Make it Visible, Make it Big: Sprint Burndown

An important tenant of Scrum is transparency.  Keeping the teams metrics and state of the project visible to others not only enables others to make decision based on this information, but it also has a great psycological effect on the Team.

Where is your team's sprint burndown chart?
A good place to put the sprint burndown chart is in an are where it gets a lot of visibility, but also where important people see it.  The burndown chart can be placed in a Starbucks, but the Starbucks clientèle is not interested in this.  I have placed the burndown chart on the Director of Engineering's office door, or on the door of the Product Owner.  Another effective place to put the chart is in a room or hallway where the peers of the delivery team can see it.  Of course, you want the delivery team to see the chart all the time too.

Make it BIG
People tend to respond to things larger in scale, than small things.  For example, the worlds largest thermometer gets a lot of attention just because it is big.  Nothing special about saying it is 86 degrees, but if you say it in a big way, now you have some attention.

Printing the chart on 8.5" x 11" paper isn't going to cut it.  Draw a chart on a large easel pad (24" x 37") or if you have a HP Designjet T610 with a 44" spool of paper, now that will work.  Add some colors and make the chart easy to read.

Scrum Tools: Points in eScrum and TFS in Visual Studio

I have been using the eScrum project template in Microsoft Visual Studio TFS edition for a few sprints now.  Along the way, the team noticed some issues with the template.  In TFS, by navigating to Team > Process Editor > Work Item Types > Open WIT from Server, I opened the eScrum Product Backlog Item template and made some changes.

Points
The Product Backlog Item template is missing a "points" field to indicate the relative size of a PBI.  There is a Baseline Work field, but that is used to represent the number of hours for the PBI in reports. I decided to add a Points field where a dropdown shows Fibonacci based numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, 250, 500, ?, infinity).  Since there are values such as "?" and "infinity, the field type must be 'String'.  I could have used the Baseline Work field, but that allows people to enter values that could complicate things, such as entering 21 instead of 20.  To avoid the debate, or having to correct this, I added an ALLOWEDVALUES rule to control this.

Query
Now I can create a query to allow me to see what items does the team need to estimate.  By using the team's velocity, this query can include items that are larger than half a sprint, which indicates the team needs to work with the Product Owner to break this down into smaller PBIs.

Quote: Communication

"Can I talk to the guy who is telling you what to tell me?"
Dan C.

Google AdSense Login Troubles

I was having trouble with my AdSense account. The account was inactive for a while, but then I decided to revive it. After searching on Google Groups and other web pages I was unable to find a solution that worked for me so I emailed their support team, which responded in one day. I hope this helps someone else out.

Symptoms:

When I login to AdSense, I get the message "An AdSense account does not exist for this login, as you have not yet completed an application."

When I try to sign-up, I get the message "A user with the email you specified already exists, Please select a different Google Account login to access this account."

Solution:

1. Please make sure that your AdSense account password is different from
your Google Account password.

2. You can reset it at https://www.google.com/adsense/assistlogin?hl=en_US

3. Once your passwords are different, you will need to log in to AdSense
with the AdSense email and password .

4. Once you log in to your AdSense account, please migrate using
https://www.google.com/adsense/migrate-login-1

Certified Scrum Product Owner

In July of 2008, I continued my Scrum education by taking a two-day certification course in San Jose. It was taught by two fantastic trainers: Chris Sterling and Bryan Stallings. I highly recommend this course for any product owner, project manager, program manager, product manager, ScrumMaster, etc., if you are using Scrum or not.

Certified ScrumMaster

In June of 2008, I went to UCLA for a two-day training course to get a ScrumMaster certification. The class was taught by Chris Sterling from SolutionsIQ. I went back to work and started applying what I learned immediately.

The challenge was, I was trained to use Scrum, but others weren't. It was as though only one player knew the rules of the game. So how can I fix this...workshops. By holding a few workshops (or crash course), I was able to get the team up to speed...kind of. I couldn't fit all two days of exercises and material into a four-hour meeting.

After one sprint (two weeks), the team had felt what it is like to sprint. It sure was fast and felt short.

So now the team knows (or was at least informed) of the rules, guidelines, and goals of Scrum, the next challenge is to get them to play as a team. They are in the forming stage of the Tuckman model, and over time, will hopefully get to the performing stage.

By continuous inspection and adaptation, I am looking forward to watching the team evolve and improve over the next few sprints.

Mix06 Pictures: Keynote

Here are some blurry pictures of Bill Gates from Las Vegas, NV:

IIS Application Pools and ASP.Net 2.0

Application Pool Organization

Microsoft IIS 6.0 uses Application Pools to run web applications. Each application pool runs in its own worker process. This will allow you to configure each application pool to its own secuirity and resource consumption.

However, application pools cannot have both an ASP.Net 1.x and an ASP.Net 2.0 application running in the same pool. You can create a new application pool for the 2.0 apps.

The two extremes for application pools seem to be this:

1. Run everything in one application pool
2. Run each app in its own application pool

There are pro's and con's for each approach. I am asking readers:

1. What motivates you to put an application in one pool versus another?
2. When do you create a new application pool?