Day 1 (Tutorial on Scrum Master) at QCon

I came in with low expectations for the Scrum Certification course being taught because I have read and have attended many Agile talks in the past.  I will have to say the class has been extremely enlightening!  The real world examples that Gabrielle Benefield gave has been very helpful.  I hope I can take this experience and have an opportunity to change the way we are doing things back on the project I'm working on now.

I  think there has been a lot of exercises that were really telling about how agile development is not the easy route that has no discipline, etc.  These types of rumors are prevalent in my current customer's view and need to be explained why they are not true.  I plan on pitching some ideas so that we might be able to really start showing what is getting done and velocity our project is operating at.  I think that we're doing a lot of work to be agile but not seeing any of the rewards because of a few hitches in our process.

One of the main problems we as a 3 scrum team might have to overcome is that we need to have everyone on board and motivated to make the process work.  I have the best team on project right now with everyone extremely motivated, so we will try to be as productive as possible to set an example for the other two scrums.

Ok, off to day 2 of the scrum master course, more on QCon later.

My First Post

I think the first thing I have to talk about is why the heck did I decide on SignedByte as a blog name.  I've been a Java developer professionally for five years and one piece of trivia I've found is that Java uses signed bytes while every other language and specification has the byte unsigned (since having a negative byte really doesn't make too much sense.)

So what does this mean?  Every time you have to interact with anything non-Java, you have to do a conversion.  Interesting, yet something you probably couldn't care less about!  If you're still curious, check out this article.