2010

Happy new year 2010 and don't forget to watch the apple product line strategy video here below. A good resource to prepare your product strategy.



Thanks to David Ha for this summary.

Sources :
Wikipedia : Apple Inc. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interacting with both worlds. The end of the old screen?

Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop."

Fruit-Shaped Sticky Notes

We have been told to use sticky colored tickets as kanban, but frankly, even if the result is damn effective, the aspect is closer to a moulting bird than a rational visual tool. Our building design quality is contributing to sustain or maybe to enhance our amenities, likewise our creativity. Therefore why not display the pace of our inspiration by a tree of sticky fruits?

Without a doubt these Fruit-Shaped Sticky Notes, called “KUDAMEMO” by D-BROS, coming from Japan must be an answer to the sad visual board we have now.

















Sources :
Gigazine : Fruit-Shaped Sticky Notes “KUDAMEMO” by D-BROS - GIGAZINE
Fubiz : Fruit Sticky Notes | Fubiz™

Agile Test Lyon. CARA session

On Monday the 7th December, an Agile session will take place at the INSA Lyon building.


The central theme will be the software tests treated by the following presentations:

• CARA Introduction
• Agile Tests concepts
• Acceptation Tests with Cucumber
• Test Driven Development
  

Links:
INSA LYON, Campus de la DOUA, Laboratoire CITI, Batiment Claude Chappe (Map)
Club Agile Rhône Alpes : Lyon sessions.
Cukes : Cucumber - Making BDD fun

Introduction to Lean Manufacturing

If you never heard about Lean, have a look at the following video from the Gemba Academy.

From TED Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't:

• One: Those 20th century rewards those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.
• Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity.
• Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.
  

Building Large Distributed Systems

Today, the computer world has two big trends: mobility and cloud computing.

If you want to have a feedback about the second one, have a look at the Jeff Dean presentation: Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems

I found the google protocol buffers "a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage",
pretty interesting.

Google Reader with colors

Google Reader is probably the best free online RSS reader available today. Due to its simplicity and its minimalist interface, sometime you wish you could have colorized at least its background.
Matt Cutts tell us here below how to display a hidden function: In your Google Reader press keys: Up arrow, Up arrow, Down arrow, Down arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, B key, and lastly A key.
And ....



This is my nerd's consern of the week.

Sources:
Commoncraft : RSS in Plain English - Common Craft - Our Product is Explanation
Matt Cutts : Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Wikipedia statistics

Statistics have been published about Wikipedia and Wikimedia (PDF Here) .

The first lines are:

• According to comScore, Wikipedia is the fourth most popular web property, world-wide. In June, it served 327 million unique visitors.
• Wikipedia is available in 266 languages.
• It is continually expanded by approximately 100,000 active volunteer editors world-wide.
• The English version alone contains more than 2.9 million articles.
• All language editions combined contain more than 13.1 million articles.
• Next to English, the largest Wikipedia editions are German (911,000 articles), French (798,000 articles), Polish (600,000 articles), and Japanese (587,000 articles).
  

For more see the original document.

Sources :
Resource Shelf : Updated: Key Statistics About Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation (September, 2009) « ResourceShelf

Next step for the web content: HTML5

I would like to congratulate Sir Brad Neuberg for the quality of the following HTML5 presentation.
Due to the number of concepts presented in this video, I spent an hour gathering further details about these subjects.
Please find here below, the links and summary, to plunge into the next dimension of the Internet content.


Video timeline:
- Technical History: 0
- Vector graphics: 6
-- SVG: 7:15
-- Canvas API: 10:15
- When Canvas or SVG : 17
- Video: 20:50
- Geolocation:27:25
- Application cache & database: 30:10
- Web Workers: 35:50



Update: Brad's slides are availabe here (PDF).

If you want to test the demos, help yourself. Humm, first of all, make sure you have a modern browser (e.g Firefox 3.5) :

Vector graphic
- 1st person gifter : walk in the game using your keyboard arrow keys,
- SVG Web Toolkit: Animated Population Pyramid,
- Bespin : web code editor. For further explanation watch the mozilla team at Qcon London 2009,
uell : German election Atlas
Canvas: Drawing board

Video: a tag to display a video.
Paul Rouget: sexy videos demo
which format?? Arstechnica: Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate

Geolocalisation: get user position
htmlfive: Authorise and test

Database: store data related to one page on the user computer
Sticky Notes: work on a web page and store date on your computer

Web workers: like a thread in a program, but for a web content
Mozbox: take care demo without workers freeze the browser
hacks.mozilla: using web workers: working smarter, not harder

I also listened to the interview: "Ric Smith on the Present and the Future of HTML 5"; where they mentioned the following HTML5 specifications:

Post message: send messages from one browser window to another one
John Resig: Cross-Window Messaging,

Web socket: a standard answer to send messages from the server to the web browser. This feature will help to replace Comet.
Kaazing: HTML 5 WebSockets

More
diveintohtml5: further details.
Geektechnica: 5 Amazing HTML5 Features to Look Forward to
w3schools: Tutorials on HTML5

Online applications

I went through Zoho writer and Google doc, and I'm still really impressed by Zoho features.
Microsoft is not yet online, but sure enough, they will recover and be on track with online office applications.
Have a look at Paul Thurrott, Office 2010 review to understand their progress and see also his explanation about Office versions.

Cloud business purchase and near futur

In Mike West's presentation at the GLUE conference : "Harnessing the Cloud" (available on InfoQ), you will find all the trends and keywords about the cloud businesses.
Below is a slideshow from him, close to the one used above.

Automated Testing Patterns and Smells

If you don't have enough time or energy to read Gerard Meszaros's book named XUnit Test Patterns...






... at least take 60 minutes, sitting on your sofa, and listen to him



Sources:
XUnit Test Patterns : Website

Hanselminutes

The quantity of material around agile is soaring and I will share with you several videos I have watched these last 2 months.
As a permanent quality resource, I recommend the podcast, The Hanselminutes.
Because of the diversity of his guests, Scott Hanselman gives me a lot of input around the current technologies, services and books.

Project board

Kanban for scrum, xp, lean or a dashboard?
At least, we do agree a visual board is the most important actifact to conduct a project. I'll tell you later about my own experience.
What do you think about Integrum's feedback below?

Glastonbury 2009

Nothing about my working questions but only a link to the Boston Big Picture about Glastonbury 2009.

Nowadays, rock/pop/electro music is not a generational phenomenon anymore, but a culture. Have a look at the people and you will understand what I mean.

Scrum introduction in 10 minutes

There are several ways to advertise your products and publishing a video tutorial on YouTube is a pragmatic one.
Have a look at the one below from Hamid Shojaee to understand the Scrum roles and artifacts.

Fighting with notes and deadlines

As an agilist, I over use post-its, because my company tends to be more and more visually organised.
Have a look at mister Bunliu's senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design.



On his YouTube account, you can read: "This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its"

Here below the making of.