Paul Watzlawick has written a couple of popular books. Ages ago I read »The Situation Is Hopeless, But Not Serious: The Pursuit of Unhappiness« (1983), and recently »How Real Is Real?« (1976). Actually I read the german language issue »Wie wirklich ist die Wirklichkeit?«, the first book for some time now I was reading in my mother tongue.

The book is a joy to read, and I finished it in a couple of evenings. It is divided into three parts, confusion, disinformation, and communication. In short, Paul states that reality is a result of communication and provides a couple of astounding examples.

The book is capable of changing your point of view about everyday’s things, regardless whether private or professional issues. After reading two thirds of the book, it already helped me better understand what is happening in my team the next day. In case your job includes managing humans, I can recommend this book – you won’t regret.

For quite a while now we are used to decompose the user stories into tickets daily rather than during a boring sprint planning II marathon. I knew other teams did it this way already, but I thought my team was not prepared for it yet. But as some team mates wanted to try it anyway, I didn’t object further. It turned out to be a very useful approach.

• The sprint planning II meeting is much shorter now, and we get some work done even on the very first day of each sprint. The saved time gets consumed anyway, as the daily ticket generation is done during the Daily Scrum, which now requires about 30 minutes instead of 15.
• The ticket generation is much more straightforward than during sprint planning II, as it is obvious which things need to be achieved next.
• During the Daily Scrum, the team members gain a better understanding of what will happen until the next Daily Scrum, since the ticket generation is more intense than each team mate just grabbing an existing ticket.
• We try to generate tickets which can be finished completely until the next Daily Scrum. Thus it is much easier to synchronize the work across the team members.
• It is much easier to respond to things which got known since the last Daily Scrum, and it’s much more “Inspect and Adapt” than the attempt to foresee everything at the beginning of the sprint.
• The Product Owner can review a small product increment almost every day, making it possible to apply adaptions earlier.

Apparently it is a bit more difficult for the team to track whether a story is progressing well, but frankly, this problem did exist beforehand also. Since we do agile software development, we accept that a story may become more complex than expected. As a consequence the Product Owner prioritizes the stories of each sprint so that the team members can finish the topmost stories first. In case complications occur, the stories of the lowest priority can be dropped in favor of more important ones, or the devlopment team can negotiate with the Product Owner how to cope with the situation at hand.

Finally a warm and sunny april day, almost summer! I just did a short biking trip from Kandel (the ferry in Neuburg currently is out of order) to Wissembourg passing some villages respectively hamlets like Dierbach, Kaplaneihof, Deutschhof, Heidebrunnenhof, Haftelhof and Schweigen-Rechtenbach. Though I didn’t intend to do any mapping, I accidentally found a couple of tracks in the wine yards near Dierbach missing in our database.

The »Deutsches Weintor«, built in 1936, is a remain of the infamous Third Reich. It is facing towards France, and it wasn’t built to express good neighbourship. The eagle originally held a swastika, which has been knocked off after WW2, in his right leg’s claws. Nowadays it is a tourist attraction. I do not find it that interesting, since it is a reminder of the darkest years of german history, still expressed by the typical kind of architecture of that time:

This one was a lazy trip of about 20 kilometers, just right for such a marvellous day. It ended in Wissembourg, the famous medieval town where I mapped most of the missing streets a couple of years ago. Not to mention the great pipe organ currently being restored.

Due to a cool and windy easter monday, I had the occasion to start reading »The Skilled Facilitator« (Roger Schwarz 2002). As anticipated, some of the content is similar to other books concerning “servant leadership”, e.g. »Agile Coaching« (Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley 2009), »Coaching Agile Teams« (Lyssa Adkins 2010) or »Motivating Employees« (Anne Bruce, James S. Pepitone 1999).

It’s intentional that I started reading books which are not specialized in agile software development. It’s just to shed a little light on the work I do from a different point of view.

In case you are a Scrum Master who transmogrified into this role from a technical background (just like me) and who already knows how to live Scrum, this book is the right addition to your bookshelf. Though I just read a tenth of it, it is likely that it will already influence the work I’ll do tomorrow.

I’m just back from the bi-monthly meeting of the local Scrum User Group. The organisators prepared an exercise to rise the awareness of team information dynamics. The participants (including me :) ) learned a lot this evening, so thanks a bunch!

The rest of the evening was covered by the usual networking and discussing actual problem that we face in our everyday’s work as Scrum Masters and/or Product Owners.

As always, an excellent occasion to improve everyone’s skills and abilities. All credits to go-agile.de, the company who provides the propellerheads behind the local Scrum User Group.

Today I had good luck, as some organ player played the Dubois organ at the Peter and Paul abbey in Wissembourg.

Overview

The instrument was abandoned for about 40 years. Especially the console looked like there was no tomorrow. The following image was stolen from decouverte.orgue.free.fr[1]:

Fortunately the instrument is currently being restored. The inauguration concert is planned the May 20th, 2012. Individuals can support this project (french language) by a sponsorship of an individual key and stop between 20 and 200 €. Note that some stops contain more than one pipe a key. For example, the Cornet of the Grand Orgue starts at the c’ key (the lower keys do not support this stop) and contains 5 pipes a key, making the sponsorship of each note a bit more pricey.

Appearently most of the original parts of the instrument were still available, thus the restoration tried to reset the instrument to the original state as much as possible. It provides the typical sounds of french instruments of the 18th century.

Stops

Here’s the list of the current stops according to amis-orgue-dubois.com.

Positif

Range: C to c”’ (4 octaves)

Bourdon 8′
Flutte 8′
Prestant 4′
Flutte 4′
Nazard 2 2/3′
Doublette 2′
Tierce 1 3/5′
Larigot 1 1/3′
Fourniture (3 pipes per key)
Cromhorne 8′

Grand Orgue

Range: C to c”’ (4 octaves)

Flutte 16′
Bourdon 16′
Montre 8′
Bourdon 8′
Prestant 4′
Flutte 4′
Nazard 2 2/3′
Doublette 2′
Tierce 1 3/5′
Cornet (5 pipes per key)
Fourniture (4 pipes per key)
Cymbale (3 pipes per key)
Basson 16′
Tromette 8′
Voix Humaine 8′
Clairon 4′

Echo

Range: c’ to c”’ (2 octaves)

Bourdon 8′
Prestant 4′
Nazard 2 2/3′
Doublette 2′
Tierce 1 3/5′
Trompette 8′
Voix Humaine 8′

Pedale

Range: C to c’ (2 octaves)

Flutte 16′
Flutte 8′
Flutte 4′
Bombarde 16′
Trompette 8′
Clairon 4′

Remarks

There are a couple of things I find remarkable:

• Neither the Grand Orgue nor the Pedal is hosting a Principal 16′. Instead both provide a Flute 16′.
• Any of the three manuals contains a 2 2/3′ 5th (aka Nazard 2 2/3′) and a 1 3/5′ third (aka Tierce).
• The Pedal does not provide any aliquots.
• According to decouverte.orgue.free.fr the Echo consists of four octaves instead of two, omitting the C# (»sans le Do# grave«). However, the current list of pipes only lists two octaves. I have no clue whether this is achieved by some repetition respectively an octave coupler.
• It also mentiones three types of tremolo, soft, hard, and a dedicated tremolo for the Vox Humana (»Il y avait un Tremblant doux (“dans le vent”), un Tremblant fort (“à vent perdu”) et un Tremblant spécifique pour la Voix humaine.«). At least I can confirm the current instrument provides some tremolo, which I heard today.

Conclusion

It is great the instrument is being restored, and it was a great joy and pleasure listening to its flutes, thirds, and lingual stops this afternoon. Expecially the Cornet is my all time favorite stop.

All credits to the unknown player :) .

—

[1] decouverte.orgue.free.fr asks for attribution when reusing its contents: »Si vous recopiez des éléments de cette page pour des articles, plaquettes ou pages Web, citez vos sources. D’abord par simple honnêteté intellectuelle, mais aussi pour pouvoir pister d’éventuelles erreurs.«

The cold and dark winter months are finally over. Last night we switched our clocks to CEST. Today we went to the Palatinate Forest to enjoy the warm sunrails and to do some occasional mapping every now and then. Here’s the trip:

Thanks to all participants for attending. It was a great joy and pleasure to spend a marvellous day with you :) .

A Product Owner is aware of a “Minimum Marketable Featureset”. The opposite would be a “Maximum Marketable Featureset” as mentioned by Willem van den Ende. Kathy Sierra blogs about the “Happy User Peak“.

To achieve this, you need an empowered Product Owner who is capable of developing a clear vision of the future product. In case a mass product is being developed, the most important thing is filtering the solution requests and to turn it into usable software. It is the Product Owner’s responsibility to maximize the work not being done. Quoting Kathy Sierra:

Give users what they actually want, not what they say they want. And whatever you do, don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!

The key to success is focus.

For the last release of the product I’m currently responsible for, we developed a completely new feature and focussed on its easy of use. As a consequence, it misses a whole bunch of features we are aware of. Additionally, we dropped a fistful of legacy features in favour of the new one. And since the product was released, the market is honouring our efforts.

10 people, two public transport tickets – we did a marvellous spring hiking trip from Calmbach to Pforzheim. That’s the viewpoint at Büchenbronner Höhe:

I find wild boars interesting, but I’m not really interested that they come that close – at least not somewhere in the woods. Fortunately this one was enclosed in a compound :) :

Almost everything on the way already was in the OSM database, so I only recorded stuff for minor edits. I used MoNav on the N900 for routing, track logging and note taking. Additionally I played with OsmAnd on the tablet every now and then. It provids tons of great features. The disadvantage is that it features tons of configurations options to cope with :) .

BTW: Thanks, Miro, for organizing the trip – I know you are reading this :) .

As mentioned a couple of days ago, I bought an Android device recently.

Tablet Use Cases

A tablet computer mainly serves as a device for consuming data – music, videos, images, e-books, News, web pages and the like. It’s also useful for applications which do not require much text input, so writing a brief eMail or a posting to a social network is an option also. And last but not least playing games seems to be an important aspect for many users, too.

Since typing on a touch screen is not convenient for longer texts, I was looking for a device with a physical keybed.

As the OSM addict I am, I was interested in an integrated GPS receiver. A 3G modem was of interest, too.

Asus Pads with Keyboards

Asus offers two lines of products equipped with a physical keyboard.

The Asus EeePad Slider SL101 provides a sliding mechanism to unhide its keyboard. The advantage of this approach is that the keyboard is always available. The disadvantage of this approach is that the keyboard is always available. It’s probably a good tool for traveling salesmen, but I guess it is too clumsy to be used as an ebook reader.

The Eee Pad Transformer is a plain tablet, except for the fact that it can be placed into an optional docking station which turns the tablet into a netbook. The dock provides additional connectivity (like USB) and battery power.

The first transformer was the TF101 with a plastic back. Its successor, the TF201 (aka Prime) provides a metal back, thus GPS and 3G do not appear as an option. I bought the TF101G (G is for 3G) without the keyboard dock (which I may buy later).

Build Quality

The overall build quality of the device is good. The display (which, unfortunately, is glossy) sits flush in a metal frame. The plastic back provides some grip and does not leave a feel of cheapness. Bending the metal frame intentionally is possible, but will not be noticable during usage.

Hardware

The Metal frame hosts the following:

• Speakers on the bottom of the left and right edge. While one does not want to use them to enjoy music or videos, they are sufficient for a short video clip or for system sounds.
• SIM card slot at the middle of the left hand side (TF101G only).
• Volume and power buttons at the top of the left hand side.
• Combined audio and mike jack at the top of the right hand side.
• Mic drilling.
• Mini HDMI.
• Micro SD card slot.
• Two Notches at the bottom to connect the device to the optional docking station.
• Data port at the middle of the bottom edge. It either connects with the dock or allows to connect a proprietary cable with a standard USB connector at the other end. The TF101 can load its battery when connected to a computer via this USB cable. The TF101G can not. You can either connect the USB cable to a computer to exchange data, or put it in the wall wart shipped with the device to load the battery.

Operating System

The device comes with Android 3 preinstalled.

Asus meanwhile provides Android 4 as an update “over the air”. First the rollout for the TF201 series started, and meanwhile the first TF101 users got it as well. However, some users are complaining about issues, and appearently the update for the TF101G series is held back by Asus. If you want to use bleeding edge technology, feel free to update and cope with the issues. If you want a device which “just works”, keep Android 3.

To root or not to root

I decided neither to root the device nor to install an alternative operating system. I just tried to explore the device in a similar way that users do.

However, since Android is not free (as in speech), I’m pretty sure that I will install CyanogenMod rather later than sooner, just to avoid loss of control over my private data.

Preinstalled Software

A bunch of applications is preinstalled.

Polaris Office acts as a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. MyLibrary allows to access e-books and PDF documents saved on the internal SD card and the external MicroSD card. SuperNote allows to take notes in form of text, graphics, images, and voice. A dedicated application grants access to Google’s application market.

The device also provides a speech recognition application. However, it can cope with short snippets only. From what I’ve read, Android 4 will provide a streaming conversion feature. It’s one of the features I’d be interested in, though I do not expect it will really work that well that you can use it to convert speech to text in an absolutely reliable manner.

Remote File System Access

It is likely that users want to copy data from their computers to the device, such as digital images, music, or video files. Thus one might expect that a tablet with WiFi connectivity should appear as a shared drive in the wireless network setup. Surprisingly, it does not. Instead, there are several third party applications available to run a HTTP or FTP server on the device. Alternatives include running rsync or Webdav.
A couple of tools at least are capable of providing an SMB/CIFS client, so users can browse network shares from the device. For rooted devices a Samba server is available.

Neither of those solutions is convenient to install and use for average users.

SSH server

Yep, geeks want to run an ssh server on any device they own. Fortunately droidsshd is available. Unfortunately, when running the server on an unrooted device, an attempt to log in will result in an error message that some log file could not be written. That’s not an issue when loggin in from a terminal emulation. But both Macfusion as well as Cyberduck deny to connect to the server. Thus I updated from version 0.5 to 0.6. But this version does not even start on the device while providing no error message at all. I need to debug it as soon as I find a couple of minutes.

USB File Exchange

The proprietary USB cable that comes with the device can be used to load the battery, to copy files between the tablet and the desktop computer and to run applications transparently and directly from your IDE for debugging purposes.

Android 3 does not provide a standard mass storage mode, as this would lock the flash memory for applications running on the device. Instead, the device uses the Media Transfer Protocol, MTP. To talk to your device, you need an application which is capable of doing just that. There’s one provided by Google.

This approach causes some drawbacks, as the application (respectively the protocol used) is limited compared to mass storage. For example, the user cannot double click files on the device to open it from the desktop remotely. Additionally, connecting a tablet to a computer via a USB chord is not what you want to do in case you have WiFi available.

File Indexing

Filesystems are a nightmare for average users and inconvenient even for people who know how to cope with it – especially when the user is required to type a path manually.

As a consequence, developers try to hide the file system from the user whenever possible.

A file indexing mechanism (aka tracker) reads all user files and extracts respectively generates metadata for the files. A music player then allows the user to sort the collection by artist, genre, or album. An image viewer lets the user access the images from a thumbnail view gallery. An eBook reader shows the author and title of books combined with a cover view. It is convernient that the user does not need to care where the files are saved on the storage medium.

On the TF101G, this approach shows some drawbacks nevertheless. The image gallery, for example, does not only show the pictures you have taken with the device, but it also shows any other images found on the device, such as audio album or eBook covers. This makes it difficult for the user to find her photos.

I downloaded a couple of eBooks from the Guttenberg project. The eBook reader (called MyLibrary) crashed after that, and kept crashing once even after I removed the files. It meanwhile copes well with a reduced amount of eBooks.

PressReader crashed as soon I tried to access the TOC of an PDF.

Physical Protection

I wonder whether I’d buy an Otterbox in case it was available and mount the TF101 to the handlebar of my bike. There are protectors available, e.g. made out of neoprene or even rubber.

3G Connectivity

The first days I ran the device with no SIM card inserted. I got the impression that it used a lot of battery due to the missing card, though this observation might well be wrong.

Meanwhile 3G is available. I haven’t figured out how to use it correctly; often the device complains there was no connectivity, though the N900 has (both devices use the same provider). Later it connects automatically. I guess I need to tweak some settings via its control panel.

Application Security

When downloading and installing applications, the application must disclose to the user which features of the device it intends to use. Many “free” (as in beer) applications display ads and require access to the internet. Some additionally require that the users grants access to contacts data. It is up to the user to decide whether to install such an application. Despite that mechanism the user does not exactly know what the operating system or an application actually is doing.

Application Repositories

It is not only Google who provides a platform for downloading and installing applications. Additionally the TF101G allows to install applications from locally available application package files as well. Here are some alternative markets:

• f-droid.org (Repo for open source applications)
• android.com (run by Google)
• androidpit.com (run by Fonpit AG)
• slideme.org
• soc.io
• pdassi.com
• onlyandroid.org
• handango.com
• getjar.com

Conclusion

I’m pretty content with the device. The TF101G, though not exactly cheap, provides a pretty good ratio of features per ¤. Android provides more Linux than I expected. The user multi touch user interface works well, and the available apps turn the device in a useful companion.