Ville Vesterinen from Arctic Startup published a nice and encouraging piece on Moozement. The observations on what Moozement is, what it’s most useful for, the current state of development (early stage, but we very much believe we’re onto something), and the direction of future development, very much resonate with our own thinking. There’s also a video interview with me 
There are a lot of books written about Agile. One can easily spend hundreds of euros on books and thousands on training courses. Sure, if your organisation has time and money, it makes sense to stockpile books and send entire development team for training courses. From my experience, what it really takes for a team to adopt agile mindset is an evangelist inside the team, and a good understanding of the basic concepts. Then it is just talking to the people who went through similar experience of adopting agile, sharing experiences and experimenting.
There are three very informative and inspirational sources of information that I recommend to all teams starting with agile or looking for some extra motivation:
1. Henrik Kniberg’s “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” (http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches). Available as free PDF after registration.
Extremely good source of information, tips and tricks, pitfalls and how to avoid them, planning ans estimation techniques. Henrik is speaking out of his own experience, which makes this book extremely valuable. You can read this book in just a few hours.
2.Ken Schwaber’s talk “Scrum et al.” at Google
Ken is is a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto.
One hour of valuable information – and hopefully after watching this video you will not try to adopt agile and scrum where it is going to do more harm than good.
3. Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/)
Print it out and pin it to the wall, so you can see it every day. Doing Agile and Scrum “by the book” never works – there’s no book that can tell you what the process should be. Not only because each team has its unique qualities and each organisation has its own constraints, but most importantly because agile is all about changing the process with every iteration – improving it and adopting to the changing reality.
There’s been a lot of heated discussions in the blogosphere in the past month about mobile platforms from independent developer perspective. Which platform to choose, if you want to develop cool applications, reach a lot of users and maximize your revenues?
I previously wrote on this subject a year ago, when Android was announced, and three years ago, when I was really disappointed by a pretty much dead S60 applications market.
This time it started with a great presentation by Teemu Kurppa (a mastermind behind mobile Jaiku) at MobileDevCamp Helsinki – “Platform = Stage. How to choose a mobile development platform?“. It is a must see for every mobile developer.
As some of you may know, I have decided to leave Nokia and go back into the start-up world. My last day is only in the end of May, but the decision was made long time ago, and information seems to travel too fast, so I decided to publicly announce it already now.
I am staying in Finland and will concentrate mostly on developing social training log Moozement, where I see a great potential. I will also be working as an independent consultant, so if you need help with your projects – get in touch.
I am hoping to get more time to formalize my thoughts, ideas and experiences with agile development methodologies, development of internet services and marrying them to mobile devices. So watch this space for more interesting blog posts.
The decision to leave was a tough one. Nokia clearly is an amazing company to work for, especially now, when it is aggressively establishing itself in the internet services domain. What makes Nokia unique is its ability to reinvent itself, and I believe that it will emerge ever-more powerful from this latest transformation.
I feel privileged to have worked with and learned from so many passionate, talented people. But after about six years at Nokia, working on products used by millions of people every day, I’ve decided that it is time to move on and explore the world beyond the corporate pond.
Let the future begin…
By now I’ve been using Trac more than two years for managing various projects – from very small ones with just a few people involved (combining in themselves developers, testers and product owners) to large ones with more than 20 people (both in private projects and in Nokia – yes, yes, some Nokia projects are also using Trac).
In agile projects, especially in large organizations, one needs to find the right balance between “post-it management” bordering with chaos and monstrous tools and processes for requirements and defect management and project documentation and reporting. Choosing the right tool can have a significant impact on team performance.
There are multiple commercial tools available for project tracking in agile environment, but I still choose Trac in most of the cases for its openness, simplicity and customizability. Below I explain the reasons for this choice and highlight limitations we faced in large scale projects.
It was a fun weekend. I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 on my Lenovo T61 and installed it instead of Windows Vista on my wife’s new Dell Vostro 1510.
Both upgrade and installation on both machines went without a single hickup, which was a positive surprise after my last experience with Ubuntu upgrade.
David on 37Signal’s Signal vs. Noise blog wrote that there’s no need to sacrifice yourself to work to be successful.
“It’s been a long time since there was a direct correlation with the number of hours you work and the success you enjoy.”
It’s one of those “my thoughts exactly” posts. Taneli Tikka futher develops the idea in his response. “You need to stay in shape, sleep well and exercise. “
Creativity and innovation indeed flourish only in an open and relaxed environment. One cannot be creative and productive, while exisitng in a state of permanent sleep deprivation and overtime work.
Examples of these successful and respected people are just confirming the idea that it is possible to run your own successful business(es) while enjoying life to the fullest extent. Reading books, watching movies, going to concerts, spending time with family and friends, socializing and doing things that are not related to your work are essential to be successful in what you do for a living.
This lends so well to the discussion I had with my colleagues on Friday – about the value of overtime work in the difficult times of the project. When overtime need continues for more than one week, it is causing more harm than good – not only to the spirit and productivity of the team, but also to the end result of the project. Working harder doesn’t make things happen faster, no matter how much you want it to be so.
Last year I got involved in the development of a new social network – Moozement. There are plenty of social networks out there, there are even white label social networks. So why create another one?
Jyri Engeström wrote some time ago about the case for object-centered sociality: “’social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people”. I could not agree with him more. The glue of each community is something that unites them – common interest, social object. When you join new social network, you typically start by building your social graph – re-establishing links to the real people you know, checking if they have already registered, inviting those whom you would like to see in the new environment. But there must be something beyond the initial phase of building the social graph. And this is the problem that haunts giants like Facebook and MySpace. You cannot possibly have common interest with everyone, and you don’t want to share the same things with everyone.
2008 has been a hectic year – with all the changes – bulding a house, travelling, moving, having a new arrival in the family, new position in Nokia, and a side venture-like project, there was practically no time for blogging.
Now things are starting to get back to normal – and I’m hoping to be more visible in the blogosphere.
Having spent almost 8 years working with Symbian devices, I decided to shift the area of my professional interests. I moved from Nokia Devices to Services, where I’m working on creation of one of the common components for Ovi services.
Software development processes and complete cycle (from building to deploying) of rich web applications are in the center of my interest. Ruby on Rails, Facebook applications and social objects are occupying a serious part of my free time. In the mobile area I’m taking a broader view and looking into iPhone and Android applications in addition to traditional Series60 and Symbian.
2009 promises to be a very interesting year…
I should admit – I shamelessly borrowed part of the title for this post from Tyler.
I had exactly same feeling after upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04.
I’ve been meaning to write about this upgrade for almost two months now. Right after Ubuntu 8.04 was released I upgraded two of my laptops from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. I know, I know, never download software on the release date, wait for a couple of months before all major bugs are fixed and it starts working somehow. But anyway…
