Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Scrum Certification

About 2 years ago, my friend António Cruz had presented me a book about SCRUM. After reading the book i found that, the methodology itself, in certain way, can help me manage the projects where i'm evolved.

Last April i've moved to a new company, in the financial area, where i need to manage multiple projects. It is a small team, with very critical projects, and most of them should be deliverable in a short period of time. I realize that i couldn't miss the opportunity to adopt the SCRUM as my project management(PM) methodology.

I sit down and start thinking, and i found myself making some questions:
1. How can i convince all the people evolved in the projects to adopt SCRUM, when most of them, even't had listen the word SCRUM before?
2. How can i show them that this is what they really need, in order to achieve their goals?
3. Will they offer resistance to the change of the way they are managing their projects at this time?

These was just some of the things that i thought.

Well, to begin, i've scheduled a meeting with the CEO, and tell him a little about scrum. What is scrum, the cerimonies, the artifacts, how it works and what are the main advantages of the methodology. When he realized that he will have something to see after 15 days of the project start, and that he will know, at any point in time, the exactly status of each project, without even call me, it was really easy to convince him.

After this meeting i said me: what are you waiting for? LET'S MOVE ON !!!

Since then, we are practicing SCRUM with a lot of success. We are making deliverables each two weeks, and the most important, all team members are very motivated doing their job. We are facing a little problems , but we can live with that.

Today, i've started the SCRUM MASTER CERTIFICATION. More details here. At the begining i thougth it will be one more borrowed session about SCRUM, that i just want it to finish my Certification, and get back to work in the real world. I never read or hear nothing about the instructor, Mitch Lacey, so my expectations for the course are very low. But fortunnely has been really good surprise. Mitch is a very good speaker, he speaks a very understandable english, with good examples, and share his large experience with the audience. For the first day it was very good. I think this is the first course that i can't wait for the next day.

Bellow, i share with you some SCRUM lecture and other related material.

Books:

  • Agile Software Development With Scrum. Ken Schwaber
  • Agile Project Management With Scrum



  • This excelent paper from Jeff Sutherland. (Many thank to Hugo Batista for the link)

    And please, dont't miss this video from Ken Schwaber, teaching SCRUM at Google.








    And, no that i'm already a ScrumMaster, you can find my profile here.

    I hope you enjoy it!
  • Saturday, January 26, 2008

    SQL Server Best Practices

    Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. These SQL Server best practices draw on the extensive experience and expertise from respected developers and engineers at Microsoft, who walk you through the specifics on solving particularly difficult issues.

    Here you can find tons of documentation about SQL Server 2005.

    Sunday, January 20, 2008

    Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit

    For those that are begining with .net framework 3.0 and 3.5, Microsoft has released a training kit with very good material.

    This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including: LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management.

    Presentations, Labs, Demos, all can be found in Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit..

    You can download it here.

    Configuring TFS Permissions

    One of the things that really borrow me, it's when i need to configure permissions on Team Foundation Server.

    After some googling i found a website that describes all the steps needed to set permissions on each module of TFS.
    After reading this article Setting Permissions in Team Foundation, you will be easily able to configure the permissions in TFS.

    The community project TeamSystemCommunity, hosted at Codeplex, has a lot of usefull information and documents to those that need to manage a TFS environment.

    Please subscribe the RSS feed of this website.