So for me what are the most important things I learned about Scrum and being a (now certified) ScrumMaster? Here is a quick review about that:

1. “there is no truth” – every Scrum Trainer may tell you something different about implementing Scrum (or parts of it). That may be as it is, but you need to remember, there is no single true only valid method of Scrum. Do what works for you and your company – but stick to it (and improve it over time)! But the basic Scrum elements should be there, otherwise don’t call it Scrum.
2. Skill No. 1 the ScrumMaster has to learn: to say “NO” to the boss! You can’t protect your team, you can’t even try to change your organisation (especially the bad parts in it) if you can’t say “NO” to the boss at some level. A ScrumMaster is like a fish swimming against the river, he goes against the rules in the organisation preventing the team to be successful in delivering quality (potentially shippable) software.
3. don’t try to use electronic tools too much – a task board, product backlog and impediment backlog can easily be managed with sticky notes and a movable board/flipchart. It makes handling the information (especially when estimating and in daily scrum meetings) much easier.
4. never ever ever ever estimate the effort – only estimate the functionalities and their relation to each other. Velocity changes with the constraints and technical details but the functionalty stays the same – and so does the estimation. I believe that’s the hardest part to make clear to Management guys who still want to think in men days and currency. So give it to them but don’t estimate the implementation, estimate the functionalities and you can give them a release plan that (should) work(s).
5. work with your Product Owner and make sure he presents the Vision and big picture behind the product to the team – make him repeat that as often as possible so it doesn’t get lost.
6. keep the roles separated – a ScrumMaster should never be a Product Owner or be part of the team. You ask why? Because he could not fulfil his role to protect the team or create a safe environment for them.
7. the ScrumMaster helps the team, but he doesn’t do the work for them! Be sure to let the team handle stuff like Burn Down Chart or running the daily scrum.
8. Be there for them and help them if they need it, and be sure to remove all impediments they might have. Try to find out if there are any impediuments the team might not know about (e.g. when a task isn’t done after like 2 days, ask why it isn’t and find out what the possible impediment could be.
9. get a clear “definition of done” from the team. Make sure the team includes possible constraints set by company rules e.g. documentation.
10. make everybody stick to the time box. Expect them to be there on time and don’t use more time than being specified!

Ok thing those are the most important items I got from the last 2 days. There was a lot more information (naturally) but if you need (or want) to know more about Scrum and the techniques, I recommend Boris’ book Scrum: Produkte zuverlässig und schnell entwickeln and Your Scrum Checklist: Scrum Hard Facts: Roles. Artefacts. All Meetings.

Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach.

Scrum is a “process skeleton,” which contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

1. the “ScrumMaster”, who maintains the processes (typically in lieu of a project manager);
2. the “Product Owner”, who represents the stakeholders;
3. the “Team”, a cross-functional group of about 7 people who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.

Here is my collection of Scrum resources in the world wide web:

• Scrum (development) @Wikipedia – (that’s where my Scrum introduction text is basically from )
• Scrum 4 You — Scrum, Thoughts and more by Boris Gloger – one of the european Scrum Guru’s
• Scrum Alliance – as official as it can get

Here are some articles I find very interesting:

• 10 Things about ScrumMasters
• 10 Things about Product Owners

Next week I will attend the Certified ScrumMaster training in Munich, done by Boris Gloger. So more posts about Scrum are about the follow this one.

Will Google Chrome OS support other browsers than Chrome?

Basically a lot of people complained about Microsoft that they are bundling their own browser Internet Explorer with their operating system. But what about an operating system which basically IS a browser? Is it different, or will it be possible e.g. to install a Firefox to Chrome OS?

I dont’t know the answer yet, but I’m very curious if Google will become a second Microsoft in terms of OS.

The german translation of it (if you are german or interested in learning it ) is available at BingRank.

It looks very similar to Google and offers similar functionalities: you can search for Websites, Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps, etc.

Mobile

When browsing the site with my Android G1 there was no mobile version of the site available, so I had to stick with the large site on my small screen.

Search Results

I did some initial searches for obvious stuff: I searched for Krahn or Christian Krahn in order to find my blog(s). The german version was no problem but I had difficulties finding krahn.org. One reason is that Bing forces you to use search results connected to your geographic location (which is germany for me) but my english blog is hosted with an .org domain, so Bing might think it’s not relevant to me. Well, wrong in my case.

Another thing I searched for is “Branchenbuch” (english translation would be “industry directory” directory, but more likely “yellow pages”). Obviously Bing uses other characteristics to rank pages, as the webpage of my employe klicktel.de is only being found on page 2 on Bling while being on the top results on Google. Guess that means more work for our SEO guys to find out how to improve “Bing rank“.

Maps

First thing that was strange is Bing Maps is not working in the Chrome browser. Hopefully that will be fixed soon. Other than that the maps implementation is similar to other sites like Google Maps or klicktel.de, map material is a bit out of date as on all the other sites. I like the implementation of the eagle view perspective on their site as the images seems to be a bit more up to date and you can pan to the next area and it automatically updates the image to that area. That’s something currently not possible in the klickTel version.

Other stuff

I will do some more checking on the other features. Currently it seems to me that Microsoft just made a copy of the current Google features (frontend) with their own backend behind it. Another thing that leads to that opinion is that Bing.com has the same spots for ads like Google (with AdWords).

Let’s see how it developes…

Hint: I did all the install and update stuff as root user. If you have another user with sudo rights, then apply a sudo before most of the commands here.

Updating the Apt

First step I did was updating the packages.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

LAMP

After that i installed the primary components, like Apache, PHP5 and MySQL:

First the webserver itself:

apt-get install apache2

I installed additional Apache modules. An easy way to do that is to use a3enmod:

a2enmod ssl
a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod suexec
a2enmod include

Just don’t forget to reload your apache afterwards:

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Afterwards install PHP5:

apt-get install php5
apt-get install php5-cli
apt-get install php5-dev
apt-get install php-pear

Some more PHP5 modules are following later.

PEAR is a package repository which enables you to install additional PHP package libraries.

To make sure that my link to PEAR is up to date, I use the following command:

pear channel-update pear.php.net

Installing MySQL is rather simple:

apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev

Afterwards you get asked to enter a MySQL root password. Make sure to keep that one safe!

I say I need some more PHP5 modules, so here they come:

apt-get install php5-gd
apt-get install php5-mcrypt
apt-get install php5-imagick
apt-get install php5-curl
apt-get install php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl
apt-get install php5-mhash

Additional tools

To create statistics based on my webserver’s log files, I use awstats:

apt-get install awstats

Just make sure that the folder /usr/lib/cgi-bin is password protected (or move the file awstats.pl to a more secure location.

Configuration of awstats is another topic, I don’t want to talk too much about right now. There is an example file in the folder /etc/awstats just digg through it

To keep the server time up to date you can install ntp:

apt-get install ntp ntpdate

Now there is always the correct time on your server.

Finally

I did some more stuff but those are the basics to install on a fresh web server. Another hint: make sure your server is able to send mails to the outside world (maybe install another MTA, but make sure only the server itself can relay mails, unless you want to use the server as SMTP server as well).

If you have anything to add to this howto, I am happy for every comment on it.

I have started to toy around with it. I have written a mayor part of the current AdWords API integration for the company I work for, so it’s best to be prepared for the mayor overhaul Google has done with this new API implementation. Here is a quick overview and some thoughts I have about it.

Authentication

Google seems to unify the use of their APIs with a common login interface: the Account Authentication API. You can make a HTTPS Post Request to the API and use your Google credentials to get an Auth token. This token then will be used to access the functionalities of the API.

I think it is good to unify different kinds of API authentication into a single login service. I just hope that it is stable enough to endure all the load from not just one kind of service but every piece of Google API which will make use of it.

Accessing the Sandbox

I created some example codes (will publish some code in another article soon) to access the Google AdWords Sandbox. At first I had some difficulties because I don’t just use the examples from Google, I created my own kind of library to access the API. That lead to the assumption that I can always use the SOAP end url as namespace – which was wrong because the namespace for the request XML has to be

https://adwords.google.com/api/adwords/cm/v200902

while the actual xml request is being sent to

https://adwords-sandbox.google.com/api/adwords/cm/v200902/....

When sending the wrong namespace the API returns a server error, but no detailed error code about what kind of error occured. I hope Google will improve their error reporting there.

Get & Mutate – the new methods of getting data and manipulating data

Past versions of the AdWords API left the impression of a patchwork API. This time you basically have two functions:

get

Getting data is simple: just build an xml which contains all the parameters you need and send it to the API.

Example:

<get xmlns="https://adwords.google.com/api/adwords/cm/v200902">
 <selector>
  <StatsSelector>
   <campaignIds></campaignIds>
  </StatsSelector>
 </selector>
</get>

This piece of xml tells the API (assuming the header information with the AuthToken, sorry not posting that one here ) to retrieve all the campaigns in the account. You can limit the campaigns by telling it to only include certain campaign IDs (filling the StatsSelecter/campaignIds node with subnodes containing the actual IDs).

mutate

Mutate is the method to create and manipulate data structures in the API.

Example:

<mutate xmlns="https://adwords.google.com/api/adwords/cm/v200902">
 <operations>
  <operator>ADD</operator>
  <operand>
   <name>Test Campaign - 1242726211</name>
   <status>PAUSED</status>
   <budget>
    <period>DAILY</period>
    <amount>
     <currencyCode>EUR</currencyCode>
     <microAmount>1000000</microAmount>
    </amount>
    <deliveryMethod>STANDARD</deliveryMethod>
   </budget>
  </operand>
 </operations>
</mutate>

It tells the API to create a new campaign in the account defined by the client email in the header (again not posted here). The additional OPERATOR tells what kind of operation (ADD, REMOVE, SET). After that all the necessary data for the operation are being added.

Final words (for now)

I think the new API is very clean and straight forward, with a new authentication method. The problems I currently see is the amount of work necessary to migrate applications based on the existing API v13 to the new v2009, but if people are using frameworks like APIlity or one of the other provided libraries, it is safe to assume that new versions will be available soon after the release to make a smooth upgrade.

I am looking forward to work closely with the new API.

Zend Framework

The Zend Framework is an object-oriented framework which is focusing on web 2.0 applications. It contains a lot of APIs to webservices like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr.

CSV Utilities

PHP CSV Utilities or PCU, is a small, open source PHP library to simplify working with CSV files.

phpExcel

This project provides a set of classes, which allow you to write to and read from different file formats, like Excel 2007, PDF, HTML, … This project is built around Microsoft’s OpenXML standard and PHP.

phpQuery

phpQuery is a server-side, chainable, CSS3 selector driven Document Object Model (DOM) API based on jQuery JavaScript Library.

MC_Google_Visualization

MC_Google_Visualization provides simple support for integrating Google Visualization charts and graphs with your own internal database. It includes a complete parser for the Google Visualization Query Language, giving you the same ease of pivoting and formatting data from your database as is currently possible with Google Spreadsheets.

pChart

pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts.

FirePHP

FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call.

SimpleTest

The SimpleTest PHP unit tester is a PHP unit test and web test framework. It has support for SSL, forms, frames, proxies and basic authentication.

If you know any more good PHP libraries and tools, just leave a comment.

twidroid

This applications is my trip to twitterland, every while and then, when I am not at my desktop, I look up my latest tweets or post a “Hello” here and there.

Timeriffic

Since my G1 is giving a “beep” everytime I get an E-Mail I use this application to set specific time frames when the device shall be muted or reactived. I don’t mind the beep, but my girl friend was driving me nuts everytime she woke up because of it.

Battery Status

No need to explain this one, don’t you think?

Delicious Bookmarks

Bookmarks, like in the sidebar to the right side, can be stored on this Google).

RTM Tasks

Helps me keeping track of my ToDo lists.

Toogle WiFi

One-click solution to activate the wifi controller. When I am home, I don’t want to miss my DSL broadband connection.

KeePassDroid

Keeping track of all the password you collect in the wilderness of the internet keeps your brain very busy. Fortunately there are tools like this which help you save your precious keywords in an encrypted database. Don’t forget the master keyword!

ConnectBot

Mobile SSH client with key authentification. When this server goes wild, I have used it the wrong way

klickTel

This application is a mobile client for the an online directory for phone numbers and industries. You can get current traffic informations based on your location and it helps you find the nearest coffee house or cashpoint. It’s for Germany only.

The Schwartz Unsheathed

Who doesn’t want to have their own personal light sabre?!