Scrum with pen & paper
A friend of mine recently asked me if I'd know any good freeware tools for use with Scrum. Well, I told him, I don't have any first hand experience with freeware Scrum tools but there certainly are a few.
However in the case that you're just starting with Scrum I would argue that you might be better off without tools. All tools force you into some kind of process that works for somebody else, but might not be optimal for you.
So instead of jumping to a fancy tool that comes with all the bells and whistles instantly, I'd recommend starting as low-tech as possible, learn the basics and discover your individual needs. After that you are enabled to get the Scrum tool that does exactly what you need it to do.
How do you start low-tech? Use pen and paper.
The CAPTCHA arms race
CAPTCHAs... we have all seen them. CAPTCHA means Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and is a family of techniques to make sure a user (typically on a website) is indeed a human being and not a program trying to act like one.
When you leave your comment on this blog you will be asked to type in two words which are displayed as distorted graphic. Most bulletin boards and free mail providers ask you to do the same before they allow you to create an account.
CAPTCHA 101
The reason behind is the same most of the time: Preventing SPAM. Spammers use forums, blog comments and contact forms to post their ads. They use bots (quite similar to the bots that update the search index on Google, Yahoo and all other search websites) to automate that process.
So the idea of CAPTCHAs is to present a task to a website visitor that is difficult to solve for a machine, but easy to solve for a human. The graphical CAPTCHA is the most commonly used one.
There are other CAPTCHA variants such as audio-based ones or image recognition based CAPTCHAs. I've even seen a simple math question as CAPTCHA.
Estimation techniques compared
I was inspired to write this article by several threads in forums covering agile methodologies. The basic discussion was whether to estimate based on Story Points or time. To me - and most people participating in those discussions - there is no silver bullet and you will have to find out what works best for you yourself. In this article I'd like to muse about the various estimation techniques that I'm familiar with as well as the pros and cons that I ran into with each of them.
I will compare PERT and COCOMO, both being traditional techniques with a long history and Planning Poker, probably the most prevalent agile estimation technique.
All techniques have their pros and cons and it will be up to you to determine which technique will work best in your environment.
My comparison is purely based on experience, which is broader for PERT and more narrow for COCOMO and to some extend Planning Poker. Your mileage may vary. This article does not intend to be the definite guide on estimation techniques.
That being said, let's start shall we?
Ken Schwaber’s “Confusion about Scrum”
On December 31st 2009 Ken Schwaber posted his article "Confusion about Scrum" in the Yahoo ScrumDevelopment Newsgroup.
He states that
There are now two definitions of Scrum. One is maintained and sustained by Jeff Sutherland and myself at www.scrum.org. Another is an old copy that is posted at www.scrumalliance.org, by the ScrumAlliance.
His article continues mentioning what sounds like the start of a copyright dispute over the Chinese version of the Scrum Guide (English version) which in its original form is written and maintained by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. Apparently now the ScrumAlliance claims ownership to the Chinese translation of the Scrum Guide (again the English version). As Ken points out
Any of you familiar with copyright law know that a derivative of the original is still owned by the original copyright holder.
Ken Schwaber recommends
that you refer to the Scrum Guide created and sustained by
the authors of Scrum, Jeff and myself.
This is serious news.
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