What if Healthcare.gov Development Were Managed using Scrum?

In a Forbes' article, HealthCare.gov Diagnosis: The Government Broke Every Rule Of Project Management, the author lists key reasons why the project failed:

1. Unrealistic Requirements
2. Technical Complexity
3. Integration Responsibility
4. Fragmented Authority
5. Loose Metrics
6. Inadequate Testing
7. Aggressive Schedules
8. Administrative Blindness

Agile Estimating and Planning: A Book Review - Section I.

Why write a review in 2013 about a book published in 2005?

Because, Mike Cohn's book, Agile Estimating and Planning is such a book that lays out the philosophy behind agile planning very beautifully, while leading the reader through day-to-day activities.¹

And, as much as I tried to keep the review short, I did not succeed: There are so many nuggets of valuable information throughout the book that I justified making an elaborate review, and decided to publish the review in multiple sections. This post is the first of those.

If your agile development environment already has a set of tools predetermined, such as Rally Software or Jira Agile for example, your day-to-day approach to managing the development may already be somewhat predetermined by the software tool. However, whether you are in such a predetermined environment, or in a pristine environment with possibly no tools other than Microsoft Office, you'll need to recall the basics crisply, and Mike Cohn's book is one excellent reference source.

On Universal Applicability of the Scrum Framework.

Meetup Announcement. (Click to go to Meetup page).

If you listened to Jeff Sutherland on the July 16 talk on "Scrum: The Future of Work", you cannot but walk away with the feeling that scrum methodology is more universally applicable than software development, but the rest of the world is yet to discover that fact. And, his enthusiasm for Scrum's applicability not just in Software Development, but in other parts of Enterprises, in Government, in non-profit organizations, etc., is contagious. Scrum and the Grameen Bank, the Nobel Prize winning microfinance organization?

On the Storage Needed to Capture Human DNA

Ever since Watson and Crick solved the DNA puzzle, in 1953, and shared a Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 with Wilkins, there has always been interest to store and retrieve DNA information.

However, it was not until the Human Genome Project concluded in 2003, that the entire human genome (of about 3 billion nucleotides) was considered fully decoded ¹.

SV-ALN Meetup: Be Agile. Scale Up. Stay Lean.

Dean Leffingwell

If you are already familiar with the concepts of Agile methodology at the team level, following Dean Leffingwell when he elaborates on the scalability of the Agile framework is a breeze. Such was my experience yesterday when he presented the Scaled Agile Framework™ (SAF) at the SVALN meetup.

The primary ambition of the Scaled Agile Framework is to take the Agile principles to be effective at the enterprise level.

We have already seen several approaches to utilizing hierarchy in using the Agile methodology at the team level. This framework takes the hierarchy, from a team or a project level, to program and portfolio levels, and recognizes the need for non-functional requirements (NFRs), in addition to the user stories that a user would definitely interact with, and recognizes business epics and architectural epics.

On Managing [Complexity in] Systems Development

Modern society invariably tends to need complex¹ systems. (If a system is too 'simple', there may not be any market for it). Consider, for example, some of the successful products in present times:

1. Smartphones such as the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy
2. Tablets such as the iPad, Google Nexus 7
3. Electric cars such as the Tesla

Each one of the foregoing has, in addition to software, a collection of parts, in several levels of hierarchy, in creating the end user product. (A blog post makes an interesting observation that mature products tend to have not more than 4 levels of hierarchy in their bill of materials).

SVForum Meetup: Building a Cloud Platform for Real-Time Video: Learnings and Challenges

This meetup on Building a Cloud Platform for Real-Time Video: Learnings and Challenges was a very captivating presentation — except in the beginning, during introductory slides, when it was somewhat slow-moving¹ — on how BlueJeans have created a good recipe for videoconferencing service in the cloud.

Is Apple Safari for Windows the best browser for the desktop?

In a previous post, I explored the JavaScript compatibility, on my laptop, of the 5 browsers I regularly use against the ECMA's test suite. That was my first attempt at the comparison, and I didn't think much of it. I undertook that exercise again a month later, yesterday, and I can say with confidence the following:

1. Chrome, Firefox and IE fare reasonably along the same lines.
2. Opera shows a lot of holes in its implementation
3. Safari is the worst performer: crashes in the middle of the test execution, probably due to memory leak.

You can see all the detailed results in a separate web page.

The Power of CSS (at the Open Web Camp, 2011).

If you are a novice to CSS, you will like this presentation by Estelle Weyl, which I attended yesterday at the Open Web Camp, 2011. If, on the other hand, you know a little of CSS, you'll love this presentation!

In this presentation, you can learn how to produce nice animation effects, such as producing snow any time you want! This use of CSS, as opposed to an equivalent JavaScript code, shows the power of declarative programming, in comparison with its companion, procedural programming.

A Comparison of Browsers: Popularity and JavaScript Compatibility

At the beginning of every month, new statistics are published on browser usage: At the onset of July 2011, as you can see from the diagram below, Chrome is closing in on Firefox, even as IE is losing its market share.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

SVForum Cloud Services SIG: "The Future of the Data Center"

By the title of the meetup, namely "The Future of the Data Center", you might conclude that the two scheduled talks would be about how to architect future data centers, racks, power, cooling, etc. But, the talks were a bit more focused on only two, but important, aspects of enterprise clouds:

Brad Stone, Nexenta: Cloud Storage.

Dave Roberts, ServiceMesh: The Big Win.

Cloud Fabrics and Virtual Networks

In the last couple of years, nearly every networking equipment vendor is touting their new data center fabric aimed at the creation of clouds. Take a look at the [partial] list below, culled from the respective web sites:

Company	Fabric Offering
Arista Networks	????
Brocade Communication Systems, Inc.	Data Center Fabric
Cisco Systems	Unified Data Center Fabric
Extreme Networks	Open Fabric Data Center
Force10 Networks	Open Cloud Networking
HP	FlexFabric
IBM	BladeCenter
Juniper Networks	QFabric
NEC	????

At the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group: Zynga presents a Real World Case Study

If you believe cloud computing is still in its infancy, you have not learnt about Zynga. While Zynga have a hybrid cloud that powers their game servers involving their data center, a private cloud, zCloud, and a public cloud, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), the more interesting fact is that they expect to be profitable in 2011 with a net margin of 35%, or a net profit of $630m on a $1.8B revenue.

At the Cloud and Virtualization SIG on Virtual Networks

This SDForum Cloud and Virtualization SIG meeting saw a set of very exciting set of presentations by vCider, Big Switch and Cisco. There have been mature commercial availability of CPU and storage clouds, but there have been no rich commercial offerings of [virtual] networks¹.

Virtual Networking and Clouds.

Recently, in a blog post written by Chris Marino, titled Virtual Networking, It’s Not Just a VLAN…, I came across a beautiful definition of what a virtual network is:

"A virtual network is a network you control that runs on top of another network that you don’t control."