My Void

Long time no blargh

It's a been a long time since my last (and so far only) blog post. There's no excuse for it really. I have been blatantly neglecting my part on filling the web with useless information. Today I finally managed to put enough coffee in me to be able to start changing that fact.

To be quite honest, I haven't just been sitting on my arse all day long for the past year. I've had the pleasure of taking part on really interesting projects during that time, which has given me a great opportunity (and excuse) to research all kinds of new technologies, and also brush up my skills on the technologies that I'm already familiar with.

But that's not all! During the past year, I've also managed to (more or less)permanently change my geographic location from Oulu to Helsinki. And I'm loving it.

I'm going to keep this post short and sweet, but also promise to write something more in the near future.

New Reality-TV show about Scrum

It's a cross between The Apprentice and Big Brother, we'll call it The ScrumMaster.

We take 20 developers and place them in one work-area to work on a project. The first sprint's velocity is going to be used as a baseline for the rest of the project's timeline, with the twist that after each sprint one of the developers is going to get fired, yet the team's velocity must remain the same throughout the whole project. The project will have additional personnel working as the "Management" and the UI Team, who will work as hard as they can to screw things up. The UI/UX specification will dramatically change after every sprint and it will not match even half of the actual user stories. The "Management" will not get affected by such minor details, and they insist on pushing the team to their limits. Another additional team "helping" the Scrum Team is the Test Team, which will provide very helpful test results after each sprint like "It doesn't work", "It broke when I did something with it, I don't know" and "This yor folt!". More detailed test results would be available in a separate tool, which is either down or just doesn't work 90% of the time, and the Scrum Team won't be given access to that tool. In UI testing, the UI Team will reject the UI implementation and demand UI changes like "The black (RGB[0,0,0]) should be darker" and "The logo should be placed half a pixel more to the left".

The project will have one week sprints, and one sprint will include all the usual meetings related to scrum process: the daily meeting which will always take more than 30 minutes, the sprint planning which is at least 2 hours, the estimation meeting which will take 2-4 hours, sprint result meeting which will last at least 3 hours, and of course the retrospective meeting which will take only 1 hour. As a bonus, the "Management" will arrange additional status meetings where the Scrum Team will help the "Management" write reports to their own managers. These meetings will eat up at least 2 hours in every sprint.

When the project is reaching it's final sprints, the "Management" will suddenly push new items to the backlog, like for example "Security auditing for project architecture" which was supposed to be done before the project started, "Additional support for 10 years old device/software", and also the usual bonus items that the customer "forgot" to mention in the requirements specification during the actual planning. And of course the "Management" already promised the customer that the Scrum Team would do the new tasks ASAP and it would not affect the original deadline OR the budget, even though it might mean big changes to the original architecture of the nearly finished product.

After the final sprint when the one man team has miraculously put the whole product together and everything is working as expected, the project will be cancelled.

The winner will get hired to a multinational corporation as a ScrumMaster.

Any buyers?