Here Be Subtlety

(Kind of) Giving Up on Apple

Right now I’m writing this on a Dell Inspiron 11 inch notebook with Windows 7. Which is light green, because, as you might or might not know about me, I have a thing for light green. I’m also waiting for the Android app for Squarespace for my Motorola Milestone (or Droid for the US readers).

Which is another way of saying: I do not really use a Mac notebook and I don’t have an iPhone.

On the other hand and to be fair: I do own a three year old MacBook and I also do own an 2nd generation iPod touch.

However, when lately I had to make a choice what kind of new computer I wanted to buy and what smart phone I wanted, I did choose a Windows laptop and an Android phone.

There are a couple of reasons why I didn’t go for the obvious choice of buying Apple products.

1. I never hated Windows. Sure, I’ve seen my fair share of computer crashes and blue screens of death, but I never had the system fail completely on me. I grew up with Windows using it since I was in my teens and so far I’ve been fine with it. And I kind of dig Windows 7.

2. More than that, I don’t believe that you have to be either or. I can see the merits of an Apple computer (mostly because I have one) and I love my iPod touch. But that doesn’t mean that I have to stick to Apple. The surprising truth is: You can have both! What a concept.

3. I use a Windows system for work and I like to play around with some stuff away from work which I can’t do on a Mac OS. (I know that I can run a Windows OS on an Apple PC, but to me that seems like an option I would consider if I absolutely wanted a Mac. Which I don’t.)

But there are a couple of other reasons, too.

4. Apple products are expensive. An unlocked iPhone still costs around 600 to 700 Euro and you can’t even get one in Germany as far as I’m aware. MacBooks got a bit cheaper, but the smallest ones are still costlier than some of the better equipped Windows laptops.

5. Currently, the iPhone in Germany is attached to T-Mobile exclusively. And the data plans suck. I know, because my husband has an iPhone. He pays about twice as much monthly than what I pay. Admittedly his plan includes a few extra options that I miss and his connection speed is a bit faster, but it still doesn’t justify the price difference for me.

6. I wanted a small simple laptop with acceptable speed and performance and no frills, other than being light green. Basically I wanted something to carry around all the time. An 11 inch screen is perfect for me. It’s big enough to work as a screen for most of the tasks and I can still connect it to a bigger screen on my desk. The smallest MacBook is still a 13 inch which was just a tad too much.

7. The restrictiveness of both the Mac OS and the iPod started to bug me. Maybe I never got around to really learning my Mac skills, but it was a feeling that repeatedly left me frustrated.

8. Slide-out keyboard. Just saying.

So far I haven’t regretted my choice. I’m absolutely and completely in love with my Dell notebook. It’s with me all the time and I use it all the time. Windows 7 also is a great OS to work with. No complaints here so far as well.

Coming from an iPod touch it took me a while to switch to the Android (not as a phone, but as a small computer). I still use the iPod for music and videos, but that might change in the future, too. I even started to play around with Android development, which seems like a developer’s dream compared to my short-lived experience with iPhone development.

I plan to write more about the actual advantages and drawbacks of each system. For now, just leave it at: I have a Dell notebook and a MacBook laptop as well as an Android phone and an iPod touch. I am neither an Apple fangirl nor am I a Windows or Google groupie. And that’s totally fine with me.

The Long-Lasting Effects of Scrum are Not Yet Known

Recently I moved from a Scrum team to a non-Scrum team. I was kind of aware that after nearly a year of doing Scrum (a total of eleven sprints) this would make a difference to me, but only now can I say for sure how that affected me and my perception of work in the first days after switching from Scrum to non-Scrum.

Frankly, it’s kind of terrifying. This is even stranger since for the most part of my work experience so far I have worked in non-Scrum environments. It seems like the Scrum-experience is indeed a bit intense and has an effect on you that you might not expect.

The way I work now can be loosely described as „there is no defined process“. In other words, there’s work to be done and the goal is to get that work done on time. That’s it.

During the first week I was confused by the lack of daily Scrums. We had daily Scrums at 11:30 am and I noticed that around that time I got slightly nervous and had to remind myself that there was no daily scrum. No more. I could just keep on working. Similarly the lack of daily feedback irritated me. How would anyone know how far I’d come since yesterday? How would I learn what everybody else was doing? (The answer, of course, is simple. They could ask me. I could ask them. Done.)

Apart from that, the lack of tasks is even more irritating and it still gets me from time to time. How long am I supposed to work on this? When is it done? When I should I start worrying about how long it takes? How long is it supposed to take anyway? Help!

Fortunately, I think these are just minor withdrawal syndroms that I will get over soon. But still, I find it interesting how the way Scrum works and the way you work with Scrum can affect you, especially if suddenly you find yourself NOT doing Scrum anymore. The bottom line is, Scrum provides a safe (or seemingly safe) environment for the team to work in. Things are clear. There are rules. There are numbers. There are timeframes. There are commitments. There are dates. There are times.

With all these things gone, you feel lost. (You really do.) The challenge now will be to create a safe environment to work comfortably in without all these fixed things surrounding you.

I will be working on that.

Renting Movies the Easy Way

After my husband’s return from Sydney we somehow got a little crazy and upgraded our living room with a new TV. We already had a BluRay Player with a 160 GB HDD which we got primarily to be able to record off the TV rather for the BluRay. Our old TV was one of the very few flatscreen TVs with no HDMI connection, which seemed even more ridiculous after we got the new player and couldn’t even use its BluRay feature. A

Anyway, we upgraded our old 32 inch HDMI-less TV for a fancy Sony 40 inch all inclusive TV. Naturally, it didn’t stop there because what’s a huge TV and a BluRay player without a fancy sound system? So, we got that, too.

We got a couple of BluRays to get us started, but looking at the shelves full of DVDs we already have I didn’t want to make that same mistake again. I wish it was different, but fact is, most of the movies we have there, we haven’t watched more than once. So I thought it was time to sign up for an online BluRay (and DVD) renting service here in Germany. I did some research and finally settled for lovefilm.de which is associated in some way with Amazon.

(There is no Netflix in Germany (yet?), so that wasn’t an option. Online streaming also wasn’t convincing with movies still costing up to 4 Euro per rent and without the advantage of full HD quality.)

In the last two weeks or so we got five movies from Lovefilm. The way it works is pretty easy. We get the movie delivered to our home address, can keep it as long as we like, and when we want to return it, we can use the same envelope it came in, throw it in the nearest mail box and wait two or three days for the next movie. You need to keep a list of movies you’d like to have which you can prioritize.

Here’s why I think it works for us and will continue to work for us:

1. There’s not much to procrastinate. The envelope already has the return address printed onto it and is stamped as well. I don’t have to go to the post office to get stamps, I don’t have to do anything, but to put the disc in the envelope seal it and bring to the next mail box – for example on my way to work.

2. You can just add and delete stuff of your movie list in between. As long as I have a long enough list I don’t have to worry about what movie to rent next for quite some time. I can just update the list when I feel like it.

3. We can keep the movie as long as we like. If we don’t feel like watching a movie for a couple of nights, we don’t have to pay extra. Sure, we will get less movies in a month for the same monthly fee, but at 12 Euro a month the system even pays off with as little as two movies a month.

4. You don’t have to worry about just getting great movies. When buying movies, you really want to get your money’s worth. There are a lot of movies that I’d just like to watch once and don’t expect to want to watch it again and again. Buying such a movie seems like a waste of money. But, to be fair, even the movies I do like a lot, I hardly watch over and over again. Now I just add them to my list and don’t care whether they’re brilliant. Already, we have watched a couple of movies that I’d never considered buying but turned out to be pretty good.

The thing about renting movies the painfree way is this: I am lazy. When I’m home after work I might not want to get out, go to the video rental, decide on a movie, get back, and remember to go back there the next day. I also don’t want to go to the post office more than I absolutely have to. (Although, to be fair, the guys here at my post office are really nice.)

After the first weeks of using Lovefilm I have the feeling that this might work out for us. It’s easy, it’s painfree and it doesn’t require anything more from me than keeping my movie wishlist up to date from time to time and walking an extra twenty meters to the mailbox on my way to work. That’s it.

(By the way: Any movie recommendations for me? I can always add more movies to my wishlist to keep them coming.)

Every Developer’s Nightmare

The coffee machine on our floor broke yesterday. This might sound like a little thing, but for most developers (as well as project managers and testers) this comes very close to a catastrophe.

But since we are a creative and communicative bunch, this is what you might see when the unthinkable has happened:

The original message says „Broken – Technician has been informed“. I don’t have to translate what desperate coffee-addicted people have added below that, do I?

The kitchen whiteboard also was used as an outlet to channel the despair:

Don’t worry about what’s scribbled on there, but the many many unhappy „smilies“ should tell you enough about how we feel about our coffee here.

Simple Tools to Make Your Life Easier

When working on a feature we often have to check the application’s log files. The easiest way was viewing them with Notepad, but that means that whenever something new was logged you have to close and open the file to see the actual log entry. Then one colleague recommended mTail, a tool that hooks itself to a log file and will automatically appends everything that is added to the file to its UI. It’s a very simple tool, but it does exactly what I need to debug an application and be able to check what is logged without constantly closing and re-opening the log file.

I’ve written about Launchy before, the tool that lets you open about everything with a bit of typing. I use Launchy all the time to access applications, folders and documents and it makes my life a lof easier. A colleague recommended Everything and while it’s very similar to Launchy it does not quite do the same. Everything is the fastest search tool I know. I use it mostly to find out in which Visual Studio solution a class is located, a very basic task, but one which I have to do so often that Everything turned out to be a real time saver here. Another sweet thing I noticed is that it allows using Beyond Compare by right-clicking on files. So instead of just finding files and then going to their specific folders, I can start comparing right from within Everything once I got all my computer content filtered down a nifty list of exactly the files I’m looking for.

There are two other tools that you probably already know, since they are widely popular, but I’m going to mention them anyway:

Evernote is a simple, but powerful organization tool, that lets you clip anything from anywhere. It syncs to pratically every device there is, so I’ve got it on all my PCs, my iPod and my Android. So, whenever I see something worth saving for later I hit my Evernote shortcut and I have access to it from everywhere. It’s also a great tool to take notes, e.g. when you’re in a meeting. The only problem I have with Evernote is that my note collection is getting a bit out of hand. I guess that’s the drawback from being able to take notes of interesting stuff with just one keystroke.

Dropbox on the other hand is a simple file sharing tool that allows you to sync files to all your computers including your iPod and iPhone. I’m still waiting for the Android application. You simply install it and can drop files into your Dropbox folder. This folder will automatically push your files to the cloud and back to all your machines that are linked to the same Dropbox account. Dropbox also allows you to share folders or make files public. It’s amazingly easy and lets me transfer files quickly whenever I think I want to have access to them from… well… anywhere else.

And by the way, if you install Dropbox using the link in this blog entry, I will get an extra 250 MB worth of storing space. Which I really could use. So if you actually plan on using it, please use the referral and make me a bit happier.

I Miss My Commute

I recently read a short blog post at 37signals about the glory of not having to commute. While reading this post and the comments made, I was reminded once more of a feeling I have quite regularly:

I miss my commute.

Seriously, what I wouldn’t give for a solid 30 minute train ride to work and back. The problem that I have is that my commute is too short and I feel like it’s such a waste of time, because I get nothing done except maybe a bit of listening to podcasts.

Now, I have been an avid commuter for the last eight years or so. I had to travel from Bonn to Cologne for about one and a half years, before we moved to Leverkusen, which made my commute to work a bit shorter, but still long enough to spend reading. Even when I worked in Leverkusen for two years, I preferred the longer bus ride to taking the train, because it gave me a bit of time to read or listen to music.

Sure, we moved here because of my job and in theory the idea of only being one train stop away from work sounded great, but I sometimes end up taking the streetcar which takes more than five times as long, but apart from stopping a bit closer to where we live also allows me to sit and relax for 15 minutes.

Now, I know that commuting can suck. I know about having to wait for late trains, missing connections, sprinting up and down stairs to the platform just to get there in time, freezing in winter or being rained upon in autumn. I have never really commuted by car though, so I can’t really share any stories about that. On the other hand, I also don’t get why people would commute by car when there is decent public transportation.

Fact is that I think I never read as much as I did the nine months that I took the train from Leverkusen to Düsseldorf each day. This was a one hour train ride each way – which is also what I consider the longest a commute should be – and I got so much reading done during that time, it was simply amazing. The key to a good commute is not having to change trains more than once (or maybe twice) and spending the majority of the time in one train, so you can just sit down, relax, and do what you want to do.

I seriously feel deprived of this sacred alone time. Alas, if you don’t like to read, listen to music, podcasts, watching videos or playing with your notebook, then a commute might not be the thing for you. For us people who do like these things, 30 minutes on a train can be the time of the day where we can for once relax a bit, because it is the only time where you might not be distracted by this and that and just able to concentrate on these things we like to do.

Oh man. I miss my commute.

Don’t Call it Scrum.

We’ve been practicing Scrum at work for about nine month now. We got from one team to two teams and will be moving back to one team in a short time (although not really, but more about that later).

We’ve been constantly redefining the process. Sometimes it was little changes like coming up with a few easy rules to make daily scrums move along faster. Sometimes it was bigger changes like defining a new way to do estimation sessions.

In the near future we’ll be adding more teams to work on our product, some of which are offshore, which forced us to rethink our process. Currently nearly everyone working on the product is located in the same office, even on the same floor, so communication between Scrum teams, ScrumMasters and product owners as well as others involved in building the system has been easy and uncomplicated. This won’t be the case once we have teams in another country or even another continent.

One key change that has already been made is that the design phase has been dis-integrated from the actual work of the Scrum team. A designer who only recently was a member of one of the Scrum teams is now working with the product owner, defining designs for user stories.

Estimation meetings now take place with the product owner and designer present. Estimations are therefore made based on the existing design. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact it takes some of the risk out of the equation for Scrum teams. We no longer have to estimate something without having a design. Also, since the design is mostly made by one person in collaboration with the product owner and whoever else is of help, it ensures consistency throughout the system.

However, it makes me wonder whether we have already stopped doing Scrum and might just be doing agile. Not that this is bad in any way, it’s merely a question that I might ask. How far can you go from the process as it was defined before you have to admit to yourself that – while what you’re doing is Scrum-based – it’s not longer what you started with.

Is this a bad thing? Not really. In fact, it could come as a relief. Once you’ve drifted so far from the defined methodology that have to stop fooling yourself that you’re actually doing it, maybe it’s time to take a step back and review all the things you’re doing , re-evaluating what is working, what might need improvement and what is simply a waste of time.

On the other hand, sticking to a methodology makes you less eager to give up something that you might not like as long as you’re convinced it is a part of the methodology. (I.e. because daily scrums are such a key item in the Scrum process, you’re less likely to skip them even if you don’t like it.)

In the long run, Scrum is just a word. We might be on the brink of letting go of what makes Scrum Scrum, recognizing that we have our own agile process that has no name and probably doesn’t even need one. Whether we get there and how we will go on from there, I have no idea. But I hope it will be fun to find out.

Get Feedback When You Can

We will have a couple of training sessions soon for a bunch of developers and testers coming over from Vietnam to bravely sit through three weeks of (probably pretty hardcore) training with us. All training sessions are held by our very own developers, testers, managers and product managers, so it will be a busy time for all of us.

During the initial meeting to talk about how sessions should run and be prepared the question of having feedback questionnaires at the end of each session came up. It got a bit heated shortly, and I’m not sure where the jury is on that right now.

However, thinking about it and having heard arguments from each side, I can say that I’m still very much in favor of getting feedback after a training session.

Here’s what I heard from the con side. I also did fill in my fair share of feedback questionnaires, so I know where these arguments are coming from:

1. Nobody likes filling out the form. It takes time, you want to go home rather than mark where on a scale from 1 to 6 you’d say the trainer would rank in terms of preparation or being able to answer questions or how you liked the conference room the training took place.

2. The results are usually not very useful. Especially with highly standardized questionnaires answers tend to be on the non-specific side.

3. We’re not trainers, we’re developers. Training people is not part of our daily job, so why should we be taking extra care in getting any feedback in how we’re doing?

There are a couple more arguments and believe me, I get them all. I still believe that we should try to come up with a way to get valuable feedback and here’s why:

1. If you’re doing a training and you don’t get feedback, how will you be able to learn? How can you be sure that what you did was okay, maybe even really good? How can you know that what you thought you were teaching really was what came across? Unless you’re really good at reading facial expressions or minds, you won’t. And while it’s true that you cannot be completely sure that anonymous feedback is sincere, it’s most likely your safest bet at getting an honest feedback.

2. You need to give the participants of your training a possibility to give feedback. It’s only fair to them. And yes, you could go around asking each of them for their opinion. One bet says that it’s going to take longer than giving out feedback questionnaires. Another bet says that if it doesn’t take longer then it’s because people are too polite to tell you the truth.

(In fact, if you think you don’t need feedback or that your training participants don’t need it or both, it sounds to me like you don’t really care about your job as a trainer. Which makes me wonder whether you should be doing this. I might be wrong. Or I might not.)

3. Deciding against getting feedback because in your experience feedback questionnaires are boring to fill out and don’t provide any valuable results is just the easy way out. If that’s the problem – and I agree that it often is – then, by all means, come up with good questions. Nobody’s telling you how to get the best feedback you can get, all I’m saying is that you should get it.

In our situation I have suggested coming up with a very short questionnaire that has no more than three or four questions. The first thing to do is find out what the most important thing we need to know is and then ask questions that are impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. One such question could be:

What was the most useful thing you learned in this session?

Another one could be:

If you could change one thing for the next group of participants for this session, what would it be?

Yes, you could still write „Everything“ and „Nothing“ respectively as an answer, but you would have to think about it for a moment. Asking these question also means that as a trainer you’re assuming that you’re not perfect and put participants more at ease with pointing out possible faults. If you’re out to get the truth, try to ask questions that make being a bit critical and giving honest opinions feel okay and natural.

And don’t overwhelm the participants with two pages of boring 1 to 6 scales or intimidating questions with no clear indication of their purpose. Ask questions that are easy to answer while still providing useful feedback to the trainers and giving the participants a chance to give a final evaluation of what they had to sit through for four hours (or more).

It’s only fair. That’s all I’m saying.

More Whiteboards Everywhere

I wrote a post about my deep love for whiteboards a while ago. This is a short follow-up with a revolutionary (well, not quite) idea that I’m proposing to development teams everywhere.

We’ve been jokingly talking about that at work, but I think it has a good point: We have our little office kitchen, basically the heart of the whole office floor because it’s where the coffee is. Often enough, kitchen small-talk turns into a design session, some technical issue gets discussed, a specific problem is brought up and so on. You probably know what I’m talking about.

So, what if we had a whiteboard in the kitchen? It would make total sense and would be perfect for turning a kitchen discussion into a design concept. Draw it up, take a picture with your cell phone, go back to work. It’s the spontaneity that counts here and having an easy way to jot down ideas would bring this to a whole new level.