Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Correcting the Definition of Scenario

We’ve had some problems with the somewhat loose wording that sneaked in to the MSF Glossary in the process guidance. The in-the-box wording has conjured up a lot of use case type imagery and confused a lot of people. We’ll be correcting the definition in the next release of the guidance. In the meantime, here is the new definition.

scenario

A type of work item, describing a specific usage of the envisaged software system by a particular persona. Scenarios should be goal directed. As a persona attempts to reach a goal, the scenario records the specific steps taken in attempting to reach that goal.

This new definition is intended to underline the origins of personas and usage scenarios from the human computer interaction and user experience design community. MSF is intended as a methodology that encourages good user experience and interaction design and is founded on requirements techniques from the user experience community. Specifically, personas originate from Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin and Usage Scenarios from the HCI department at Virginia Tech. [As an interesting footnote: Alan Cooper was the creator of Visual Basic and by incorporating some of his work on user experience and interaction we are re-connecting with an old friend.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF

Monday, September 11, 2006

Thoughts on September 11th

Where were you five years ago today?

I had a breakfast meeting with Steven Huber from the User Experience team at Sprintpcs.com. He arrived a little late and reported to me that he’d heard on the radio that a small plane had crashed in to the World Trade Center building in New York. I remember we talked about a similar incident that had happened many years earlier to the Empire State Building then we got on with business.

A couple of hours later, I was in my office on the Kansas City side of State Line Road, standing on the balcony of the 2nd floor overlooking the lobby. The security guard had dragged a TV set to a location where a crowd could gather to watch the first tower burning and hear the emerging news. Clearly that early radio report had been misinformed. I arrived back just in time to see the second tower hit. Quite simply a World changing event was unfolding in front of me. I tried to call my wife to tell her to put on the TV. She didn’t believe what I told her. She had photos of her standing in the restaurant at the top of World Trade Center. She couldn’t believe it was gone.

Later that day all the Sprint staff got an email from top management asking us not to use our cell phones in order to free bandwidth for emergency services. This wasn’t actually an issue in Kansas City. Next day the doors to the office buildings were locked. This heightened security lasted for months. You had to wave your badge at the security guard who would come and open the door.

My boss was stranded in Alaska with a bunch of my colleagues who were attending a WAP Forum meeting in Anchorage. Some other colleagues were in Seattle at a conference. They rented a mini-van and drove it back to KC. The team in Anchorage rented a private jet after the ban on small planes was lifted several days later.

As a kid who grew up in Britain in the Cold War, during the 1970’s when the BBC carried public information video showing how to build a nuclear bomb shelter under the kitchen table and gave advice on what kind of tinned food to store for the aftermath of disaster, I truly thought my children would grow up in a kinder world where such security concerns were history. Anyone, like me, who had to make business travel in the weeks and months after September 11th - we launched the Sprint PCS Developers Network and our Sprint PCS Vision (and WAM) initiative one month later in Las Vegas - was quickly to realize that our children will grow up in a World with its own set of challenges. A four hour queue to get out of Las Vegas was evidence enough of that. The line was backed up out in to the parking lot in 100 degree heat. Staff from Southwest Airlines were walking the line giving out bottles of water. At least back then we could still carry bottled water on to the aircraft.

For me personally, the most moving thing happened a couple of weeks later. I got an email from Jeff De Luca. He was simply checking up on all his US resident friends to make sure none of them had been involved.

Implementing a Virtual Kanban System with VSTS

Eric Lee from the VSTS marketing team has been busy building a demo that shows some neat integration between VSTS and BizTalk server. He has chosen to show how to implement a virtual kanban system similar to the one Dragos Dumitriu implemented with the XIT Sustained Engineering team at Microsoft. This is very cool. It is clear evidence to me that I had a positive influence on the direction of MSF and VSTS and that it will be live on after my departure next week. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Eric+Lee, Kanban, MSF, VSTS, Visual+Studio+Team+System, BizTalk

Saturday, September 09, 2006

My Trip To Taipei

In my tradition of bringing you old news in an untimely fashion, here are a few shots of my trip to Taipei. I was there from August 12th to 17th and on the 16th I was part of a Software Engineering day event organized by the local Microsoft office. The event at the Grand Hyatt in Taipei attracted 450 visitors. I gave the keynote speech and then appeared on a panel with some local experts to talk about CMMI, agile and software engineering in general. You can read all about it in this press release (PDF, traditional Chinese).

This is me opening the proceeding in the morning with the keynote speech.

And later on the panel session with Nien Chen (NC) Liu and Peter Hu from Microsoft to my left and the panel of local experts to my right: Professor Cheng, Professor Chou and Mr. Hu (the first CMMI Lead Appraiser in Taiwan.)

A few empty seats in the front row but otherwise it was a full house at the Grand Hyatt.

As you can see better from this angle.

We got quite a few questions from the floor.

Here I am giving a press interview earlier in the week. Everything involved eating. I put on 5 lbs over the 3 week trip to Asia. So lots of biking to work for me to take it all off again, now that I’m back in Seattle. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Taipei, MSF, Microsoft, Software+Engineering

Friday, September 08, 2006

What about my speaking engagements?

Some people have been asking me whether or not I’ll be fulfilling my scheduled speaking engagements following the news of my departure from Microsoft.

The simple answer is that I will be fulfilling all my obligations. There are only three, namely, the PNSQC in Portland Oregon in October, Project World in Orlando in November and OOP in Munich in January. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, PNSQC, Project+World, OOP