Quotes 2011

Some quotes that I came across this year. They motivate me and I try to learn from them:

1. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend. Bruce Lee.

2. What is your dream? And knowing this, what have you done to work towards realizing it today? -- Les Brown

3. Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently. [...]Habitability makes a place liveable, like home. And this is what we want in software – that developers feel at home, can place their hands on any item without having to think deeply about where it is. -- Richard P Gabriel, Patterns of Software.

4. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making mistakes. -- Napoleon Bonaparte.

5. I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -- Confucious.

6. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” – Suzuki Roshi
7. "Thought is useful when it motivates action and a hindrance when it substitutes for action."Bill Raeder
8. Success is not achieved by doing the largest project, but by doing the project that provides the most value for the customer, leaving time for software developers to work with other customers with real needs. This strategy is strongly supported by Scrum

Qualified Professional Scrum Master -I

I have since long used Scrum in various forms but never got “certified”. Then I came across http://www.scrum.org/onlinescrumcertification/ and reading through this and its reviews I was really tempted to see how much knowledge I had. I attempted the free Assessment and got only 74% marks (qualifying marks were 85%). Now I knew that I may be distorting Scrum unknowingly and I went through the Scrum Guide seriously and was enlightened in many ways. Took the test almost 10 days later and passed with 91% marks.

So, I am a Professional Scrum Master -I that is good to hear, but in addition I came to know what mistakes I was making in implementing it in our team and coincidentally we are starting a new Sprint on 10Jan2011 and I would ensure that those mistakes are not repeated.

Inducting Interns

We decided to offer three candidates internship. They are all MCA final year students who have 6 months of industrial exposure as part of their curriculum.

I made a decision to ask the current engineering team to select the three individuals from a pool of 13 in a single day. We had an aptitiude test, a simple Java test including a small program writing and a general question paper to judge the clarity of the individual regarding training followed by an interview taken by the three engineering staff.I also sat down with the engineering team to come with a probable plan of study and project that should help them cover the curriculum needs and also know how software development happens in our company.

The three interns joined us on 03Jan2011. If end of 6 months we have any open vacancies should we provide these three individuals a first shot at it? I am not sure, but I think it is better to evaluate a person in 6 months than in 60 minutes. Let us see how it goes. The only thing that I plan to gurantee is that they would have good exposure to working in teams than their colleagues.