Early last year I heard about a management process called Scrum. As we didn’t really have any management process in place for the development team, I felt it necessary that we needed something. I began reading about Scrum, and could see the benefits that scrum would bring us. Before long, I booked myself on a SCM course, which was a 6 month wait. In the mean time, I decided to implement some of the scrum practices based on my understanding at the time. The first thing I done was bought 3 sprint boards, which were placed at the end of the office where everyone can view them. The following week we started to have morning scrum meetings. This was at most the very basic attempt at scrum that we employed.

Before letting you know of the results and how we actually benefited we did initially encounter many problems:

The morning scrum meetings

Every morning, we started off the morning scrum. This consisted of all the departments, and the stake holders. The problem this presented to us is, was there a need for the designers to be present when in most cases they where not needed and therefore produced waste. A knock on effect of having the design team there also sparked conversation. The result was a morning ‘catch up’ meeting that lasted up to an hour.

Of course reviewing the situation we ended up just including a PO, the SM and the team which of course worked better for us. However, the time boxed meetings still dragged on longer than the 15minutes.

The two questions that were eventually answered later where, should the designers be part of the team? How can be keep our morning scrum meeting time boxed?

Educating the team

Getting the top management to buy in was actually quiet easy, so to was the development team. However, everyone seemed to have a slightly different interpretation of Scrum. Of course this then produced mixed results like:

- Why do we needs morning scrum meetings when we can add all the work to trac and it can be monitored?

- How come we are not including the designers when we need to create GUI’s?

- User stories, story points etc what are they and we need hours!

These questions where later addressed too, but they were all fair points.

Sprint boards and tasks

To be honest, I found getting my head around user stories very hard. To me a task is a task, but creating user stories is a fine technique. Therefore tasks were usually a little to complicated and a little ambiguous. As of the sprint boards, sometimes task notes where tampered with and instead of having the notes in the order of the backlog they were very randomly placed.

The results

After 6 months and one scrum course I am now Certified Scrum Master. The course provided me with a wealth of information on scrum, not to mention the practical element showed me how to incorporate some of the practices. As a CSM I think everyone took me a lot more seriously which paved way for me to now fine tune the process.

The first problems that I addressed were the morning meetings and other small projects. Here I laid it straight, I ask the 3 quesitons and other than a reply no one should talk as we can arrange a meeting straight afterwards. Also, this was done standing around the sprint boards. Or other office based in Poland also joined in the morning scrum meetings as they too are part of the team. This resulted in a short and effective meeting, just like the scrum process dictates. The points as to why the relevant people have a meeting afterwards was to loose all the waste of everyone having to listen to a discussion that did not really effect them.

As of the other projects, we usually have 2-3 medium projects, then several tasks from many different projects that were mainly updates, added functionality, bug fixes etc. No book actually provided me with an answer. Therefore, the only thing i could think off is create an ‘other’ project that acted like any other project. This was welcomed and have been using it since.

The result of the problems were all overcome by simply educating everyone. To be honest we have seen vast improvements in our working practise. Some of the notable ones:

- Sprints on 5-10 days. Our clients instantly took to view and playing with the prototypes than the flat visuals that they were used to seeing. To quote one of the POs (as best as I can remember)
“We went over the visuals with the client, then before leaving I showed them the prototype and they loved it. I could tell they were still on the site after I left”

- Retrospectives formed an integral of the process. Having a retrospective after release highlighted all the pitfalls and good points through the sprint. It also serves as part of the documentation for ISO 9001.

- All management could see all the work being done at a glance by looking at the sprint boards. Also, the burndown charts are updated every morning so they are also aware of anything major, although just listening to the scrum meetings highlights this.

Another mis -understanding was using scrum along with scm tool. We use trac/svn as our source code management tool. Some of the developers though that just adding everything to trac without the morning meetings could be seen as more beneficial. But I reminding everyone of the key points

- Trac encourages collaboration to a certain extent, where scrum is total colaboration

- The PO’s don’t want to login to trac to see a list of tickets.

- Trac is for source code management, not managing the whole process.

- Problems would not be highlighted etc.

After everyone bought into this, a user story was accepted by a developer or pair of developers. They wrote the tests, documented it on the trac wiki and created their own ticket. Any additional information was added to the ticket and if needed the documentation on the wiki.

I have seen first hand how the process of just a system like trac in place can in fact let a project down.

Other things that I have learned as a result of trial/error, reading and attending events like the London Scrum Users Group.

When implementing scrum or introducing a client to scrum might help if you change the terminology. As we work with a lot of non technical peopel, the word scrum can scare people. Using words like process, release, release meeting, morning meeting, tasks etc masked the fact that scrum is present. I did find this useful and was something that I picked up from several people in the London Scrum Meeting.

User stories can be difficult to write at first. But after reading two books on user stories and agile estimation, some trial and error I finally sussed them, which had the benefit of more people understanding them and work being more accurate. A link to my linkedin profile and book review follows below in the list of other resources.

To use Scrum you either use it or you don’t. Of course implementing a few features can work but not as successfuly as following the process completely. One problem I encountered was slipping out of the process. One project suffered a great deal as a result of this.

Other resources
My linked in profile and book reviews

The london Scum Users Group linked group

The london Scum Users Group Wiki

We then had a break before starting a retrospective on how we all thought the meeting went. Although there were mixed responses, the general out come for the next meeting is perhaps break off into groups and/or have have a few lightening talks. If your interested in taking part in the London Scrum Users Group, please see the wiki and join the linkedin group.

Links

Lindedin Group

The wiki

Well there are a few things:

1. Setup the firewall to handle them

2. Installing deny hosts

3. Configure your ssh daemon properly

4. Set up proper accounts for people

The methods that I deploy are points 1, 3 and 4.

Configuring SSH

In the sshd_conf do the following:

- change the port number: port 9999

- Allow no password auth: PasswordAuthentication no

- Allow public key auth: PubkeyAuthentication yes

- Only allow user accounts that belong to a group: AllowGroups groupName
By setting the above you have place a lot of restrictions on the who can access your server using ssh.

Configure your firewall

iptables -N SSH_CHECK
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 9999 -m state –state NEW -j SSH_CHECK
iptables -A SSH_CHECK -m recent –set –name SSH
iptables -A SSH_CHECK -m recent –update –minutes 60 –hitcount 4 –name SSH -j DROP

Finally the last thing is to configure the user accounts that can access the server. It is strongly recommended to add the users to the sudousers if they require any specialist privileges.

We use a base project that is configured for all our core developers, which means im not adding the same permissions and groups all the time.

How I configured it:

apache svn config:

<Location /projects/test2>
DAV svn

# Set this to the path to your repository
SVNPath /var/svn/test2

AuthType Basic
AuthName “Test2 Project”
AuthUserFile /var/trac/.htpasswd
AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/svn/authz
Require valid-user
</Location>

apache trac config:

<VirtualHost *:80>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond /var/trac/$1 -d
RewriteRule ^/([^/.]+)(/?.*) /trac.cgi$2 [S=1,E=TRAC_ENV:/var/trac/$1]

ServerAdmin tim@domain.com
ServerName trac.domain.com

DocumentRoot /usr/share/trac/cgi-bin/

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

<Directory /usr/share/trac/cgi-bin/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /trac “/usr/share/trac/htdocs”

<Location />
SetEnv TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR “/var/trac”
SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/trac/egg_cache
</Location>

DirectoryIndex trac.cgi
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.trac.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.trac.log combined

</VirtualHost>

The above configuration means that all users are in one file, and can be controlled globally. Below are the plugins which i have installed and consider very helpful.

Plugins - Below are some of the plugin which I think really help

iniadmin

trac account manager

trac svn authz

trac web admin

timing and estimatation

pagetopdf

Trac table of contents macro

XMLRPC

apt-get install exim4  exim4-config

After installation is complete, you must run:

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

This will allow you to configure the MTA. That is it, php will ‘just work’ because the installation also creates a symlink of sendmail to the exim binary.

If you do not run the above config command, you will see this in your exim/mainlog:

tim@*******.com R=nonlocal: Mailing to remote domains not supported

When pasting in your certifacte, in the certificate field make sure you copy and paste the private key first. Followed by the certificate. If you puchased an AV certificate (so your domain is green in the IE bar), make sure you get the root and intermediate certificates.

Look in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf for the line like:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>

If it exists you have to delete/comment this default SSL virtual host starting from the
“<VirtualHost _default_:443>” line and ending with “</VirtualHost>“.

Then stop and start (not restart!) Apache server.

http://kb.parallels.com/en/939
- private key then certifacte

- You must paste in the root certificate first! CA intermediator cerficate then root certifecate

svn export . ../new_dir

or

find . -name .svn -prune -exec rm -rfv {} \;

Either way, both will work. I personally use export, because if there is a problem it means that I do not have to checkout an entire project

Today I finally installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my Sony vaio sz4. It runs like a dream, better than the SUSE setup which it replaced. My first thoughts are that the system runs very fast and all the components work out of box(web cam, finger print scanner have not being tested yet). I have noticed the wifi throughput has increased, using the eclipse IDE runs like a dream and best of all compiz fusion works on both the laptop and on a dual monitor setup. The synaptic package manager seems more complete overSUSE’s yast package management.

Although it is my personal laptop,  Ubuntu (7.10) was rolled out on all developer workstations at Or Media. This was a little shock to some of the developers, but everyone has seen the benefits. Some of which are:

• Apps deployed on a Linux system are developed on a Linux system.
• Most of the software is free (Although some machines run VMWare with windows installations - QA, Bless them!)
• Cheaper machines can be bought
• Everyone now has the same setup
• Security is tighter

Of course, like all good things, there are certain draw backs. . VMware needed the vmware-any-any-116 hack just to get it working. After that the evaluation license is invalid and therefore had to buy it straight away (well 30 days earlier than needed!).

In conclusion, SUSE in my eyes was pretty good. But the more I use Ubuntu I see that this distro is going to be the de-facto standard.  Below are some of the reason why you will agree why Ubuntu is on top and why everyone is changing towards linux:

Dell

Dell

BBC’s view

Sweeden moving to linux

Japan’s schools

 French parliment

Cross over office helps

An advocate of microsoft windoze(hehe)

There are many many more example that you can find. At the end of the day, money, security and stability all play a key role. Linux is a winner, so if you have not tried to change your OS now is the time to consider.

Example:
To see if an author has a comment

$author = AuthorPeer::retrieveByPK($id);
$authorComments = CommentPeer::getAuthorComments($author->getAuthorId());
 
//In the model
public static function getAuthorComments($id)
{
 
    $c = new Criteria();
    $c->add(self::AUTHOR_ID, $id);
 
    return self::doSelect($c);
 
}

The reason why people would want to use this is so they can see if a comment is available. Which is a fair point if your sql is rusty

$author = AuthorPeer::getAuthorComments($id);
$author = array_pop($author);
 
...
...
 
//In the model
public static function getAuthorComments($id)
{
$c = new Criteria();
$c->add(self::AUTHOR_ID, $id);
 
$c->addJoin(self::AUTHOR_ID, CommentPeer::AUTHOR_ID, Criteria::LEFT_JOIN);
$c->setLimit(1);
return self::doSelect($c);
}

As you can see the latter users a left join, which means only one database query.