As VP of Engineering, I frequently need to translate between engineers and management and one of the areas that come up frequently is our use of SCRUM (agile development). We happen to be lucky enough to have a CEO with a technical past and one that understands development methodologies. Of course this is good and bad in that he knows enough to question me :(

He recently commented that which methodology we use didn't really matter, what mattered was how it was managed. It is true that any of the methodologies can work given the right management. But, there are a number things that agile in general brings to the table that are more difficult (though not impossible) to handle with other methodologies, especially waterfall.

The first is that you should know a lot sooner if things are not working well in an agile environment. In a waterfall methodology, it may be months or longer before you realize you are way off track on a project. In Agile, you should see the "velocity" fairly quickly and be able to point out the discrepancies and adjust.

The next is that you should be able to adjust to changing requirements and changing environment/market much more quickly with an agile environment. With waterfall, you may take months just to nail down the requirements and by the time you are done, they are out of date. In agile, you adjust each iteration or sprint (usually 2 to 4 weeks long) and so are keeping up with any changes as you go.

Then there is the general philosophy in agile that attempts to build a creative, high performance team. This is certainly possible in other methodologies as well, but the framework defined by agile methodologies helps create the right, open environment where waterfall tends to push processes and control.

So… yes, they can each work given good management, but how many really good technical managers/leaders are there out there and I would contend that agile development methodologies help produce better results even if (especially if?) you don't have that kind of great management (or maybe it helps to train the manager :)

Since we launched the OpenLogic Expert Community that pays open source software developers to fix customer issues (something they do for free), I'm very interested in other programs that pay people for doing things they would normally do for free.

Here's a program that I think missed the point.  Netscape is offering to pay Digg users to post bookmarks on the Netscape site instead.  Here's the original post from the guy that set up the program.  I think he missed the point of why Digg is successful and what it would mean to Netscape to have a successful social bookmarking site.

People post their data to Digg because of what they get out of it.  They share their links because they like the way Digg shows them what everyone else is looking at.  Or because they like seeing how many people follow their links. Or how ahead of the curve they are in identifying cool links.  Or how many people are reading the same articles as them.  Or what other people are saying about the articles they find interesting.  They are sharing their data with Digg because Digg does cool things with the data.

If Netscape wants that same type of user community, they need to provide something to those people to incent them to come to Netscape.  Most likely they can only afford to pay 20 people, so how are they going to recruit the others?  You can't tell me the top 20 were at Digg  for all the reasons I mentioned above and all the rest were just there to see the top 20.  That's not how social websites work.  I don't post my pictures on Flickr because  I want to see the pictures that the top 20 users post.  I post them because I like all the things that Flickr gives me (easy sharing with my friends, tags, sets, etc.)  The only way I'll convert to another photo site is if they give me cooler features, not if they offer to pay me.  (Although I do have one friend, not to be named here, who keeps changing photo sharing sites because they offer her free pictures.  So the money thing might work with some but only because they aren't using all the extra features that attracted me to Flickr.) 

And what's to keep those paid Netscape bookmarkers from crossposting on Digg?  If Netscape makes them sign something saying the data now belongs to Netscape … well that goes against the whole grain of social networking.  My data is mine. (Although I am agreeing to share it with others, I still own it.)  If Flickr said I couldn't copy my pictures to another photo site, I would never post another picture there.

So if Netscape wants a successful social bookmarking website, they are going to have to make a really cool, feature rich social bookmarking website and market it.  And it's going to take more than money to get the top bookmarkers from another site.

So now you're asking, so how's that different than OpenLogic's Expert Community (OXC)?  Well, for starters, we are not trying to compete with any of the open source software projects.  We have customer issues with open source software that we want resolved quickly with the help of the community but we fully expect and hope that they will remain active members of the project and give any bug fixes or new code back to the original projects and continue to participate in the project.  If they quit participating in the original project, it would defeat our purpose.  Our value add and our community is around making open source accessible to enterprises.  It is a new type of community with a new purpose.  And just as you can participate in both Digg and Flickr, you can participate in multiple open source projects and the OXC.  They are complimentary, and hopefully over time we will figure out better and better ways to integrate them both socially and technically.

Brad's idea here is really interesting:

My Virtual Library

My first thought was what a great thing to do; then I wondered if the recipients would think you were trying to send them a message. I think that could be handled with a short note and it is a really wonderful way to let people know you are thinking of them and of doing something useful with the books.

The excerpt below came from an introduction to a talk that Thomas L. Friedman gave at MIT. His books in general are incredible and this one specifically is a must read for everyone in or entering the work place today. In a concise and very readable way he explains much about the modern world-wide work force and how it impact each and every one of us…

In his latest book, The World is Flat, Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world, and “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors.� Today, “individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.� Friedman’s list of “flatteners� includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable; the emergence of common software platforms and open source code enabling global collaboration; and the rise of outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining and insourcing.

Friedman even has a chapter on open source – relating back to what I do for a living!

And here's the states I've been to from Visited States.  I'd like to point out that I visited most of these in a car first.  Quite a few of them in a VW bug with my entire family!

create your own visited states map

You can use this website to quickly make a map of the countries you have visited. Thanks to Danese for the pointer! (She's visited a few more countries than me!) Here's mine:

create your own visited countries map

So I blogged about my favorite open source conference, OSCON, and about being pregnant, and I got a flood of email from people, several from my favorite open source community, GNOME.  I get asked a lot how I got involved in open source and why I'm such a big fan.  While the why I'm such a big fan has a long history in how I view software, technology and society, the how I got involved in open source and so quickly discovered what a great community it is is all due to the GNOME community.

I was managing the CDE desktop team at HP when I started investigating what the future of the desktop should be, turned to Linux and then to GNOME, met Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, and ended up at … GUADEC!  Checking into the hotel in Copenhagen I realized that the people checking in before me who had also been sitting behind me on the airplane were also there for GUADEC … so I ended up wandering around Copenhagen with the Red Hat GNOME folks, trying hard to keep each other awake to beat jetlag.  The next day checking into the conference I was greeted with an enthusiastic - no, jubilant, "YOU'RE A GIRL!!!"  Turns out I was the second female attendee to sign in and the first one had been debating on whether "Stormy" was a girl's name or a boy's name.  I still tell that story often.  (As a side note, GNOME is hosting a Women's Summer Outreach Program this summer to encourage more women to get involved with GNOME.)  Everyone I met was very welcoming, very enthusiastic about GNOME, very committed to making it a great product … it couldn't have been a better experience.

And since then I've found the rest of the open source community to have the same ideals and commitment to open source.  Some are more idealistic than others, some are more friendly than others, some are easier to understand than others … but it's a great group of people all dedicated to making software better for everyone.  How could I not enjoy working with a group of people with such great goals and ideals that are committed to working together to make it happen?

An interesting bit of trivia for you.  The half life of an online news story is 36 hours.  So half of all the people that are ever going to read it, read it in the first 36 hours.  Goes to show you that you really need to keep your websites and blogs up-to-date!

Are you reading the news? (July 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb.

We recently attempted to release a new product and when we got near the end we found that many of the stories were not really complete. The developer had called them complete, but there were bits and pieces hanging around that were really required if we were to release the product to customers.

This begs the question of when is done really done. The answer in the agile world is that a story is not complete unless it is releasable (I hear the term “potentially releasable� sometimes to mean it could be released if we wanted to). It is a very difficult requirement to put to the delivery team, but a story isn’t complete until it is releasable to a customer; and this includes from a QA and technical writing perspective as well, not just from the developers. The entire delivery team for that story must agree that they would be glad, in fact proud, to have that story delivered to a customer for real-world use.

It may not be easy, but we have to hold ourselves to this standard in the agile world or we accumulate “technical garbage� that eventually either overloads us or completely surprises us when we do go to release a product.

So be diligent and make sure that done is really done.

Although I won't be at OSCON, we (OpenLogic) will still be there and we will be talking about the Expert Community.  Rod Cope, our CTO and founder, will be giving my talk, Enterprises and Communities: A Match Made in …?, where he'll be talking about our experiences of bringing enterprises and the open source community together in a mutually beneficial way.  Later that evening, Thursday at 7pm, we'll be having a BOF for all of those interested in the Expert Community or interested in sharing their experiences with it. 

For those that are curious,  our Expert Community is the way we bring the open source community into our enterprise support model for open source software.  OpenLogic offers enterprises 24×7, one source of support for 150 open source projects. We provide a first line of support – taking the calls from our enterprise customers and answering basic questions.  For more complex issues (and after we’ve screened out the “read the manualâ€? type questions), we turn to the OpenLogic Expert Community.  For each issue they resolve, we compensate them - with cash.

So come join us at OSCON!

• Enterprises and Communities: A Match Made in …? Thursday at 5:20pm. Rod Cope.
• Join the OpenLogic Expert Community BOF Thursday at 7pm. Rod Cope and friends.
• And Scott is giving a tutorial on Ajax and web services. Real World Web Services Tuesday 8:30am. Scott Davis.