Software Freedom Day 2010

I spent yesterday at Software Freedom Day(SFD) Wellington. SFD is technically based on the four freedoms that the GNU people have, which I somewhat disagree with as I favour the less precriptive MIT style licences, but that's a discussion that I'll avoid for now. Regardless of what philosophical underpinnings are technically behind the event, it's a great day and people talked about a number of cool or inspiring things.

The highlight for me was hearing about the use of Moodle and Mahara in schools. I really care about education and seeing open source tools being leveraged in schools, where they can assist in learning, customising features and cutting costs, is really great.

Talking of open source in education, there's a big empty spot for open source in the student management system area of education that isn't being covered by anyone at the moment apparently. The teachers I know all seem to be permanently complaining about whatever tools they're currently using for this, so it's probably something that needs looking at. Have to know more about what's required though but could make an interesting side project if I get round to it (People should remind me that I already have too many side projects).

Also on the education front we had a bit of a discussion of the issue of getting more kids(particularly girls) into tech at an early age. Which reminded me to check the progress of hackety hack the open source Ruby program that's working towards helping teach kids to code, originated by Why the lucky stiff. Hackety Hack looks like it's going quite well so I'll take a shot at stick my little cousin in front of it next time I see him.

The talks on Freebase and Opencog lead into a great discussion of various ways of interacting with data and extracting meaning from the web. Freebase is great for providing a decent amount of metadata in a lot of areas. While Opencog either as a whole or as some of its subprojects seems to have a lot of potential for really pulling meaning out of the masses of data that people simply don't have time to add metadata to appropriately. Also, AGI is just really fucking cool.

I also quickly pitched Railscamp and the idea of Camp during the lightning talks, so hopefully that'll get some interest.

Anyway, Software Freedom Day happens every year and is worth going to even if you aren't a GNU loony.

Scrum Introduction at RailsCamp

I did end up giving a talk at RailsCamp on Scrum. I'd had a few conversations about client management the previous day so I pitched it at a reasonably introductory level. The audience that showed up was probably about half familiar with scrum and half not. I think we got through a pretty good overview of the Scrum process and the experienced folks caused a lot of really interesting discussion.

Scrum

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During the talk estimating/sprint size and client trust became a significant part of the discussion. A number of people had issues with picking an amount of work and suggesting that that amount of work should be concrete for the sprint. I mentioned a few ways of minimising or accepting this and there are probably many other methods:

• Set stretch targets at sprint planning by putting some targets in the sprint at the bottom of the sprint backlog. This way there's something to do if you run out, they should only be done if you really finish the other tasks and there's no penalty for not reaching them.
• Regardless of having slightly less work, there's almost always something else for developers to be doing. From refactoring time to working on side projects there's never likely to be a shortage of work.
• Clients are going to be happy with consistent work and meeting the goals they've started with. If velocity needs to change that should be worked out before the sprint.
• Developers are most likely going to be happier if rules agreed on at the beginning of the process are kept throughout, changing things at odd times is likely to have odd flow on effects.
• Any change to these rules can be easily addressed according to team desires during the retrospectives and planning for the next sprint.
  

My general belief is that by maintaining consistency in process and methods, clients and teams will have a more comfortable feel for what's happening in the project. All parties are likely to trust each other more. Parties that trust each other(where the trust is justified) are more productive than groups that are trying work everything through an adversarial state of requirements and contract negotiation. Scrum occupies a similar position in development to manners in general society by allowing people to have a set of behaviours that allow for smooth communication without intimate knowledge of each other.

The talk also spawned a talk on Kanban a project management system with some interesting properties that I might blog about sometime(it also has inbuilt support in cucumber).