Scrum?

So I've been on several teams that refer to themselves as agile. They do scrum meetings each day and get updates from individuals on the team. Presumably, the meeting is for coordination of effort among the individuals.

Scrum seems to work better in some groups - finding holes in requirements, promoting discussion about a data model, general communication to make sure everyone can deliver for the next iteration.

Sound good? Sound normal? Sound effective?

Well I've wondered lately about the cumulative time from all the individuals in the room - that's a lot of work time. That's a lot of disruption. That's a lot of "I'm working on bugs" on some days.

Then today I was reading a passage in the book Peopleware that warns of a balance.

The ultimate management sin is wasting people's time.
...
When you convoke a meeting with n people present, the normal presumption is that all those in the room are there because they need to interact with each other in order to come to certain conclusions. When, instead, the participants take turns interacting with one key figure, the expected rationale for assembling the whole group is missing; the boss might just as well have interacted separately with each of the subordinates without obliging the others to listen in.

He goes on to say that some ceremonial meetings are necessary, for project milestones, when new people come on, celebrating a release, etc. However, the authors in the same section of the book say:

A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirmation. And it's not the status of the work, but the status of the boss.

Weekly status meetings?!? What about a daily status meeting?

Now I'm not saying that scrum is always a waste of everyone's time. However, I wonder if we in the world of agile are missing the point sometimes and ceremony trumps getting work done. I wonder if many of the same things could be accomplished by having a common work area online, like a campfire chat room or an IRC channel for work discussions. I thought a recent interview (links to page 2) with Jason Fried of 37 Signals was interesting - his take on meetings.

The excerpts from Peopleware come from chapter 33: "The Ultimate Management Sin Is ..." It goes on to talk about all sorts of ways to waste people's time.

I just thought it was interesting to contrast the need in agile for a scrum-like meeting with the need for uninterrupted work time. I think it just inspires thought about whether or not a given meeting, particularly a regularly scheduled meeting, is of value.

An Office Environment

Since I picked it up in grad school, I've been fascinated by a book called Peopleware and the different ways of thinking about the work place.

This morning I read a bit about how a work place or work space affects the productivity of a software developer:

"Staying late or arriving early or staying home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment. The amazing thing is not that it's so often impossible to work in the workplace; the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody ever does anything about it."
- Chapter 8, "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here from 9 to 5"

They went on to describe a study they did involving developer productivity. They found the normal 10:1 range of individual developer productivity. What was surprising was they also found that there was a 10:1 or so range for organizational productivity - with two developers from each organization. The two developers from each performed on about the same level.

It would seem that not only individual developer productivity matters, but also their working environment.

Using firefox extensions in mozilla prism

Matt Gertner, creator of the Mozilla Prism firefox addon/SSB, just posted some basics on how to get a firefox extension working with prism.

Thought it was interesting for those messing with site-specific browsers...

http://browsing.justdiscourse.com/2009/10/22/prism-and-extensions/

A Pidgin plugin for Growl for Windows

I've been fond of Growl on the mac as a pretty standard notification mechanism.

Growl for Windows is a project that uses the same protocols to do notification on the windows side.

After a discussion in the forums, someone has finally implemented support for one of the last core apps that was missing for a long time: pidgin.

http://blog.growlforwindows.com/2009/10/pigdin-growl-sittin-in-tree.html

Previously there was a snarl->growl bridge called gnarly that would notify growl of messages, but it's nice to see that such a popular app is getting some attention :).

W00t for open source :).

FindBugs in IntelliJ IDEA

I was just perusing the plugin repository for IntelliJ IDEA plugins recently and came across the FindBugs plugin. It will analyze your code and give you a categorized list of potential problems in your code that links to the source. It bundles the latest FindBugs implementation so there is no need to download that as well.

It looks promising for catching things I may have missed in my code.

There is currently a bug where when you first use it, you need to go into the settings for FindBugs and click on Restore Defaults. That initializes the list of detectors that it uses.

Links:
http://findbugs.sourceforge.net - the findbugs home page
https://findbugs-idea.dev.java.net - the findbugs IntelliJ IDEA home page
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea - the IntelliJ IDEA home page

Additional stuff from Developing with Mozilla Prism

Yesterday in my presentation on Developing with Mozilla Prism, I had some difficulties getting an app to work because of an intermittent bug in prism right now.

I did want to post the webapp.js code for the Google Reader prism app that I was showing during the presentation:

/**
* Google Reader web app script
*/

function n(app, msg) {
 window.platform.showNotification(app, msg, null);
}

/**
* standard webrunner plugin api
*/
function startup() {
}

function preload() {
}

function load() {      
   Reader.load();
}

function shutdown() {
   Reader.shutdown();
}

function error() {
}

var Reader = {
   _timer : null,
   _unreadCount : 0,
   _window : null,

   receiveMessage : function() {    
       //window.platform.sound().beep();
       window.platform.getAttention();

       n("Google Reader", "You have " + Reader._unreadCount + " unread item(s).");
   },

   _init : function() {
       Reader._unreadCount = 0;
       Reader._window = window;
   },
 
   run : function() {
       if (Reader._unreadCount == undefined)
       Reader._unreadCount = 0;

       var title = Reader._window.top.document.title;

       var matches = title.match(/Google Reader \((\d+)\)/);
       if (matches) {    
           if (matches[1] > Reader._unreadCount) {
                Reader._unreadCount = matches[1];
                Reader.receiveMessage();
           }

           Reader._unreadCount = matches[1];
       }
   },

   load : function() {  
       Reader._init();
       // kick off a polling timer to check for new articles
       Reader._timer = Reader._window.setInterval(Reader.run, 5000);
   },

   shutdown : function() {  
       if (Reader._timer)
           Reader._window.clearInterval(Reader._timer);
   }
};

Also, the MIME type to add to your httpd.conf to allow prism webapp bundles to load properly by linking to them is:

AddType application/x-webapp .webapp

Talking with Matt Gertner a little about adding javascript to your own web page... He said that you could use the window.platform stuff in your webapp and that would, in many cases, simply replace the need for webapp.js since your web page would then essentially become prism aware. That's another option for trying to distribute a prism app.

For more information on prism - check out https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Prism

Slides for Developing with Mozilla Prism

I just wanted to post my slides for my presentation this afternoon on Developing with Mozilla Prism.

It will be in the Auditorium at 3 PM. I hope to see you there!

I received a bag of stuff from Mozilla to give away - various fun mozilla/firefox stickers and mozilla firefox badge lanyards.

Slides (pdf through Google Docs)