My thoughts on why and how metrics/measurements of ongoing tasks should be done.

I will start with the practice. The problems we are trying to tackle is:

1. How to make our team believe in their own estimations?
2. What is our cycle time?
3. How do we project the probability of fulfilling the sprint goals?
4. How do we track the state of the task?
5. How do we ensure continuous development of processes?

For the last 3 questions, I suggest referring to the self-explaining Cumulative Flow Diagrams (http://www.slideshare.net/yyeret/explaining-cumulative-flow-diagrams-cfd). Martin Alaimo writes on measuring sprint progress in the Scrumalliance community blogs (https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2011/may/measuring-sprint-progress). Essential Scrum: A practical guide to the Most Popular Agile Process by Kenneth S. Rubin (p.357-359) defines how task metrics can be visualized (though in a table formation) (https://books.google.se/books?id=3vGEcOfCkdwC&pg=PA357&lpg=PA357&dq=visualize+tasks+in+scrum+boards&source=bl&ots=-BBbkkfr_l&sig=KqO_9xWDIEM3hVqe-9QSi0IQKQQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZk9ztxurKAhWFs3IKHYioBLE4FBDoAQg9MAU#v=onepage&q=visualize%20tasks%20in%20scrum%20boards&f=false). An electronic task board showing the progress (https://www.targetprocess.com/content/uploads/2013/11/lists-sketch-for-Targetprocess-3.png). A detailed article by MSFT on Task board (of course tailored towards VS Team edition usage but has lots of details) (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vs/alm/work/scrum/task-board). Another article (https://blog.taiga.io/q-id-like-to-measure-the-sprint-progress-through-closed-tasks.html) very good on why sprint progress should be monitored regularly and not at the end of the sprint.

Year 2014 was very interesting for me both professionally and personally. It had its own ups and downs. Today I want to retrospect on 2014 and important things that happened around me!

2014 started with an exciting CES in LA where demos with M7450 and SLSI 44xx were shown. Proud to mention that I had been very heavily involved with the bridge implementation on SLSI 44xx and M7450. And in Feb 2014, I was in Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona with Ericsson modems business showing 5 different demos ranging from global device to carrier aggregation (CA) to CAT4 DL speeds on real live Ericsson back bones. Proud to say again that I was the one who coded all the demos in various technologies.

Many of my friends using Linux have serious problems with switching screens, screen resolutions, connecting to projectors, etc. and all of them end up wasting humongous amount of time doing stuff like that. And after banging their heads for 30 minutes they curse Linux and all and put up a request for another meeting! Anyways, below is the code to get screen toggling and switching screens easily done. Of course one needs to modify to suite their own use-cases but I guess the script itself will suffice most people.

Now WTH is Blind Debugging? Well, thats what I have been doing for the past 2 weeks everyday for 14-16 hours a day! I am working on a new top secret project(!) where there is a lot of intercommunication happening between 2 systems. One of them is a master and one is a slave. The intercommunication happens with a list of complicated protocols. Now comes the bad part. I don’t have source code access to either of the systems and my task is to get some things working in both the systems!

 Available on: http://slideme.org/application/smsbiljett

This is for all the people who have been struggling to get a proper ticket on the buses run by Skånetrafiken in Sweden. As most of you are already aware, starting with 1st June 2011, Skånetrafiken local buses are not accepting any cash on board the bus to buy a ticket. One just has 2 options: either buy an SMS ticket or have a “Rabatt Kort”. As an outsider, it might be very difficult to get on a bus. Also the process of getting an SMS ticket is very cryptic. My new application SMS Biljett eases the process.

I received my free upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. Of course the free upgrade was free (as in beer) where I had to pay for the shipping charges, etc. which were more then standard shipping charges (around 17 USD). The other thing was that since I am living/working in Sweden, I got my upgrade in the Swedish language. The stupid thing about packaging for Windows 7 Home Premium (W7HP) was that one cannot change the language of installation. Now that was something which was available in Windows Vista Home Premium (WVHP) edition. No idea why it was removed from Windows 7. Maybe UI language elements were hard coded! I searched the net to find out that Microsoft only allows for language changes in Professional and Ultimate editions. That is not very nice to you Mr. Microsoft. It is stupidity to believe that all users in a particular region would want their OS base language of that particular region. But you may ask me as to why I did not order the English version of W7HP when I was ordering the upgrade? Well because I bought the desktop in Sweden and so it came loaded with a Swedish version of WVHP. Hence it automatically selected the Swedish version of W7HP because of Microsoft’s stupid policy to provide upgrade to Windows 7 in the same language as was in Windows Vista.

I was writing a small piece of code for Windows Mobile in C# and wanted to use GetKeyboardState() but after a lot of searching around found out that the API is not available. Also Mouse Hooks does not work in Windows Mobile. As simple as this information seems, it took me a lot of time to search and basically validate that information. Of course the various ideas and blog posts out there are pretty confusing and does not allow you to reach to a conclusion easily.

The topic is hot from the press, “iPhone 3GS suffers from heating issues”. According to reports, the new hardware which is deemed twice as fast as the original one also consumes more power and thereby heats up the device! Now was that a secret that more powerful hardware will consume more power and will need a better heat dissipation system? Heat dissipation and thermal issues are something that every hardware manufacturer is concerned from time immemorial. Thats why the microprocessor vendors had to stop pursuing higher clock speeds and focus on multiple cores instead. Also Intel had to redesign its heat sink architecture to support for higher heat dissipation rates and better thermal management.