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Yesterday evening I had a so-called “Meet and Eat” together with my colleagues. The agenda is simple: everybody comes to the office, we all grab some food (usually pizza or chinese food) and someone gives a presentation on a current subject. Subjects from the past include new versions of the Oracle database, JDeveloper, CDM RuleFrame and Kapow Mashup Server.

This time I gave a presentation on Scrum and why I think Scrum is a major improvement as project management framework for software development projects. The slides of this presentation are available for download (dutch only).

After two hours, many questions and an extra cup of coffee everybody was quite enthusiastic about the whole concept of short iterations, potentially shippable product increments, team commitment and the like.

Technorati: scrum, project management, agile, whitehorses

Tags: Scrum by martin
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Silence here doesn’t really mean I did nothing (hey, after all, my blog is and never will be that important). In this post a quick overview of the year and a small peek into the future (I borrowed the title of the post from Charles Dickens - it’s almost Christmas anyway).

On a personal level, I have seen Emmy grow from a little baby to a small girl who already walks around the house (a little shaky, but still). Leontien found another employer, Capgemini, where she will be very busy consulting public organizations about their business processes.

Professionally, I became a Prince2 Practitioner. Prince2 is the de-facto standard methodology for project management (founded in the UK, used worldwide). It was a 3-hour essay based exam, but I made it. I also certified myself as a ScrumMaster, which basically means I attended a two day training.

Scrum is a framework for iterative, incremental development in cross-functional, self-managing teams. I’m impressed and kept reading on the subject since (Agile Project Management with Scrum, The Enterprise and Scrum, Agile Estimating and Planning, Lean Software Development). As far as I’m concerned, this is the way to make software. Who needs waterfall anymore?

In the near future, I’ll definitely keep extending my knowledge and skills on Scrum and project management and try to share my findings here every once in a while.

Technorati: agile, prince2, scrum, waterfall, project management

Tags: Personal, Prince2, Scrum by martin
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I just finished implementing a new design for this blog (no, I did not make it myself, credits go to Anthony Baggett). I also included Stray Quotes in the upper right corner, a random quote plugin for Wordpress. It allows me to manage my own list of quotes from within the Wordpress admin interface. Nice.

All in all, a fresh and clean layout, suitable for personal and professional rants.

But… where are the rants? Shame on me! Let’s try to fill this blog with at least one post a month, starting now. Sometimes I ask myself if I’m not a writer, don’t have the time, don’t make the time or happen to be a victim of coincidences.

We’ll see.

Technorati: redesign, Anthony Baggett, wordpress, random quote

Tags: Personal by martin
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