In Scrum we trust

we had a Scrum training in the last 2 days with Boris Gloger. It was clarifying to have this training as most of the participants were already using Scrum actively in their projects. Now we know what we did wrong and what could be improved.

the points that catched most of my attention was the rule of working on one backlog item at a time (of course you need to be reasonable here, as there might be situations where it is necessary or better to parallelize, but as a general statement you should avoid that).

another point that confused me was the sizing of the backlog, we previously sized the items in days, but we got convinced that sizing should not be dependent on time as you want to estimate how big your item is and not how fast you can solve it.

one interesting practice to sizing is the poker play: where you use cards with the values of an almost fibonacci sequence to "size" your backlog items among your team.

a very important point is to define beforehand the acceptance criteria with the Product Owner and also check what went well and what could be improved by the end of each sprint.

according to the curse, for having scrum running efectively you need to have:

1. Timebox
2. Self organization
3. Full principled
4. Potential shippable code
   

and for documentation, it is basically the product backlog (PB) & the sprint backlog. \o/

as an interesting side note, the word backlog refers to the containers that are transported by ship and this backlog is also ordered by importance: the most important containers are placed in the bottom in case there is any storm.


the things we are going to improve in our team for the next sprint: do the daily scrum meetings DAILY, time boxed and on time, work on the same backlog item until it is really done before moving to the next one and doing the sprint planing 1, . planning 2, review & retrospective in order to improve after each sprint. In order words, just apply Scrum more strictly :)

the main benefit of the training was to understand the principles of the Scrum methodology. With that in mind you should be able to adapt it to your day to day work, without loosing the agile principles.

Canola beta9

the new beta 9 of canola is out! in this release the main new additions are the UPnP plugin and the "On the Move" playlist.

I find these two new features extremely useful: now you are able to create and edit a dynamic playlist on the go and access your media from your local network seamlessly.

besides that, there is also the new canola-tuning plugin, which enables you to get the cover arts and video thumbnail from inside canola´s settings (no need to run the canola-tuning app anymore).

one really old bug that was finally solved is the PNG thumbail generation! this was a long time on my todo list, but with low priority. the fix included a patch for epsilon, the EFL thumbnail library, and I took the opportunity to send some patches for epsilon upstream.

hope you enjoy, there is more to come ...
br

Arena in FISL 9!

this year was the first time I went to fisl (Forum Internacional de Software Livre) to participate in the organization of the Arena Contest, that was promoted by INdT together with Forum Nokia, the Gobolinux community and the fisl organizing committee.

the arena itself was a closed glass room (like an aquarium) in the middle of the event area. it seemed like a "big brother" show, everybody stopped and starred through the windows to see what was going on inside :)
while coding the participants were given "red bull" and pizza to keep their energy high and it worked since none of them left before the last minute!










the first phase "qualifying" of this competition was a series of tasks of python for series 60. these tasks were hidden in the calendar of the N95, like a "treasure hunt". 8 teams of 4 people participated and the teams that earned the most points by solving the tasks advanced to final round: the "insanifying".

in the final round was proposed a real project of developing an ODF viewer for the Maemo platform. from the 5 teams that participated in the final round (1 resigned), 4 functional applications were coded in 24 hours, great job from the participants!

we hope they continue to develop the applications (as they promised) and start a joint project at garage.

more photos from the Arena can be found here.

all this Arena event was filmed by a great professional team of film producers from Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre. they will produce a video that will show off better what we are trying to describe here.

besides the great experience of organizing the Arena, it was also great to meet the guys from trolltech and kde and see the challenges of the UI design in Andreas talk! in INdT, we are doing a lot of work in common with these guys and we talked about the opportunities of working together.

summarizing, as artur said, it was an amazing event for INdT!

Bossa Conference

I am very excited for the next weeks! The reason why is that the first edition of the Bossa Conference will be held in Recife from the 12th to the 14th of March. Actually the event will take place in Porto de Galinhas, a wonderful beach in the southern coast of Pernambuco. Here is the conference site and the agenda.

Many experts of the Linux Community will be present focusing on Embedded Software in three main categories: Connectivity, Multimedia and Platform.

Besides the invited speakers, the whole INdT from Recife will also take place in this event, gathering and disseminating information about its projects and the maemo community in general.

It will be an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and to build new ideas!