September 30, 2008
Long overdue
So the title of this blog is slowly become very wrong and I apoligise for that, I just can’t really talk about Dragonlings much, and I have been working on other things that just don’t belong here. To fix this problem I have started a new blog that I hopefully will be posting in more often at choosemyreality.wordpress.com. I messed up and lost my usual chooseareality name to not paying attention to what happens when you delete a blog from another account. (I don’t get it and it is gone forever! 
) Not a biggie, just had to reword my usual name a bit.
Hopefully I can start making some posts now that I have a much broader subject matter to attack. Namely anything that is catching my attention at the moment. 
May 22, 2008
Talking about Scrum
Ok, so I am going to be doing a presentation at work about Scrum and how we can use it to manage our projects, or at least as an alternative to our current method.
Wait! I know what does this have to do with Dragonlings? Well, I am using a solo Scrum to keep things on track with Dragonlings and I have used a lot of what I have learned personally and applied it to my proposed methods at work.
Oh, and this is my blog so I can talk about what I want! =)
I am doing this presentation and have about 20 slides so far that I plan on showing. They are a collection of talking points that I want to discuss in more detail and also ideas of how we can use Scrum and our existing processes, which I have to admit are leaning too heavily toward design up front to make me comfortable.
Almost every example I can find applies Scrum to programming, but I am trying to make the argument that we can apply it to any project that IT has to accomplish. This should work for the most part from everything I have read, and I have read a whole lot.
The biggest questions I have right now is about the programming group though. I want to talk a little about the engineering practices that the programmers should think about doing to make Scrum successful for our projects. The problem is that once I start to go into those practices the com and networking groups may start to see that I am really just presenting a programming framework and trying to make it fit them. In the past someone did a presentation on MSF and they had similar problems with the non-programmers because of the software focus that MSF has.
I am afraid that without the engineering practices like Test Driven Development (TDD) and constant refactoring the attempts to do Scrum just won’t work. I also would love to try pair programming and having teams working on a project instead of individuals each working on one application.
Of course making things worse, I am just a Programmer Analyst II here, above me are the Senior Programmer, a Supervisor, and a Director of IT. I am at the bottom and trying to make changes that will ripple up to the top and I have to say that it is going to be a uphill battle. Time to go slay a few gant charts! CYA!
April 18, 2008
Scrum (No! It isn’t the stuff floating on top of the pond)
I have been heavily researching, reading, putting together presentations, and using every extra minute at work to put together a presentation on Scrum.
Scrum is a project management framework that has been around for about a decade. It an agile methodology created to help deal with complex, unpredictable projects. For example making a MMORPG game. (I will admit that in the game programming field this has only gained traction in the last several years, from what I can tell from Gamasutra.)
In the past I used XP (Extreme Programming), which is another agile methodology, to run a project where I was debugging a really large application that was written by someone else. It worked really great! In fact so great that I was layed off soon after I finished since it was stable and they had slowly been eliminating all in house programming till it was just me.
I really like it though and thought it really was one of the best ways I have ever run a project. Every since then I have wanted to try it again.
That was over six years ago and now I am working for a government agency and, as I have mentioned, on a independent game. I have tried from the start of Dragonlings to use Scrum to run my project, and for the most part is has allowed me to keep my focus, despite a two week delay when my home pc died. I am convinced once again that Agile Methodologies are the way to go, at least most of the time, and I will do everything I can to make them an option for pursuing projects where I work.
After that I will tackle introducing TDD (Test Driven Development) to everyone. Yeah I know, I am crazy to even try to do so much, but I think it is fun trying to change things… so there! =P
