Columns / Harsh Mander : Barefoot - The other side of life LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE: Matt (left) and Tushar. Photo courtesy: RS100ADAY.COM Can anyone really live on Rs. 26 a day, the income of the officially poor in rural India? Two youngsters try it out. Late last year, two young men decided to live a month of their lives on the income of an average poor Indian. One of them, Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment banker in the US and Singapore. The idea suddenly struck them one day. To begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? The young men moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help, much to her bemusement. Living on Rs.100 made the circle of their life much smaller. However, the bigger challenge remained. For this, they decided to go to Matt's ancestral village Karucachal in Kerala, and live on Rs. 26. It disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now consider excesses.
CMMI | CMMI Compatibility | CMMI and Agile This information has moved to www.cmmiinstitute.com. As part of its mission to transition mature technology to the software community, the SEI has transferred CMMI-related products and activities to the CMMI Institute, a 100%-controlled subsidiary of Carnegie Innovations, Carnegie Mellon University’s technology commercialization enterprise. The CMMI Institute will conduct CMMI training and certification, sponsor conferences and classes, and provide information about CMMI process improvement models and appraisals. The SEI will continue to pioneer and advance new research in the field of software process management.
Pixar Engineers Leave to Build Real World Living Toys Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri. Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. The company is putting together a powerful team of technologists and creatives from Pixar and SRI (makers of Siri) and is being relatively open about what it's up to. ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob, photo by Chuck Foxen. Neilsen announced new numbers yesterday, showing that tablet computers are increasingly being used by children. 70% of US households with both tablets and children under 12 now report that their children use the family tablet computer, up 9% over Q3 of last year. Imagine the youngest of children using Web-connected toys carrying character-driven chatterbot artificial intelligence programs. The Brains ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob worked at Pixar for 20 years, where he served as Chief Technology Officer. Got that?
Agile and CMMI: Better Together Organizations follow many paths in their pursuit of excellence, applying various principles, methods, and techniques along the way. It stands to reason, then, that an organization interested in adopting agile practices might also be interested in PMI’s OPM3, ISO or Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) as a means to achieve that excellence. While I have seen some organizations that are trying to implement agile and a PMI model at the same time, none are doing it successfully. Last year, in fact, I observed two very large companies that had simultaneous internal initiatives to utilize agile and CMMI. Many believe that agile and CMMI are polar opposites and sub-optimize each other’s efforts. CMMI Refresher Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI)1 is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. To the new generation of agile practitioners, CMMI may seem bloated, dull and unimaginative. Agile Sweet Spot 1. 2. 3.
Super Mario Crossover Scrum (development) Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project. A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. Later, Schwaber with others founded the Scrum Alliance and created the Certified Scrum Master programs and its derivatives. Each sprint is started by a planning meeting.
Brave New World Classic 1932 science fiction novel by Aldous Huxley In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World as #5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[2] In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at #53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time",[3] and the novel was listed at #87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC.[4] Title[edit] O wonder! Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des mondes (The Best of All Worlds), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz[7] and satirised in Candide, Ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759). History[edit] Huxley said that Brave New World was inspired by the utopian novels of H. Plot[edit] Characters[edit] Bernard Marx, a sleep-learning specialist at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Benito Hoover, Another of Lenina's lovers.
Scrum's Product Backlog - Agile Requirements Management The Product Backlog: What should we make? One of the first things assembled when we embark on a new project is a list of things to do. Everyone loves a list! Projects often start as a to-do list, jotted down on a piece of paper. For small pieces of work, this may be all you need. In this article, I’ll describe techniques for collecting requests relating to your product and helpful practices for managing that list of requests. Before you start Do you know what you are doing? Delivery teams are created to help a business realize a part of its vision. But why? In order for the delivery team to complete a piece of work, many small decisions have to be made to solve the problems encountered along the way. Fortunately, Scrum provides an incredibly effective way to manage the requests of our enthusiastic collaborators when building a software product – the product backlog. What is a Product Backlog? The product backlog is used to: capture requests for modifying a product. Product Backlog Items Notes
Ten Amazing Java Applications Java is such a great language and platform for any kind of application. It is open, fast, powerful, runs on any platform, and there are more jobs for Java than any other programming language. After reading more FUD and Java bashing from Ruby land I thought it would be fun to put together a list of truly amazing uses of Java that covers a wide spectrum. 10 - Sun SPOT The Sun SPOT Device is a small, wireless, battery powered experimental platform. 9 - Project Looking Glass Project Looking Glass is an open source development project based on and evolved from Sun Microsystems' advanced technology project. 8 - Flying Saucer & Mozilla Rhino Flying Saucer is 100% Java XHTML+CSS renderer, including support for table pagination, margin boxes, running elements, named pages, and more. 7 - UltraMixer UltraMixer is a DJ mixing software which enables you to mix digital music in various formats such as MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG, WAV or CDs in real time. 6 - Blu-ray BD-J 5 - JavaFX Script & JavaFX Mobile
Story Points: Why are they better than hours? Traditional Estimation Funnel Microsoft Story Point accuracy Story points give more accurate estimates, they drastically reduce planning time, they more accurately predict release dates, and they help teams improve performance. Hours give worse estimates, introduce large amounts of waste into the system, handicap the Product Owner's release planning, and confuse the team about what process improvements really worked. Interesting new research has become available. Scrum + Engineering Practices: Experiences of Three Microsoft TeamsLaurie Williams, Gabe Brown, Adam Meltzer, Nachiappan NagappanIEEE Best Industry Paper award winnerMany people who have managed projects with hours have a hard time understanding why story points are better. First, let's look at the latest data on project failures. In fact the latest Forrester Group research shows that:Common Project Management Metrics Doom IT Departments to Failure The stability of a user story is critical for planning.