a mobile device dilemma Part II

Since last December when I shared the small family crisis caused by the way the cellular industry has conspired to keep me off of Android a couple things have changed:

• AT&T has begun to offer some good Android phones. I would seriously consider the Captivate for my use.
• Rumors of Verizon taking on the iPhone persist. If that happened I could move the family over and my wife and daughter could stay on the iPhone while I could pick and choose from a wide variety of Android devices.

However, my decision continues to be complicated by the fluid nature of the service provider landscape. Now it is the emergence of higher bandwidth networks. For most of what I do on the mobile device a solid 3G connection gets the job done. But if I could get 2-10x the bandwidth via HSPA+ or LTE then should I wait until the right Provider/Device/Price comes along on one of those networks?
Because of the financial impact of disengaging my family from 3 two year contracts on AT&T my easiest option would be to stay with them and face a simpler choice:

1. Wait until this September when I am eligible for an upgrade discount and jump on the Captivate and use 3G
2. Wait until AT&T roles out HSPA+ in early 2011 and hope there is a nice Android device able to take advantage of that network.
3. Wait until AT&T roles out LTE in 2011-12 and hope there is a nice Android device (by then it will have a 2GHz processor and an mega-mega pixel camera) able to take advantage of that network.

Obviously these three choices represent the constant agony of the early adopter... whatever is in my hand is obsolete and the nice new shiny gadget is always over the horizon. BUT that feeling is tempered by my frugal side so that I tend to upgrade about every two years. I am tending towards option 2 with some caveats:

• Since AT&T has not announced any concrete steps or devices towards HSPA+ (unlike T-mobile) I am afraid early 2011 could easily become late 2011.
• With AT&T moving off of an unlimited data plan, will HSPA+ carry a double premium? First a higher $/byte charge then 3G, and second, my natural tendency to play with the technology and do video conferencing on the device until my first monthly bill comes in (Ouch!).

Decisions Decisions.
What would you do?

Agile Team Dynamics

Last night at the Agile RTP meeting we had Don Gray speak to us on Agile Team Dynamics.

The meeting was broken down to 5 teams with each team having approximately 10 people. One person was designated as the Product Owner. Each team was given a bag of supplies and an instruction sheet for the Product Owner to give requirements to the team. My team got a bag of colored paper, tape, and pipe cleaners.

We were told to construct something that was:

• Artistic
• Tall
• Sturdy

We were given 20 minutes for the exercise. The picture shows what we created.

Then Don asked each of use to take some post-its and write down what we had contributed to the exercise.

I think my set was:

• Contributed vision of "Eiffel Tower"
• Started rolling paper into tubes
• Worked in team of two specialists Roller + Taper to create legs
• Asked other team to give us balloons

Then Don told us about the Kantor Four Player Model.

During the exercise, each of the team members was contributing in one or more of the four interactions. Don asked us to classify each of our contributions. I had thought most of mine fell into the "move" category. In fact, among all the participants, the vast majority of actions were classified as either move or follow. A few Bystand and almost no Oppose.

Don mentioned that in an Agile team setup the Scrum Master should be a bystander, allowing a self managing team to do most of the Mover type activities. I made the observation that a classic problem with many agile teams is that the Scrum Master (often being an old project manager) can not help but try to take over and "move" the sprint along. Don agreed and gave some war stories from his own experience on how this can be a problem.

Other comments from the audience pointed out that the team dynamics in our 20 minute exercise did not realistically compare with a real project having team members familiar with each other and with the political / cultural context of the company surrounding them.

My main take away for the night was that in any healthy development teams these four players can each contribute something of value and that all team members should accept the presence of these roles in the team dynamics.

Meeting Fred Brooks

Last night I met Fred Brooks.

I was moderating a panel discussion of our local chapter of the IEEE Computer Society. It was about "Practical Software Development".

Afterwards, an older gentleman walked up to sign our registration sheet and apologized for joining late. I glanced down and the name was "Fred Brooks".

I had this flashback to 1977 when I was a young software developer. Two years out of school with a shiny new Masters in Computer Science. I was just starting to call myself a Software Engineer and I was in this meeting with about ten older, wiser, non-programming, engineers who did not understand why my software was on the critical path and why I had just announced a slip in schedule. The Project Manager ( a terrifyingly gruff Sargent type as I remember) suggested that we add a couple of other programmers to the team to help get me out of the ditch. I can remember holding up my copy of The Mythical Man Month and saying "I think that adding more people to a late project will only make it latter. Let me tell you why".

This was one of those pivotal moments in my career. The ideas in that book helped me earn the respect of the Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Industrial Engineers, etc who surrounded me but did not understand my profession. Along with books like "Software Engineering Economics", and "Structured Analysis and System Specification", the "Mythical Man Month", became the core of my Software Engineering.

So, thanks Dr. Brooks.

a Sojourn in the Clouds

I have been learning IBM's Mashup Center, demoing to clients, and weaving it into my Web2.0 briefing as an emerging technology. I am able to do this in the Lotus Greenhouse as a free service from IBM. Recently IBM released version 2.0 of the product and after a product webinar I was ready to try the new/improved product. Alas, the greenhouse only had version 1 (that has just been remedied). Anxious to get going I fired notes off to people in IBM asking when I would get the new shiny version. I then stumbled on the fact that IBM had v2.0 available on Amazon's EC2 and if one was only using it for developer investigation (compared to a mashup for multiple users) then the product was FREE.

IBM provided a getting started video and pdf so off I went. I would listen to the video for a bit and then try to repeat the steps. There are a lot of things to do up in Amazon Web Services to get started and several freeware programs one needs to download in order to get things to work. I got stuck several times and finally resorted to reading the pdf line by line and carefully doing EXACTLY what was written. I never got my Ultra VNC to work but was able to use my Firefox browser to link directly to the Mashup Center Instance running on EC2.

For the configuration I had requested (Linux with 4GB storage) I was paying Amazon about $1.75 for each 24 hour period. I left it on for a few days while I developed and demoed for a client and was then able to terminate my instance.

If I did not have access to Lotus Greenhouse, and I was someone wanting to play around with a program like Mashup Center then using a infrastructure cloud is a good way to do it. And how do I like IBM's Mashup Center? Let me build up some more examples and then I will post a blog with my experiences.

a mobile device dilemma

The exclusive deals that device manufacturers are making with service providers will ultimately cause a family crisis for me.

Today my family of three is using an AT&T unlimited family plan. On that plan we have three devices:

Blackberry Bold - me

iPhone 3GS - wife

iPhone - daughter

I picked the Blackberry last year when my old one died. It was not my ideal choice. I really wanted to jump on the Android bandwagon. I am an avid Google user and wanted to have a state-of-the-art experience of integration. Alas, I did not do so at the time because:

1. AT&T did not have an Android device (I suspect they may never have one).

2. The T-mobile HTC G1 was not a game changing device

However, at that time my wife/daughter were using dumber devices mainly with voice/texting capabilities and I probably could have migrated the family over to T-mobile.

BUT since I got my Blackberry (which has OK Google apps), my wife/daughter became iFans. At this point, I would have to pry the iPhone from my wife's cold dead hand.

So you see my dilemma. At some point there will be this wonderful, amazing device (like an HTC HD2 running Android 3.x) on a service provider like Verizon and I will either have to ignore it, convince my family to abandon their iPhones, or split the family unit into separate accounts ($$$).

I had hopes that Google's push for an open network would have worked out. Being able to purchase any device and activate on any network (radio compatibility assumed) would make this little family crisis in the making disappear.

What is the perfect Agile Tool? - It Depends.

Within the Agile/Scrum/XP community there is a love/hate relationship with tools that support the development process. I used to call these Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools but that term has fallen out of favor. CASE is more associated with the waterfall wold the the Agile Manefesto revolted against.  There is one camp of Agilistas that will only use 3x5 index cards posted on a board in a war room. And even when considering tooling, the complexity of the tool is a major discussion point.
Last night, I attended an agile tools shootout hosted by the aRTP group. We looked at the following tools:
Zen
Cucumber
PivotalTracker
Rally
ScrumWorks Pro
Microsoft Team System
IBM Rational Team Concert
Jira/Greenhopper

Actually, the demos were given in two separate rooms and I was only able to personally see the Zen, PivotalTracker, ScrumWorks Pro, and Rational demos. From the demos and what I could see from their web sites I would broadly seperate the Microsoft and IBM tools from the rest and put them into the more complex category. However, this is because with both of these tools the vendors are attempting to cover the full development cycle and making sure at detailed design and coding they have things covered. For example, Team Concert was demoed as an Eclipse plugin with source code control, build management, real time notifications, project management features all enabled
Other tools, such as Zen and PivotalTracker tended to be more like electronic 3x5 cards with electronic boards. They did offer the advantage over a manual system of being able to automatically calculate burn down and other statistics.
In the middle of the complexity spectrum were Rally and ScrumWorks Pro because they added more project management features and the ability to integrate with other tools.

So which would I pick? Like any good consultant the answer is "Depends".

It depends on the size and complexity of the organization using the tool.
It depends on the target architecture and technologies used (e.g. one tool I did not classify above is JIRA/Grasshopper which is specifically used for Ruby development)
It depends on the level of contol over tool content needed (e.g. several tools were SaaS with concerns over security)
It depends on the sophistication of the developers.
It depends on the level of formality required of the process (e.g. if federal certification of the software is required then more traceability and reporting will be needed)
It depends on the risk accommodation of the users (Want to go with a small flexible rapidly changing tool/company OR stick with a slowly moving but more stable large vendor)

I did enjoy the exposure to the tools and we will be holding another shootout in the future.

Virtual Conferences

In a previous post I mentioned attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference being held in Boston MA...only I was not able to be in Boston... I was sitting in my home office in Cary NC.

Today, I upped my game and simultaneously attended Enterprise 2.0 from San Francisco CA and the Internet Summit from Raleigh NC. Plus I did some billable work for a client and was writing this post. Can I have a productive day? OR am I evolving to the attention span of a squirrel. Anyway, here is how I would compare the two conferences from a virtual attendance perspective:

Enterprise 2.0

This conference offers a quality virtual experience. There are several remote mechanisms offered to gather information:

Twitter - #e2conf 2719 followers, On a typical full conference day there were 17 tweets from the conference. However, approximately 1500 tweets related to the conference occurred in the same time period. For example,

RT @ terrigriffith: Linden Labs brilliant. Gifted laser pointers allowed responses to ?s shown on screen http://yfrog.com/j8kepzj

BTW I thought the use of the lasers for audience participation is cool but they need to give me a virtual laser as well.

Facebook - 881 fans, There are a posts for each of the sessions, posts by exhibitors, and posts by participants.

LinkedIn - 50 members, 1 discussion posted. This is a weaker presence for this conference.

Video on Demand - David Berlind hosts demo presentations from the exhibit floor. Each session is about 10 minutes and what I like is that David asks some penetrating questions that expose weaknesses as well as strengths of the vendor's product.

Streaming Video - The A/V team uses multiple camera shots with some good closeups of the speaker and interweave slide images into the stream. Well managed scheduling.

Conference Blog - The blog is written by approximately 8 people and includes immediate summary of current conference presentations (e.g. Integrating Google Wave into the Enterprise) but also has entries between conferences (e.g. 10 posts in September).

Internet Summit -

This conference also focuses on the emerging web technologies and business models with content that covers both enterprise as well as consumer use of the web. They support the following virtual attendance tools:

Twitter - #isum09, 777 followers, all conference status posts. There were approximately 225 tweets per hour from individuals during the conference at mid day. Lots of commentary of speaker points that correlate directly with the video stream.

Facebook - 155 fans, 22 posts mainly status announcements.

Video on Demand - Replay of the main tent sessions.

Streaming Video - The A/V work is a little rough in a few areas 1) Listening to Richard Jalichandra of Technorati and was not able to see the slides he was showing. 2) Just before a session was to start the A/V person turned on the video of the stage including mikes that picked up some amusing "open mike" comments from the speakers. 3) They have a background music channel that they sometimes forget to turn off when the presentation starts.

However, during one panel session I experienced a first for me... the speaker was referencing a good book "Naked Conversations" by Scoble and Israel... while continuing to listen to the panel, I reached over to my Kindle, found the book online, and purchased / downloaded it.

I enjoyed both conferences but think the better virtual conference goes to Enterprise 2.0 put on by TechWeb.

So what is coming over the horizon? Recently, Ruven Cohen hosted a beta CloudCamp in the Cloud. This was a completely virtual event. A replay is available on UStream

So why is this not just a webinar? Well during the unpanel session the participating audience could ask questions which would be displayed and then people could raise their hands (virtually) to discuss the question raised.

I think that using a better social networking platform for real-time sharing of data / voice / video will give a better result.

There have also been several virtual conferences held in Second Life. The New Media Consortium (NMC) has thousands of members who participate in virtual conferences. The nice thing about a second life conference is the immerse experience... your avatar walks around the conference, talking with speakers and other participants, strolling through an exhibitor floor and even participating in pre/post conference social events. Unlike the remote participation in conferences like the two discussed above, the second life conference gives me the opportunity to actively contribute. After a virtual conference session I can walk up to the presenter and introduce myself and ask a question. What is lacking, is the ultimate realism of being at a real life conference or even watching a presenter over a good video stream. A lot of subtle communications is non verbal through facial expressions and hand gestures. Perhaps someday we will have technology that captures real time video of our faces and renders that onto an avatar.

Given the cost of travel and time away from work I imagine that more and more conferences will be moving to remote access it not complete virtual participation.