Jazz in the hood

Martin Espinach, coffee machine and lunch mate, gave yesterday a very nice internal talk about how his previous project used bugzilla and Mylyn to help them plan, assign and track team tasks. Although they were initially excited about Mylyn's task-focused UI, none of the team members ended up using it; they did love Mylyn's ability to get notifications from bugzilla. It looked like a neat solution.

When his very detailed talk was almost done, he told us that, for their recently started new project, they are using IBM Rational Jazz. I felt like killing him, but I then I would have missed the chance to complain about his talk during every afternoon coffee in the next weeks.

And Jazz? So far, they are loving it. I'll have to ask him to demo it to our team.

Play with ClearQuest and ClearCase without installing them

I've been playing with IBM Rational ClearQuest and ClearCase without doing any configuration. Cool. I'm hoping that we'll do the same for more IBM Rational products.

You can access a dW server with a tutorial environment setup using a Citrix client. Go to Trial: Rational ClearCase V7.0 (I just reported it, but, in case that you take the first tutorial, you'll see that the screenshots of the first part don't match the actual product: you'll have to "connect" instead of "login", and you better know that pat's password is pat and that she has the lead project role).

Grandmothers and designers' expectations

Bruce MacIsaac:

Systems often outlive the assumptions of their original designers. The millenium bug is a classic example. Assuming that the software would be replaced by 1999, early designers used two-digit dates. That assumption cost billions to correct. My own grandmother was the victim of a similar false assumption. When my grandfather passed away in the 1970s, she bought a dual headstone, precarved with her name and "19__". At the age of 112, Mary MacIssac, like many legacy systems, continues to outlive the designer's expectations.

From the Leverage Legacy Systems chapter of Agility and Discipline Made Easy. Practices from OpenUP and RUP (amazon.com,amazon.co.uk ,safari), by Per Kroll and Bruce MacIsaac.

Bruce dedicates the book to his grandmother.

Ajax i Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe i atSistemas

Web 2.0: la revolución de RIA en el desarrollo de aplicaciones web. Un enfoque práctico: al World Trade Center de Barcelona el primer de febrer, i a Madrid el 8 de febrer.

Organitzat per atSistemas, Business Partner Premier de IBM.

Ups! Inscripcions al 91 640 76 20 o per mail a Isabel Hueso (ihueso at atsistemas.com)

OpenUP: a short intro to the Open Unified Process

I listened to Introducing OpenUP, a very interesting ibm internal presentation by Per Kroll and Ricardo Balduino, and hosted by the Agile@IBM community. I'm highly impressed. The slide set used has quite in common with this powerpoint, available in the Eclipse Process Framework Project (EPF) community news page.

Take the RUP principles, borrow freely from XP, Scrum, Agile Modelling and DSDM, shake, and you get a methodology that makes lots of sense despite having a mostly ungoogleable name...

OpenUP/Basic is organiced around 4 subprocesses: Collaboration, Intent Management, Management, Solutions Development. It has 6 different roles.



Did you notice that the tester role works in the intent management?

OpenUP/Basic is minimal, complete and extensible.

• Minimal means that it is not the kind of methodology where you have a huge role and workproduct initial list that you have to cleanup for your project (and that usually makes you shop more than you really need...): 6 roles, 18 tasks, 20 work products, 200 printed pages.
• Complete: can be manifested as an entire process to build a system (scrum does not deal with the solution construction subprocess)
  
• Extensible: can be used as a foundation on which process content can be added or tailored as needed. In fact OpenUP consists of
• A base process - OpenUP/Basic
• Extensions to this base process, such as Model Driven Development content

The main worproducts and their realtion to roles/subprocesses can be viewed here:



The Work Item List is very close to the scrum backlog (not only for the current iteration, but for all the project). Of course, it is iterative, a la RUP:



But adaptable! The project plan is a 2 pages doc, describing the goals for the different iterations. And, since each iteartion brings its learning, the plan changes:



I really like the concept of "Stakeholder Satisfaction Space".

Other things that I'd like to highlight:

• daily meetings
• test driven developemnt
• use case based
• promotes a readable representation of the architecture. Much of the architecture can be
• Selected instead of designed (patterns)
• Referenced instead of described

OpenUP/Basic instantiates the core values of the agile manifesto in some slightly more concrete core principles:

OpenUP/Basic Key principles	Agile manifesto
Collaborate to align interests and share understanding	Individuals and interactions overprocess and tools
Evolve to continuously obtain feedback and improve	Responding to change over following a plan
Balance competing priorities to maximize stakeholder value	Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Focus on articulating the architecture	Working software over comprehensive documentation

Does it work? I cannot tell, but at least looks like its building blocks have proven to work often.

dW chats: Grady Booch on the latest Rational tools release

Another developerWorks chat that looks very interesting: Grady Booch answers your questions about this week's Rational tools release. On Thursday December 7th, at 4:30 pm his time or 10:30 pm my time.

I did not learn about this from Booch's blog itself, but from a comment by Ferran Rodenas to a post in Kelly Drahzal's blog. The interesting bit about this is that Ferran works for "la Caixa", a very important ibm client, and it is a very good thing for me and some team mates to be able to read his posts and keep track of his blogroll. Or explore his linkedin profile and our common connections. The openess that blogs and social software have brought rocks!