Thursday, December 29, 2005

Egyptian Labor Law

Here is a sum up of the 'new' Egyptian Labor Law by Business Today Egypt: Egyptian Labor Law.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Bluetooth

My cousin told me about bluetooth a couple of years ago and he was so excited about it telling me how the 'new' mobiles can do all sorts of interesting things with it. A popular example of bluetooth use was pinning a bluetooth enabled pin on your shirt upon entering an exhibition and as you pass by every booth, those in the booth can automatically read information stored in this pin on your shirt using their bluetooth enabled equipment. Looked and sounded exciting at that time.

Although I've not seen myself this example in practice, the bluetooth pin used at an exhibition, yet I found bluetooth to be a very interesting technology when used on mobile phones. After taking several photos with my Nokia 6630 I then went near my computer and transferred all photos and videos from the phone to my computer without connecting any wires. It's cool.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Starting our First Sprint Backlog

Today we created and started writing in our first Sprint Backlog. After two Daily Scrum meetings, we decided we can make use of a Sprint Backlog to get used to writing in it and get a better feel of the project progress.

We used a single spreadsheet in an Excel file for the Sprint Backlog. We share this single file through SharePoint so we can all have read and write access to it without conflicting with one another (by using check in and check out).

After today's Scrum meeting, I passed by the team members one by one each at his workstation (there were 9 of them) and showed him how to use the Sprint Backlog, how it fits in the whole process and what each of its elements means as well as its significance to the whole process of our project.

I believe again Scrum has proven to be good and showed promising signs. I believe now by starting to use two of Scrum's elements, Daily Scrum meetings and a Sprint Backlog, we are starting to reap some of the benefits already. I believe Scrum could be our way to go in the next phase of the project. I believe we can start implementing it fully by then. The good thing is that by then we would have a stronger grasp of it having used it, if only partially, at the last part of our current phase of the project.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Our First Daily Scrum Meeting

Today we had our first Daily Scrum meeting. We all stood up in a circle (similar to the standup meeting in extreme programming). We were 10 all together: 9 developers and the 10th was myself, acting as the ScrumMaster in this case.

Each developer mentioned what he has done since the last Scrum meeting, what he will be doing till the next Scrum meeting and any obstacles that stand in his way. Although the team were not yet that comfortable with the Scrum meeting and did not talk in the best way, yet they started to get the feel of it. As the ScrumMaster I guided them through the process by first reminding them of what the Daily Scrum meeting is all about and how it is done. I had already given them a brief training session about scrum in the previous day. During our first Daily Scrum meeting, I tried to keep them on track by guiding them to mention the 3 things required (what they did, what they will do, obstacles facing them) and keeping them from talking about things that are not to be talked about during the Daily Scrum such as how to solve specific problems they faced or discussing alternative paths for some elements of the project.

Although it was our first Daily Scrum and we did not actually do it in the best way, yet I feel we did benefit from it. I think now team members will be more motivated to do useful work each day because they will be mentioning what they have done in front of the rest of the whole team. It also keeps everyone informed of how the project is progressing and how its different elements are going forward. Furthermore, two pairs of developers found out they need to meet after the today's Scrum meeting in order to further discuss specific things in their project to resolve problems that showed up during the Scrum meeting.

I believe the Daily Scrum meeting is a very good idea. Although we have not yet implemented Scrum in its entirety and only started by implementing this small part of it, the Daily Scrum meetings, yet it is already showing promising effects. Perhaps gradually we can introduce the whole of the Scrum process to our team and start using it fully by our next iteration of the project. Bottom line: Scrum looks promising and we will continue to integrate more of it in our work till we fully implement it. We feel that this will result in better productivity and better project management of our software development efforts.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Outlook Nightmares

Been using Gmail for quite a while now. My hotmail and yahoo accounts I just keep in the background and try to dry out by not using as much as I can. I use Gmail for all my email communication and all my serious needs. I've come to depend on it now totally and got used to its cool way of organizing information (aka: conversations, labels and easy search).

At work now I have to use Outlook to check and send email from my work email account. It is utterly a nightmare! No conversations in Outlook! That's extremely terrible. When using Gmail I can easily follow up on back and forth emails between me and another person. I do this so easily. On Outlook however, I keep digging my way trying to find the scattered emails that went back and forth between me and another person. That's utterly terrible. I really need to have Gmail-style conversations in Outlook so I can find it palpable.