Spending 24 hours including a hotel night, travelling 2400 km on four air routes and 3 taxi fares - for a 30 minute presentation. Was it worth it? Yes! The satisfaction of having my first paper published at an academic conference and presenting it to an interested audience was definately worth it (and having a break from baby-sitting).

I was very content with my presentation and I will ask a few more people for feedback. (If you have feedback you are welcome to comment this post.) Immediately after the presentation I was approached by two gentlemen from Chalmers who asked me if was interested in giving a guest-lecture to their students. That would be an interesting challenge.

I proudly announce the conference proceedings.

Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Sitting at a hotel in Umeå and summing up the Scandinavian SCM Day in Lund earlier today I think it was valuable to network with other SCM people in the area. I met a few former collegues from different assignments in the past and I also met a few persons that were attending my breakfast seminar a couple of weeks ago. I talked to some of them about having some sort of information exchange. Looking forward to that.
My personal highlights of the conference were:

SCM for Agile Methods (Lars Bendix, Torbjörn Ekman) - This was my personal favourite since it was on the same subject as my “Lean CM” paper, but with a slightly different focus. I have a wider scope and turn more towards the industry while Lars were more focused on how SCM can support and add more value to agile projects. Anyway it was great to get a confirmation that my ideas have support in the academic world.
Build Tools (Nadim Khemir, ZI Decuma) - Nadim passionately talked about build systems and particularly about PBS, a system that he and some other geeks, as he put it, are developing. The tool sound pretty promising, if I ever decide to dig into the universe of build tools. Not very likely though.
SCM Metrics (Ulf Steen, Dag Ehnbom, ABB) - They shared their experiences on some research about SCM metrics they conducted at ABB. Dag is an old friend from my assignment at ABB five years ago.
A Day in the Life of an SCM Stretegist (Ulf Asklund, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communication) - Ulf Asklund is also an associate professor of configuration management at Lund University, and he also attended my breakfast seminar on Lean CM. Today Ulf talked about the SCM environment at SEMC and the challenges it means to have 750+ developers in several time zones developing up to 20 products within the same code base at the same time. They use pretty much the same environment and setup that they are using at Ericsson Mobile Platforms, where I have been assigned for a couple of projects as CM/integrator, so it was interesting to hear it from his perspective.

Lars Bendix who was the mastermind behind the arrangement did a great job and if I get the opportunity I will return next year. Over and out - good night!

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Agile methodologies is considered to embrace change, but it’s also about getting quick and frequent feedback from all kinds of sources, in a way to cope with changes.

• Short iterations with incremental deliveries – gives the team and the product owner frequent feedback on the progress of the product, enabling change of direction of the project.
• The daily scrum meeting - is designed to get feedback on the progress and to raise any issues.
• Continuous Integration – gives the team instant feedback on the status of the code when delivering changes to the code.
• Test Driven Development – gives even more feedback when delivering code changes. Makes it possible to get a test report from unit tests to acceptance tests immediately after a code change.
• Retrospective – at the end of an iteration gives the team feedback about the methods and processes of the project.
• Pair programming – gives the programmer instant feedback. This corresponds doing a code review simultaneously as the coding, thus providing instant feedback.

Did I miss any? Let me know in a comment!

Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

I just sent the final updated revision of the approved paper on Lean CM to SERPS’06. The full title is: Lean Configuration Management - Supporting Increased Value Delivery from Agile Software Teams.

You are welcome to Umeå on october 19 to listen to the presentation. Hmm… I’ve never been that far north before.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

I will be attending the Scandinavian SCM Day in Lund on the 18th, which is a part of the Lund software Days Conference. They have a really interesting program.

Immediately after I go to Umeå to present my paper at the SERPS conference on the 19th. My co-author lives in Cambodia, which makes communication a bit limited, and I haven’t been able to reach him yet.

That’s a busy schedule for someone who is on paternity leave, and I hope I can get someone to look after my children while I’m away.

Uncategorized | No Comments »

Yesterday my paper on Lean CM was accepted at the SERPS conference.
However as expected we got some criticism on the scientific methods and integrity, making it hard to evaluate. This was more or less expected since it was built upon experiences and not research. But since they found the subject interesting and original enough they want us to come to the conference in Umeå to present it. Cool!

Uncategorized | No Comments »