To be or not to be (Agile)

Sorry , I haven't been posting a lot of stuff as much as I wanted to, I have recently been assigned the responsibility of managing a small project team. The last month or so has mostly been spent in a lot of meetings and team coordination.

So far from what Ive experienced, project management is all about making plans, updating them and meetings, and some more meetings. I'm not really sure at the moment if I want to continue this path fo project management or stay towards more on the architecture side.

I'm currently leading an internal project, so there is no requirement for costing or client meetings etc. I can classify project management practices for software in two major categories

1. Plan Driven Management
   
2. Agile Development Methods

I have been doing a bit of reading on the internet on different forums and article based sites for better management practices and which yields more productivity. One of the sites is techrepublic, a great site on general IT related articles and whitepapers

Plan Driven Management:

Plan driven management is the classic form of project management, in which you have one project manager who usually creates an upper level plan within the first 1-2 weeks of the start of the project, allocates resources and maintains the cost of the project.

The project manager is responsible for defining timeliness of the project from top to bottom to the very detailed pieces required

Agile Development Methods:

There are a number of methodologies available for agile development, Agile methodologies welcome change and focus more on the people and team effort rather than processes or plan management

I am most familiar with the SCRUM, Ive take two presentations on it, one during my MS and one during the PDC

In Agile development methodologies there is no single person responsible for complete planning, usually the complete plan is broken down into iterations and the team itself is responsible for further deciding who will do which task in order to complete the iteration.

Agile management requires that the initial level plan only define the upper level requirements, the detailed planning is done just in time. All agile methods focus on customer satisfaction, there also exists an agile manifesto, which consists of the underlying principles for all agile methods

more information can be found in these links:

Traditional Plan Driven Project Management
Agile Project Management
Agile Software Development

DSL experience in Karachi

For those of you reading this post from within Pakistan know the problems associated with getting a broadband connection. A lot of services do not provide QoS (Quality of service) or any affordable package. Recently I got a shared DSL home 256k unlimited download package from maxcom. So far I have been using it for almost 2 months without any issues, check out the speedtest result for my connection:
speedtest result

The experience so far with maxcom has been really great, the installation was free and service downtime is virtually zero.

Some providers are providing download speeds upto 2 Mbps via ADSL connection, but almost all of them are volume based. Unlimited packages cross the affordibility line for the average Pakistani.

But the prospects are good, like the launch of country wide Wimax solution by wateen telecom, the prices should come within affordable reach even for 2Mbps connections

2nd Day at PDC 07 , Stephen Forte to the rescue!

Thanks to stephen forte for putting some life back into PDC 07!, I feel the problem here is maturity of professionals. Our industry is still young and people are still new to concepts like application architecture and management processes required to deliver a successful solution. As such, the local presenters either dont have the presentation skills or the required experience to engage the audience in an interesting case study.

Otherwise the mismanagement from the PC Hotel management was slightly better than the first day, you can download all the slides for topics presented by stephen from here

My personal favorites were database design patterns and Scalable applications. I really wish Clement Vasters would come and visit sometime. I took some of his sessions at PDC 05', they were a real mind opener.

Regex Fundamentals

I went over this site over the weekend to brush up my skills on regular expressions, this is probably the one of the best and only site you'll need, it has basics, quick starts and detailed internal working of the regex engines

For people new to Regular Expressions or regex, it provides a powerful functionality to match patterns in text, it might seem confusing at first but once you get the hang of it its not that hard (but I think the testing data would take some thought!)

as I work on .NET, the framework provides you classes in the namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions

http://www.regular-expressions.info/


I'll try to post some examples later

First day at pakistan developers conference 2007

As some of you might know, PDC 2007 is happening in karachi on 19th and 20th June, today happens to be the first day of the event. Frankly, i was looking forward to some of the topics mentioned in the agenda here

My first was PDC 2005, which was really quite good with speakers like Rafal Lucaweicki and Clemens Vasters, at that time VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 was to be released, so there was tons to learn from it. The list of speakers was amazing none the less and there were topics on domain specific modeling, sql server reporting services and even Avalon. It was truly inspiring, after that I kept following blogs of some of the technical leaders in the market.

Unfortunately, that was probably the last good PDC there ever was, I get the feeling that PDC has been going downhill ever since, the number of professional speakers are minimized and so is the list of topics.

Today I attended the first day at PDC 07 arranged at PC hotel, It started off by waiting for the chief guest IT Minister Leghari to arrive, which in keeping with tradations here at pakistan arrived a full hour late. eventually he arrived and the ceremony was kicked off with a speech from the minister and plaque award ceremony.

Plaques were given to all sorts of people, including a guy who wrote the new urdu dictionary and a bunch of other people who's achievements were not explained and other irrelevants from the developers conference. Probably IT minister thought it would be a good idea to get rid of all pending plaque presentations at the PDC 07 event, may it be relevant to the developer conference or not

Finally we got to the tea break an hour late, on our way back we were handed an updated schedule. On close examination of the schedule, the session on Architecture "decoupling business logic from services" which I was planning to take was removed from schedule without any explanation!

we decided to take Goksin Bakirs presentation on developing with windows Vista enchancements, the presentation was nice but it was an overview level, pretty much of which I already knew

then we had the (mis)managed lunch. One of my friends had to go on a hunger strike lol!, cuz he had'nt filled his plate enough the first time, after the food as gone the waiters refused to fill it up. By the time people moved to desert, all the spoons had disappeared

after that we took the second session on "using LINQ to retrieve business data" by Zia khan. Zia khan is more of a business entrepreneur than a tech guy, but he gave enough of an overview to get started. Again there wernt any live sessions or demo's , just some architecture slides and some code in slides. You would be better off by downloading a quickstart tutorial on LINQ

the last session we took was "using the right technology : Bizztalk, SQL Server, Sharepoint etc" by Naveed bajwa, the guy was a pretty horizontal tech guy, but the presentation could use some work. He explained some basics and discussed certain scenarios and asked the audience what technology can be used under the scenarios. Unfortunately, the scenarios were bland 2 liner requirements statement and without depth except the last one. It was hardly a topic for PDC, he could have been better off by writing a 2 page article on it

I really hope that tomorrows sessions are better, otherwise if we keep getting useless topics and inexperienced MVP speakers, PDC 07 would be loosing the last of its professional audience. Ever wonder why we have a Professional Developers Conference in the world all over and here its called Pakistan Developer Conference ??