Lean architecture

Just before the summer holiday started I went to a NLJUG university session by Xebia. The evening was about their concept of "lean architecture". Lean architecture means applying lean principles like "eliminate waste" to the architecting process. And there is quite some waste to eliminate at most companies :)

After presenting their principles (http://www.slideshare.net/xebia/lean-architecture-university-session-for-nljug-at-xebia-on-july-8th-2010 ) we quickly got to work on a case study. And maybe this was the most instructive part for me. Getting a fuzzy assignment, too little time and a bunch of people. "Go and do it." As an outsider I would say that there were way too much degrees of freedom in the workshop (I counted 8). While you were working on 1 or 2, you would be interrupted about one of the others. Never mind, my take away point is to keep this in mind when I set my students to work.

At the questions at the end they put on their "process" slide. I felt a bit uneasy with it. Agile was al about keeping things simple. But now the scrum process was extended with a productbacklog kanban and an architecture kanban and relationships between the three. Oh well, when you need to choose between changing people or processes, maybe changing processes is easier?

Finally!

After about 8 years of trying (not fulltime ;-), I FINALLY got an RMI example to work. And with that I mean working as it should by transferring classfiles, not cheating by putting the classfiles of the server on the clientside.

In 2002 I understood the concepts in about 15 minutes and the rest of years was pure frustration on crappy tutorials and technical details (trailing slashes, classpaths, codebases, security policies). I tried to find my original 2002 posts on the Sun developer forums but they are either archived or banned. My point was then and still is now: if you can't get a HelloWorld working in 15 minutes (ok, 1 hour) then the technology won't catch on. I've seen plenty of students give it a try and I couldn't blame them when they quit.

Glad I can put this one behind me, let's move on to other things now. I have a whole list for the coming holiday ;-)

Update: : http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/rmi/index.html was the most useful tutorial

Karlstad university

I visited Karlstad university (Sweden) with some colleagues last week. It's a former Högskule that has transformed itself into a university with a lot of research activities (and funding!). This took a long term effort however. I can imagine this is the vision our rector Henk Pijlman has of the direction the Hanze should move into. My estimate is that it would take 10-15 years of concentrated effort, a lot of it on the personnelmanagement side.

We met some nice and interesting colleagues (Anna Brunstrum, Donald Ross, Martin Blom) and discussed collaboration possibilities on agile among other things. I got a nice idea about the coding dojo which I would like to give a spin next year. Finally we also went to the Compare Testlab and met Sven Wedemalm.

Universidad Polytecnica Madrid

Last week I did my first Erasmus lectures. I was invited at the Universidad Polytecnica Madrid to give four lectures. As the topic I chose agile software development. This obligation had as an effect that I prepared pretty hard, developing new teaching material and learning even more about scrum, kanban and lean in the process. I now have a new case study which I really like and I hope I can reuse in on other occasions. UPM would probably like me to come back next year, I'll have to check with my boss and the internationalisation officer if that's feasible. Once you go international, there are so many places to choose from.

What more can I say about the experience? Madrid is nice, the spanish people are friendly, the country doesn't differ that much with the Netherlands, except for their eating schedule. The students were about as I expected: stronger on the theoretical issues, not very experienced on the practical side and they need to work on their English.

Thus I have finished another challenge to myself. The hardest part was the preparation. But you know what they say: "Train hard, win easy" :-)

Busy times...

These are busy times, I need a lot of time just to keep my todo-list up-to-date. So Keeping up with IT is more Learning on the job at the moment.

Internationalisation

• Tomas Gustavsson from Karlstad University is coming over to give a workshop on Scrum, with the emphasis on starting up a project.
• A delegation of Fachgymnasium Papenburg is coming over to discuss whether our studies are interesting for their students.
• In March I'll go to Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid for a week to give some lectures on agile software development. I combine this with mentoring Hanzestudents who are doing their graduation work there (on the subject of Google wave).

Research
Research? Not really research yet in my opinion. I'm involved in the NOVO-project (see earlier posts) but at this point it's about system development. Requirements, use cases and architecture are starting for real now. The build team (Q3+Q4) will consist of 3 students and we'll be using Scrum.

Curriculum Development

• I'll need to update our 2nd year software engineering course with more multithreading because of the "multi-core revolution". Also, our strategy of intensifying the 1st year has led to material going from 2nd to 1st year. This creates room for some other topics!
  
• Software architecture will be added to our 4th year, a non-trivial job.

Accreditation
For the accreditation our institute will be visited by Hobeon in the fall. This means there's a lot of work for us to get ready.

Honours
I'm participating in the project group that's developing a honours course for excellent students. After some brainstorming we've got the right ideas. Now we have to see if we can match them with the 'guidelines' that came down from Hanze central.

And I still have a buildtool/continuous integration server on my wishlist. But I'm afraid it will have to wait some more...

Just a thought

We used to have the slogan De student centraal (The student is central, focus on the student, etc. ) Yesterday one of our eductational advisors said to me "That's history. A better way to put it is, Het leren van de student centraal" (The learning of the student is central.)

Don't ask your child what he (she) did today, ask him what he learned today :-)

Scrum Master

I just had two days of training on Scrum by the guru himself (Jeff Sutherland) and Serge Beaumont (Xebia). After doing XP for a while, I now can complement it with Scrum and have two legs to stand on ;-) I won't try to give a full account here what Scrum is, but it doesn't really cover the same stuff XP does. In one sentence you could say it's "extreme projectmanagement", or just "a framework for getting things done". The final goal is to get your team into "hyperproductive state".

The training was ok, I'd give it a 7.5/10. The material could have been presented a bit more structured (tell 'm what you're gonna tell 'm, then tell 'm, then tell 'm what you told them) but the content was ok. I appreciate the fact that they tried to support their story with data and referring to literature.

Completing this two day course (+exam) makes me a "Certified Scrum Master". After some more experience you can become a Certified Scrum Practitioner. Personally I would have switched those titles, but it's probably for historical reasons.

Already the next morning I noticed that I was unconsciously using some of the stuff. What's the business value of my wife opening the curtains when her goal is to get the kids to school on time? What's the business value of discussing a student who wants to enroll when he has missed the first 2.5 weeks of a quarter?
Let's keep this way of thinking and see if I can enter a hyperproductive state ;-)