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Agile Math The basic math of team-based agile is pretty simple. You can slice it several ways, but at the end of the day, one of these three basic formulas has to hold true. It’s all about time, cost, and scope… you get to decide which two constraints you want to lock, but then you have to derive the third. 1. backlog size / velocity = duration 2. duration * velocity = backlog size 3. backlog size / duration = velocity I generally suggest that agile is all about fixing time and cost, and deriving scope… but it doesn’t have to be that way. Feel free to derive time-based on a fixed backlog and known velocity. You can even derive a planning velocity based on fixed scope and time. This one is the riskiest, so be prepared to measure, adjust, and negotiate as the plan unfolds. Limiting WIP But here's the rub… when a team has too much work to do, and not enough time to do it, there is a cognitive dissonance between the messages of agile and what they see on the ground. We can say all day long that the PO gets to decide the “what” and the team gets to decide “how” and “how much”… but if management is fixing all three variables, the team isn’t going to buy in. Putting the Right People in Place One of the biggest mistakes that people make when working on any coding project is not having the right people in the right spots to help them out. It is absolutely necessary to use the talent and resources that are available to you in the most effective ways possible. Doing anything short of that can lead to major issues that you do not want to deal with. Instead of taking a risk, make sure you look at the pool of talent you have beforehand and begin to reassign people based on the skills that they clearly possess. You may be able to connect just the right pieces where they need to go in order to place people in the correct spots where they can be the most effective possible for you. If this is the case, then you will be in good shape when the time comes to use those people to get certain missions completed. You are responsible for putting people in a position where they can be as helpful and useful to you as possible. Observe their strengths and weaknesses to try to figure out exactly where that spot is. This may take some time, so make sure you have budgeted enough time for yourself to get these kinds of things figured out. It won’t always be easy, but it is the kind of work that you need to do to see real results on your projects. Rushing the Backlog Generally, here is what I ask from management out of the gate… give us three sprints to help the team come up with a backlog and establish a velocity, afterwards we’ll see what we have and decide how to proceed further. We’ll start by doing just enough backlog planning to identify a sprint or two worth of work and get the team working to establish a velocity. While the team begins work to establish their velocity, the PO aggressively moves to create the backlog. Almost never do I see a PO that can create a backlog all by themselves. Very often we need Product Managers, Architects, and Analysts to paint the complete picture. More often than not, I’ll ask these folks to work full time for as long as it takes to get the backlog together. I’ve got one PO team that has been at it for 8 weeks just to get ahead of the team, and define the release. Initially, the PO team is focused on feeding the team's high-value, high-risk stories… but as the backlog emerges we start rounding out the app. If all goes well, after several sprints we have a decent idea of what we have to build and the rate at which the team can complete the work. At that point, we apply one of our three formulas, baseline the plan, and go. Emergence or Convergence How far ahead of the team you need to be, largely depends on your business goals for the release. If you are highly uncertain about what you need to build, smaller backlogs are probably better, and the release planning process can be more nimble. Trying to predict stuff you just don’t know is a waste. In this case, agile is helping support an emergent outcome. Not all companies are going for an emergent outcome… Some want stability and predictability. In these cases, the PO team needs to plan further ahead of the team and adjust as the product is developed. The better we know where we are going, and what it is going to take to get there, the further out we can plan the backlog, and the more certain we can be about outcomes. Here agile is supporting a convergent outcome with a focus on risk reduction and predictability. One of the biggest problems I see with teams new to agile is that they act as if they are going for stability and predictability, when their product requires an emergent approach. Either requirements are not well understood or because of high technical risk or a ton of unknowns around how to implement them. Either way, you have to act as if the project is emergent until you gain enough knowledge to establish a more predictable plan. Not Knowing What You Don’t Know I’ve met a few teams lately where everyone is new and unfamiliar with the product and the code base. How do you set a schedule in this environment? The short answer is… you don’t. It’s okay not to know, but it’s not okay not to know forever. In this case, you better have a plan to get it figured out fast… It’s not reasonable to indefinitely ask the business to invest with no strategy for getting it done.

Nowadays Quarkus is known as Supersonic Subatomic Java. It provides a lot of features to facilitate build and deployment.

This article was originally published on 3/19/15

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You have probably heard a lot of talk about the wonderful things the cloud can do for you, and you are probably curious about how those services may come into play in your daily life. If this sounds like you, then you need to know that cloud services are playing an increasingly important role in our lives, and we need to look at how they can change how we message one another. Many people are looking at Android cloud messaging as the next leap forward into a future where it is possible to reach out to the people we care about and save those messages directly in the cloud. Never miss the opportunity to communicate with someone who truly matters to you, and start using cloud storage to back up your messages. It is as simple as that! You might have heard of c2dm (cloud-to-device messaging), which basically allowed third-party applications to send (push) lightweight messages to their android applications. Well, c2dm as such is now deprecated and replaced with its successor up the evolutionary ladder: GCM, or google cloud messaging. GCM is a (free) service that allows developers to push two types of messages from their application servers to any number of android devices registered with the service: collapsible, "send-to-sync" messages non-collapsible messages with a payload up to 4k in size "Collapsible" means that the most recent message overwrites the previous one. A "send-to-sync" message is used to notify a mobile application to sync its data with the server. In case the device comes online after being offline for a while, the client will only get the most recent server message. If you want to add push notifications to your android applications, the getting started guide will walk you through the setup process step by step, even supplying you with a two-part demo application (client + server) that you can just install and play around with. The setup process will provide you with the two most essential pieces of information needed to run GCM: An API Key is needed by your server to send GCM push notifications A Sender ID is needed by your clients to receive GCM messages from the server Everything is summarized in the following screen you get after using the google API console: The quickest way to write both server and client code is to install the sample demo application and tweak it to your needs. In particular, you might want to at least do any of the following: Change the demo's in-memory datastore into a real persistent one. Change the type and/or the content of push messages. Change the client's automatic device registration on start-up to a user preference so that the handset user may have the option to register/unregister for the push notifications. We'll do the last option as an example. Picking up where the demo ends, here's a quick way to set up push preferences and integrate them into your existing android application clients. in your android project-resources ( res/xml) directory, create a preference.xml file such as this one: and the corresponding activity: // package here import android.os.bundle; import android.preference.preferenceactivity; public class pushprefsactivity extends preferenceactivity { @override protected void oncreate(bundle savedinstancestate) { super.oncreate(savedinstancestate); addpreferencesfromresource(r.xml.preferences); } } the above will provide the following ui: The "enable server push" checkbox is where your android application user decides to register for your push messages. Then, it's only a matter of using that preferences class in your main activity and doing the required input processing. the following skeleton class only shows your own code add-ons to the pre-existing sample application: // package here import com.google.android.gcm.gcmregistrar; // other imports here public class mainactivity extends activity { /** these two should be static imports from a utilities class*/ public static string server_url; public static string sender_id; private boolean push_enabled; /** called when the activity is first created. */ @override public void oncreate(bundle savedinstancestate) { super.oncreate(savedinstancestate); // other code here... processpush(); } /** check push on back button * if pushprefsactivity is next activity on stack */ @override public void onresume(){ super.onresume(); processpush(); } /** * enable user to register/unregister for push notifications * 1. register user if all fields in prefs are filled and flag is set * 2. un-register if flag is un-set and user is registered * */ private void processpush(){ if( checkpushprefs() && push_enabled ){ // register for gcm using the sample app code } if(! push_enabled && gcmregistrar.isregisteredonserver(this) ){ gcmregistrar.unregister(this); } } /** check server push preferences */ private boolean checkpushprefs(){ sharedpreferences prefs = preferencemanager .getdefaultsharedpreferences(this); string name = prefs.getstring("sname", ""); string ip = prefs.getstring("sip", ""); string port = prefs.getstring("sport", ""); string senderid = prefs.getstring("sid", ""); push_enabled = prefs.getboolean("enable", false); boolean allfilled = checkallfilled(name, ip, port, senderid); if( allfilled ){ sender_id = senderid; server_url = "http://" + ip + ":" + port + "/" + name; } return allfilled; } /** checks if any number of string fields are filled */ private boolean checkallfilled(string... fields){ for (string field:fields){ if(field == null || field.length() == 0){ return false; } } return true; } } The above is pretty much self-explanatory. Now GCM push notifications have been integrated into your existing application. If you are registered, you get a system notification message at each server push, even when your application is not running. Opening up the message will automatically open your application: GCM is pretty easy to set up since most of the plumbing work is done for you. a side note: if you like to isolate the push functionality in its own sub-package, be aware that the GCM service gcmintentservice, provided by the sample application and responsible for handling GCM messages, needs to be in your main package (as indicated in the-set up documentation)—otherwise GCM won't work. When communicating with the sample server via an HTTP post, the sample client does a number of automatic retries using exponential back-off, meaning that the waiting period before a retry in case of failure is each time twice the amount of the preceding wait period, up to the maximum number of retries (5 at the time of this writing). You might want to change that if it doesn't suit you. It may not matter that much, though, since those retries are done in a separate thread (using asynctask) from the main UI thread, which therefore minimizes the effects on your mobile application's pre-existing flow of operations.

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