We all have this desire and probably have experienced this. You should have heard about the different draw back, like decline in quality, and a drop in morale. But there’s one thing you might not aware.

Upon finishing your tasks, your team will get through a period of procrastination.

Why? They are paying the debt that have loan, just like the oxygen debt that build up through exercise. Your team will feel they have already done a lot and “deserved” to laid back a bit, to regain the momentum before marching forward for the new tasks. And this is the problem, the laid back usually drags on, and even when they can ramp up to move forward, they need time to get back to the momentum.

Thus, try to avoid the temptation to sprint. Keep the pace that your team that feels comfortable, and you can get a more consistent focus factor for each iteration.

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The pace of development and the granularity of task in a project affects the duration of each cycle. Thus, the duration of a cycle may varies among different team and different projects. But for easier manipulation, one month or two months is the duration of time that will be adopted mostly.

I am sure you have read a lot of articles on how to structure the work into each cycle. But one thing I want to share with you is, reserve a day for packaging of your deliverable. If you are like me, who demand a release of the development that is capable to execute either a fraction or a complete set of functions at the end of each cycle, it is better to reserve a day for the team to tidy up their work and prepare for the release.

In my team, the deliverable for each release will include all or selection of the followings,

• release notes (text file or an additional entry on the product web page)
• change log
• binary (e.g. compiled java classes, war)
• program source
• user guide (or any sort of document to describe the usage)
• email announcement
• tag a version on SVN

As you can see, the list is quite extensive and thus I feel it’s easier for the team to spend a day for preparation. In turns, it helps them to review what they have achieved and give them a sense of satisfaction. With the release properly organized, it helps you (the project leader) to review the development as a whole. You can evaluate if the pace is proper and allow you to send out your product for testing or simply to experience at the earlier stage.

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You start working with a team. But have you ever wondered, how the size of your team will affect your work? Have you thought about what is your perfect team size?

Larger team = Shorter project time? Not necessary so.

When you have a lot of work, it’s natural to hope there are more people to help out. Sometimes it work but not necessary so during a product development. Or to be precise, the “efficiency” of having more people in your team does not scale linearly with project time. The more people you have, the larger the overhead in managing them – the daily update get prolonged (I will talk about the work around later), more concurrent tasks means more context switching.

What’s more, no two individuals are the same. We have different personality, some communicate better than others, some do backend better than UI frontend. So the larger the team size, you have to possess more “set” of communication profile with the team member.

When we work solo, the project schedule is simple, we have a lot of flexibility to shuffle the tasks around. But once we have a team, we need to deal with multiples of working schedule. Tasks dependency among different people shows up and more consideration is needed if we want to execute the project efficiently.

A big team is not necessary evil.

So, should I avoid having a big team?

It depends.

There are tasks that scale well, tasks that are repetitive or demand just manual labor. One of the example is functional testing, although you can automate many of your tests, functional testing (or UI expectation for GUI program). When you have a proper test plan on hand, tester can carry out the test execution by themselves.

If you have a larger team (i.e. larger then my desired perfect team size), I can suggest some twist to ensure an efficient daily update.

Attend multiple of daily update
Instead of getting everyone together, you may split the big team into smaller entity. Group them together by functions and talk to each of them. This prevent the whole team but you to sit together for a lengthy period, yet, knowing what’s happening to everyone is your job, isn’t it?

Just bring the team lead
Another approach is just grab the team lead together and have them update on behalf of their team mate. The advantage of doing so is, all the team lead know what’s the whole project is happening and they can then divert the message to their team mate in their own update session. You may have fewer chance to meet some of the team mate but compensate for it in other occasion, like a tea session or lunch gathering.

Three, the magic number

I prefer having a team of 3 people or 4 the maximum. If the 3 people are working as individual, there will only be 3 stream of work proceeding at the same time, which I can follow through and understanding the details. When there are more concurrent tasks, I find myself will begin forgetting the detail for each of them. For a more complicated tasks, I have the flexibility to assign 2 of them working together.

Also, preparing work that can “feed” 3 people is much easier than feeding a bigger gang. Since you only need to prepare a handful of tasks, you shall have sufficient time in defining them clearly. When the team are busying working on the tasks assigned, you have the buffer to prepare the next wave and also have time for your own work, too.

Go back and enjoy the team work.

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The objective is simple – everyone in the team will tell other what they are doing.

Is it a waste of time?

OK, I hear you are saying. Meetings are toxic.

But first, let me tell you what daily update is meant to me (and my team).

1. It is the time for everyone to get together. I can also notice how they look – are they tired? Are they excited on what they are doing?

2. It allows everyone to know the status of projects. Since we usually have multiple projects executing at the same time, so one may learn about the other projects.

3. It provides a platform for everyone to either raise the issue they are having or simply to show off what they have done.

4. Let them know what I am doing. Don’t think about if it’s of relevant to them, they have the rights to know. Being transparent helps to build the trust.

Some tips to reduce the “cost”

Asking everyone to drop their work and sit together is costly. But there are some way to reduce the cost.

1. Make it consistent. I used to meet in the morning, before everyone kick start the day, but turns out they come back at different time and thus I moved the meeting to after lunch. With the time fixed, people can allocate their work better to prevent pulling them from the “Zone”.

2. Make it short. Usually, 15 min is sufficient and unless there is some complicate issue to discuss. If the issue only of interest to some of the teammate, discuss it after the meeting.

3. Make it causal. You don’t want it become a burden for everyone. Apart from the regular update, try to let it be the stage for the team to show off their work! Let them get the satisfaction and applause they deserve.

4. Make your notes! Have a little notebook with you, drop down what the teammate has said, you can mark down the item to follow up on the next day and in the long run, you can review the progress of the project.

Meeting is only a gesture

So, daily update is a mean of communication. You can disagree having a meeting but you are wrong if you are not communicating with the team. You can pick the most comfortable means (IM, email or even lunch gathering) to achieve this. Just don’t get the gesture prevent you from knowing your team (and vice versa).

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Let’s face it, we can never get away from problems. And we should all have the experience of getting stuck, no matter how hard you try, there doesn’t seems to be a progress in finding the resolution.

It’s all because of the juice

The “creative juice” is what we need in resolving problem. The juice contains all the “nutrient” we need in solving the problem, these nutrients are what we consume everyday – the things we see, we learn and we listen. These information help us to find the best way to tackle the problem, thus, when we are stuck, it meant the “juices” is unable to circulate.

Cleanse yourself

One of the method which works very well for me is taking a bath, I have “solved” many problems during my bathing time. The sound of the shower, the isolation and the steam, establish a very well environment that I find idea is flowing around me. One of my lately encountering is designing the roadmap for my product. I need to strikes a balance along the product line and to satisfy needs of all kind and some of them is contradictory (e.g. a software solution vs a hardware solution). One night, when I am bathing, I realize that I can simply split the product into two but having one as the subset of the other.

Apart from bathing, dish washing and extensive walking can also help me to better circulate my “creative juices”. The repetitive action enables me to get into the state that, idea can again flowing freely.

Zen is null

What I have been sharing is nothing magical, the activities are similar to meditation. Meditate enable us to get into a state that enable our “creative mind” to become dominant. I am no expert in Zen or Buddhism, but to describe this state of mind, I find it is close to the state “null” that we are familiar with. The state of meditation is not either an “empty string” nor “non existent”.

It has been realized by a lot of people and nicely explained in various books. One book which I strongly recommend is Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware. It explains all the above with theoretical information.

To summarize the article, I would like to share a quote from Zen master Daisetz Suzuki

“Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.”

Happy Meditation.

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A new product (let’s call it “Messenger”) is scheduled to be finished in 2 months but a core team member is telling me he is departing for another opportunity.

Instead of 2 months, I only got about 10 more days to work out the remaining with him. Scraping up the project is the last thing I want and I decided to compete with time.

Constraint becomes your friend

Time become my constraint. I go back to the drawing board and look at Messenger again. I focus on the following area and soon, I found myself having Messenger 2.0.

Garnish looks great but your product won’t die from not having it
Cross out everything on the feature list – except those which will render the product non-functional if gone missing.

There’s a scheduler engine in Messenger which works similar to crontab. The original design aims to make it generic throughout the entire product line and provide flexibility to define how frequent the scheduled tasks should run. Indeed, the scheduler engine is re-designed to only cater job that runs per day or per minute which are the two settings that Messenger needs.

Spoon and fork VS chopsticks
If your product is already focused in doing one thing, can it be done even simpler?

Messenger is a product to take care of message exchange. User can customize the way to communicate and one of the setting is where in the file system to pick up data for delivery. Instead of allowing the user to define, we eliminated this field and request them to put everything in a pre-defined location. The fewer settings we provide, the less validation effort is required and the less likely to have bugs.

Re-use it if you can
Look around, you might already have some components developed and well tested. But don’t over doing this by patching it up as a “make-do”.

There are some DB operation needed in Messenger. Instead of writing new DB classes, we reuse the existing DAO and modify to suit the specific needs. The transaction is well taken care of and we can even reuse the unit test cases.

Iterate and iterate fast

The last thing I see essential is working as closely with the developer as you can. This ensure your decision is well executed. And communicating directly helps to address things fast, but of course, keeping things on issue tracker is still necessary.

When my teammate finished anything, he will notify me through IM and I will check it out right away. I shall give him instant response so that he knows if any amendment is needed.

All goes well

Luckily, by the time when my teammate departs, Messenger 2.0 is done. It certainly is a challenge to both of us but having it accomplished is not as difficult as one would imagine. Try to turn the bad into your good.

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Time went on and AIR apps can now run on all major platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). And there seems to be more “real” apps available, which is written to solve a problem, instead of just showing off the capability.

I have came across two apps that really helps my work. The first one is Balsamiq Mockup from Balsamiq Studio. It is a tool that helps to speed up creating application prototype. It enable the user to draw wireframe for the interface and it provide a library of pre-drawn component which you can just drag and customize.

This is a wireframe I drew with Balsamiq Mockup, the table, the heading, the text box are all pre-drawn components.

Another application written in AIR that I have tried is PreziDesktop, it is an application to build “Prezi”. Instead of using Power Point to illustrate your idea, it allows the user to convey in a more natural approach. Imagine having a canvas of unlimited size, you can draw and orient text as desire. You can zoom in when you want to drill into the details and pull out when you want to see the big picture. Prezi is a web application which you can edit through the browser and the AIR application is a companion tool which enable user to edit and present when they are offline.

Both tools make good uses of the UI capability, installation can be done very easily through a simple click on the install button from the webpage.

I believe this would be the trend for desktop application development for the following reasons,

• Cross platform support
• Enable the reuse of component that can be used both online and offline.
• Leverage the capability of Flash
• Rollout easily as installation could trigger from webpage

Let’s see what can we see next.

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VMWare provides an API (which is a set of perl script) called RCLI (Remote Command Line Interface) and it provides the script in two flavor – Windows and Linux.

We want to issue the command on our Gentoo box which is running in 64 bit but the RCLI linux deliverable failed to deploy in 64 bit. Googling around noticed a patch to get around this.

Apply the patch by the following command

patch vmware-install.pl vmware-viperl-distrib.diff
After that, just install the script by,
./vmware-install.pl

It goes OK except a warning explaining the failure to bind with the perl module Crypt::SSLeay.

I guess it doesn’t exist on my box and thus I emerge this right after. Upon doing so, when I try to issue the command “vmware-cmd”, I was greeted with the following,

builder vmware-rcli-distrib # vmware-cmd
Can't load '/usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux/auto/XML/LibXML/Common/Common.so' for module XML::LibXML::Common: /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux/auto/XML/LibXML/Common/Common.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32 at /usr/lib64/perl5/5.8.8/x86_64-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux/XML/LibXML.pm line 12

No help to google around but I suspect it’s again the missing of a proper perl module, so I emerge it again and try. Turns out I am right but I am seeing yet another error message on a different module. I repeat until I can execute “vmware-cmd” without an error.

Below is the list of module I have emerged,

• emerge Crypt-SSLeay
• emerge libxml-perl
• emerge XML-LibXML-Common
• emerge XML-LibXML
• emerge Class-MethodMaker

After that, all is running well.

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Also, internet access is no longer for people living in big city. The increment in rural area and villages has outgrown those in the bigger city (60.8 vs 35.6%). What’s more, most of them are using broadband for internet access (around 90%), and surfing on the mobile phone has a significant gain as well (133%).

I think the explosion can be seen in two fold, one is the general public adoption while the other is the booming of our own internet application. We are now having all kinds of localized web application, which break down the language barrier for the user adoption.

Talking about web application, it is found that about 24% of the web site hosted in China is using PHP, which is the most popular languages among all.

The report is very informative and I am seeing that the internet user in China is now more comfortable in using this media to do things more than web browsing. The penetration of using the internet to do ecommerce might be coming soon.

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I like my iPhone, the apps and games are wonderful. But I can only realize the true power after subscribing to a data plan.

See the above? I can now blog at anywhere, locate myself at any time and what’s more is to get the latest information on the road.

But are we not getting connected enough? Now, other devices, such as the digital camera or portable gaming console, can also gain access to the net.

I wonder when would we feel exhausted in sending update to our friends round the clock.

Before that, I will enjoy the using of my iPhone.

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