Waterfall ha ha

Carrying on from the last post, I found this very funny.

You put your document in, you take your use-case out

It's time to do the methodology shuffle again. This time around it's Scrum.
An agile methodology which is light on overhead (arent't they all) and strong on team-working (again ditto). What seems appealing about Scrum is that it lacks the obvious lunatic elements of XP. Sorry, I meant to say, it doesn't require the same level of rigor as XP (that everyone eventually stops doing anyway - cos it's like hard and stuff).

So what does it give you, well unfortunately at this point we don't know much more that the details of the methodology and some feedback from external projects that use it (or variants of it). So time to pilot it, adapt it to our culture, review and improve.

In essence Scrum is a to-do feature list. You organise your product features by priority. You then give this off to the Scrum team, they take the first chunk (sprint) and then beaver away for up to 6 weeks knocking tasks off the sprint. By the end you have a milestone.

So good for dividing a big long process into discrete demonstrable chunks.
There's also a strong team ethic. Daily Scrum meetings where people are asked three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Is there anything blocking you?

They then resolve the difference, add / delete tasks as they progress and continue.

So not a hell of a lot of difference between this and iterative/phased development. Some nice new team-building practices, easy metric gathering and clear separation between overall planning an phase / sprint planning.

Of course the devil is in the detail and it's the tension between an overall product planning process and the sprint / phase planning that seems to be the least explained.

Anyway, should be fun finding out how it all really hangs together in the real world.

CIA Open Source Notification System

Okay it's not actually the CIA trying to check what evil backdoor sludgecode your hacking into your fabulous open-source libraries in an attempt to overthrow western capitalism, but rather quite a nice site that integrates with the SCM systems of various open source projects and monitors check-ins etc.

See the system here.

Of interest to us, from the point of view of tracking Eclipse projects. Which is nice additional resource in conjunction with mailing lists and bugzilla.

Can someone just shut this man up.

AAAAAaaaarrgggh well he's back. It's our man Charlie McCreevy and with his winning ways he wants to restart the whole issue of European Patenting. The whole shebang kicks off this time with a consulation document (available from here).

Commissioner McCreevy has stated his intention to make one final effort to have the
proposal adopted during his mandate.

Well so just one last one then. Go on, go on, go on.

So the text seems noddy enough. "Would you approve of a pan-european patenting system" - sure, provided you cannot patent software. "Do you think there should be a single european patent dispute process should exist" - sure, provided software patents attempts always fail.

O.K. this is re-framing the debate on the Community Patent (i.e. a pan-european one vs the national ones we have at the moment)... but could this be a stalking horse for software patentability. It'll be interesting to see how the vested interests stack up, always telling. Last time round, they all stacked up as you would expect (apart from the icky ISA), then it looked like the directive might actually get through with sensible ammendments, so both sides decided to scupper it.

Also this comes just days after a UK judge has questioned whether we need software patents at all. Good to see the "why are we giving these guys a monopoly" meme is percolating up the stack.

Phone hacking

So it turns out that my spanky-new VOIP provider (I got my final bill from Eircom and they owe me money) has just started beta testing web service for account management. Well this is kinda cool, since I was able to import this directly into Cape Clear / Eclipse and quickly implement time- and SMS (via gateway)-controlled call-forwarding. This is cool and I really look forward to the day when all my basic services are web-service enabled. What kind of crazy web-service mashups could you have? Routing calls / screening calls on the basis of the alcohol levels detected in fridge?