… de personas y sistemas.
Experiences
The day I sat for the PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) exam
34 months ago
In mid-September 2011 the PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) exam was lunched. Personally, I get the chance to sit for the first time the exam was taken in Latin America some weeks ago.
Being in a pilot phase, the test results will be announced in December this year, but meanwhile, I take to leave my impressions recorded here.
What I think was positive
- Values. The biggest surprise that I got was to see that all content and exam questions are strongly oriented towards agile values and philosophy. One of the questions that accompanied me all the way to where I took the test was exactly “What would the vision of PMI about agility be?” (I was particularly concerned about an article that got published by the PMI in 2010 with, in my opinion, a not-so-lucky-vision about agile methodologies, on which I wrote at that time (see original article). But let’s get back to the exam. It seems the steering Comitee for tagile certification has done a good job.
- Agile Manifesto and Lean Values. There were several questions about the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto (essential to know) and Lean values. I particularly liked some questions that asked for parallels or mappings between Lean and Agile Values.
- Methodologies. All XP, Lean, Scrum and Kanban are covered by the exam. There were questions related to these four agile approaches. Although I must admit that most are associated with XP and Scrum and fewer to Lean and Kanban.
- Not as many tools and processes. Excellent from my point of view. Most of the exam was oriented toward the interactions between people, working with the customer, learning and constant adaptation.
- Situational questions. Like the PMP exam, many questions were situational. Ex: It poses a particular scenario for which you have to choose an action. There was a “most correct” choice of a series of “right choices”.
- Oppositions. I liked the way in which some questions were asked. I refer specifically to several that included two types of correct answer: The one that a PMP would choose and the one that an Agile Practitioner would, in fact, those questions could be part of the PMP exam and thus have another correct answer than the one in this context. I think this point is critical and requires the candidate a paradigm shift in the way of working.
- Technical Knowledge. While it is not necessary to have a high level of technical knowledge, XP practices are presented in the exam, like TDD / ATDD / IC. I was happy to see them there.
- Reference Materials. The exam questions cover virtually the entire bibliography recommended by PMI.
What I saw as Improvement Opportunities
- Questions. There were some questions with semantic errors. I recommend to pay special attention to such situations.
- Agile Manifesto and Lean Values. In my opinion, I would put greater emphasis on agile principles and values. I think (and it’s a personal opinion) that is essential to understand them before trying to understand any methodology or framework or particular implementation.
- Methodologies. Incorporation of DSDM, Crystal Clear, OpenUP, etc.. would be great.
- Many “Hows” and few “Whys”. For the most part, the test was focused on “how to” resolve certain situations or “how” certain methodology solves the odd situation but does not spend too much time on the “Why” of the resolution.
In short, and in my personal view, the test has more positive points than improvement opportunities. I must admit that my expectations were far surpassed.
Where would be located, in my opinion, this certification in relation to the Scrum Alliance ones? I’ll leave this topic for a next post.
How to access this certification? More information on the official website for the PMI-ACP.
Mariana’s Scrum Implementation Laws
01 year ago
Who is Mariana? True to the best journalistic style that doesn’t reveal its sources, sometimes for professional or ethic reasons and many other times just for fun (to annoy the audience), I won’t reveal his true identity. Let’s call it simply “Mariana.”
“Mariana” is one of the students who attended one of the Scrum courses I taught this year. Upon finalization, I gathered all my stuff, including the material usually used as letters, cards, post-its, tape rolls, markers, etc. Later when I got home, I proceed to arrange all those things and found this paper:
Infallible laws to Implement Scrum
1. Do it Iterativly, Incrementaly
2. Don’t try to cover everything from the beginning
3. Manage the expectations for the first Sprints
4. Don’t feel overwhelmed by all the impediments that will arise (previously hidden)
5. Have courage, experience and let experience – Its nor bad to fail, it’s bad if you don’t learn from your failure.
Well, the truth is that I do not know who was the author of this note because it wasn’t signed. Just guess it was a woman because she folded the paper very suspiciously neat and so I called her “Mariana.” Today I regret this haven’t been shared with the rest of the class, it would have been very productive, but at least the good thing is that she understood what it is to bring Scrum to practice.
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/limaoscarjuliet/225249268/
Adding auto increment columns
01 year ago
I’m currently working on a demo/tutorial on Evolutionary Database Development techniques and tools.
Since yesterday we installed a mysql in a client for some software configuration management operations, I decided to use mysql for the tutorial / demo at hand.
I found something strange when trying to add an auto-incremental column to an existing table.
Given this table:
create table program ( required_solo_hs int not null, required_inst_hs int not null, int not null required_hs )
I tried to add a column id:
alter table add column program id int not null auto_increment
Getting the following error;
Script line: 1 Incorrect table definition;
There Can be only one auto column and it must be defined as a key
The solution is simply to indicate that the auto increment column is also primary key:
alter table add column program id int not null auto_increment key,
Again .. someone might find it useful.
Windows Vista 64bits & MySQL: ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’
61 year ago
Today -at Kleer- we went through the experience of installing MySQL 5.1 for the first time in Vista 64bits. Far from being a pleasant installation, as we’re used to, this made us sweat bullets sweat.
After downloading the 64bit installer, install and configure, the setup wizard wouldn’t stop giving the error:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root' @ 'localhost'
We tried many solutions but none worked. Except for the following:
1. Stop the service “MySQL” from “Control Panel-> Administrative Tools-> Services”
2. Go to “C:\Windows\System32″
3. Find the file cmd.exe, right click with SHIFT down and select “Run as administrator”
4. Run the following command:
mysqld - skip-grant-tables
5. Leave that window running
6. Open another terminal window, this time NOT as administrator: “Start-> Run-> cmd” ENTER
7. Run the following command:
mysql-u root mysql
8. Wala! We are inside. Run the following statement, changing a password mypass real you want setear:
UPDATE user SET Password = PASSWORD ('mypass') WHERE USER = 'root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
9. Exit:
exit
10. Close the window
11. Close the window that was running as administrator
12. Open task manager and kill all processes named “mysqld” (there should be one, of another user “Administrator”)
13. Start the service from “Control Panel-> Administrative Tools-> Services”
14. Log in again, this time as we are used to:
mysql-u root-p
With this last step, you should be connected without problems. I hope this solution can serve someone and save some time.
Agile Open Buenos Aires 2010 – Quality
01 year ago
Excellent experience in the AO Buenos Aires during March 13th. I can say that I’ve met many people and good experiences. Here you go the link to the photos of the event: http://bit.ly/coCnnA
Greetings!
Agile Open La Plata 2009 Results
02 years ago
On Saturday June 20th the Agile Open La Plata 2009 took place, more than 65 people attended.
After having breakfast, we did the official opening, which I facilitated. An incredible experience: it was my first facilitation in an Open Space model. At the beginning, it was exactly as we’re used to see in these kind of events: people does not understand the expectations on them until after 10 minutes of actual work, the result was almost 40 sessions proposals, a very fluid voting and the following schedule:
Agenda AO La Plata 2009
I highlight some sessions I was able to participate in, all of them of an excellent level:
Lean introduction (facilitated by Juan Gabardini) and Agile introduction (moderated by Nicolás Paez) were the first two sessions. I saw people very engaged on the topics, I admit it was hard to stop those sessions on-time due to the atendees’ enthusiasm.
The starts of the second track were SCRUM intro (proposed and moderated by Marcelo Belnicoff) and Agile Team Communication (moderated by Nicolás and Esteban).
Lunch arrived on-time, there was an excellent climate where people exchanged concerns, experiences, questions, solutions, doubts, opinions. A great networking context.
We started the afternoon with the “Pajarraco” Game, during which I took some photos (taken with my cell phone) and a lot of other parallel sessions, more advanced ones in which I was lucky to participate: CMMI+PMI+Agile, Scrum with very little teams, Agile Testing, How to engage the client in Agile Projects, Non IT-industry implementations of agile methodologies, etc.
* Pajarraco Photos:
After a coffee break during the afternoon, there was an interesting debate about Retrospectives (open discussion format) and an Agile Architecture presentation (by Diego Fontdevila).
We reached to the closure with more than 40 people. It was facilitated by Diego with excellent results, as we’re used to in every Open Space: great people interaction, highly engaged & active people,really interesting topics, living experiences, etc. The result was more than positive:
Resultado AO La Plata 2009
The next steps we’re taking at “La Plata” level is to organize a monthly event where to discuss agile topics following the same approach that has been working for months in Buenos Aires, while at a national level we still have the organization and realization of the Rosario, Mar del Plata and Bahía Blanca Agile Opens. And any new city who wants to have one.
A new Agile Open was finished, and -same as the previous ones- it left it’s footprint.
Fying Post-Its
02 years ago
by Martin Alaimo
in Experiences
A few days ago, in the Agile Latin America Community (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/foro-agiles/message/1738), the Flying Post-Its topic was discussed: they fall down, they fly, etc. from ScrumBoards or TaskBoards.
The recommendations were several of different kinds, i.e:
- the usage of “super sticky” Post-Its,
- Scotch Magic tape,
- UHU Tac bar
- Magnetic boards.
In my last 2 experiences applying Scrum on delivery teams we tried using cork boards, regular post-its and Push Pins supporting them. The first implementation of this kind raised by chance; we were waiting for the arrival of the regular board and in the meantime, using easel-pads (Fig.1). Due to the delay in the delivery of the regular board, we made use of a cork board that wasn’t being used at all, we started attaching the post-its to it, but they immediately start falling down. We rapidly used Push pins to attach them to the cork board, preventing them to fall down (Fig.2).
By doing this we found out 2 benefits, apart from avoiding flying post-its: 1) being able to attach a big amount of post-its with a single push pin (Fig.3), using less space (ie. in the “pending” section), and 2) using different colors of push pins for each team member (Fig.4), making it easy to identify the person working on each post-it.
References:
- Fig.1: Easel Pad board @ Accenture – SCM Team
Fig.2: Cork Board @ Gorricho
Fig.3: User Story + Tasks in "Delivered" section @ Gorricho
Fig.4: Each member one Color
Defragging My Day
12 years ago
A few days ago while I was surfing the Internet, I suddenly reach up to an article called “Defragment your Day” which caught my attention.
Reading it carefully, the base idea is to group the different activities of the day into slots of the same type rather than spreading them randomly –in a chaotic way- all through the day calendar.
It seems to be a very good idea to implement, but I still have some concerns on it, ‘cause it tends to assume the people work at least 3 hs at night after 10PM… what¡¡?? C’mon, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working from 10pm to 1am every day (plus my normal office hours). Do you?
Ok, but let’s give it credit and assume this is a schema for a very high workload period, like a cutover, an implementation or an annual financial close, etc. which may demand an extra effort from you. So, I’ll try avoiding that 3hours period whenever I can, leaving it to emergency/critical situations. Make sense? I hope so.
Assuming that, it seems to be pretty good. You know what? I’ll try putting it in practice in my day-to-day basis and figure out how it works, which problems I face. Additionally I’ll post here my experience on this.
By the way, the original article was written by Kevin Milden for New Leaders. You can find it following this link: http://newleaders.com/discussions/369-defragment-your-day
Cheers!
