I’ve had a Kindle DX for about 10 days now and thought I would jot down a few thoughts about it.

A couple of friends have said “Uh…you chose a Kindle? Really?” in a way that sounds like they’re asking “So you bought the whole Britney Spears back catalog on vinyl? Really?” – as if there’s something simultaneously uncool and outdated about the choice.
What lies behind the question is the imminent availability of the iPad, and the question is really “why buy the big Kindle, when you don’t have long to wait for the iPad to be released?”

In a word – the screen.

I had high hopes for the iPad. I really thought it would be incredible. I thought it was going to be the most sci-fi device you could have until robot girlfriends and flying cars are available. I was deeply disappointed.
No multitasking. No cameras for video conferencing. No direct file access to the device (iTunes only). And the most disappointing – a plain old, 1024×768 LCD screen with a backlight.
In other words, the iPad is a giant iPod Touch. I can’t really see it fitting in to my life when I already have a powerful Macbook Pro and I have an iPhone – what I really wanted was a device that I could use for long reading sessions.
I’m studying at the moment, and I cart around a backpack full of files containing material printed from PDFs. My eyes can’t take an LCD screen for a whole day at work and then still look at one in the evening.
Working at a laptop is different from reading on a laptop – when you work you actually look all over the place – different windows, your keyboard from time to time, around your desk etc.
 Reading 100’s of pages on an LCD screen doesn’t work for me.
 So it had to be e-Ink or a hybrid screen.
The choice was pretty simple for me – Kindle DX was the best way to get a high-resolution e-Ink screen with native PDF support for documents that were designed for A4 printing. 
I would have preferred a Que or an iRex device with built in Wacom tablet for note-taking, but then the price would double.
If the iPad had used a next-generation screen from Pixel Qi, Liquavista or Mirasol then it would have been an obvious choice, but not with an IPS backlit LCD panel.
I’m glad I made the choice I did – the Kindle screen is amazing. At this point, I think I prefer reading on it to reading on paper. The soft grey screen with crisp text is extremely easy on the eyes, and it’s absolutely flat, unlike a book or magazine page that seems chaotically bendy and unstable after using the Kindle.
On the down side, it’s difficult to manage files on the Kindle. Although you can simply connect it to your computer via USB and create folders and documents on the device, they all appear in one flat non-hierarchical view. I have about 200 documents stashed on mine, and it means scrolling through 13 pages if I want to browse the whole collection. I’ve been assured that a software update is on the way, but until then it’s an interface failing.
Overall, I’m super-happy with the device. It does exactly what I wanted it to do, and it reminds me a lot of my first monochrome iPod in it’s focus on doing just one thing very well. No regrets on the Kindle, and I’ll take a closer look at the iPad when it hits version 2.

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It seems as if the Scrum folks really don’t like anyone asking questions about the real-world implementation of Scrum…

Firstly, we use Scrum every day at 24.com. It’s changed our development teams, and has had a significantly positive effect on our business.
I regard myself as a Scrum advocate, and enthusiastically recommend Scrum to teams that have not tried it.
We have been using Scrum for about 2 years now, and I regard our Scrum teams and processes as mature and stable.
I am a member of the Scrum Practitioners forum on LinkedIn, along with 8000+ others.
I’ve been watching one of the threads with some intererest – it is titled “Who says they are doing Scrum But?“.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “Scrum But” (or “Scrumbutt”) refers to the commonly heard expression “oh yes, we’re doing Scrum, but we (insert some tweak to or deviation from the process here)”

The debate on LinkedIn has been swinging back and forth, and participants seem to be divided into a few basic camps :

1. True believers – there is a Scrum answer to everything, and if you you can’t make the process work in your environment, then you are not trying hard enough, you have no discipline, and you need to go read some books or watch a video. Or maybe pay for some Scrum coaching / training / certification. Don’t like discussion with the Pragmatists or the Critics. Prefer to speak to other True Believers at Scrum Gatherings, and to dish out “try harder” advice to Strugglers.
2. Pragmatists – adopt the term Scrum, but are happy to inspect and tweak their processes for their environment. Sometimes they are unable to make the sweeping structural changes that would enable all the elements of Scrum. Sometimes they can enhance the performance of Scrum for their environment. Seem unperturbed by the True Believers or the Strugglers. Mildly interested in what the Critics have to say. Happy to share real-world experience.
3. Strugglers – these are teams that are trying to adopt Scrum, but haven’t really grasped the principles. Their processes are not working, they have entire sprints failing, and the promised productivity increases are not being realised. Typically, these teams have tweaked Scrum in a way that breaks the process completely, like not actually having shipping software at the end of a sprint, or doing twice-weekly standups, or not bothering with retrospectives. Looking for answers, but don’t know who they should listen to. Like what they hear from the True Believers, but don’t seem to be able to actually follow good advice, regardless of where it comes from.
4. Critics – these are the most dangerous of the lot.. these are people who understand the Scrum process well, have used it in production environments, have used Lean and Agile principles outside of the Scrum framework, and have worked with both disfunctional and high-performing teams. They have a few bones to pick with the Scrum process, and they want to do it publicly
5. Indifferent masses – These are the 8000+ people in the LinkedIn group who have some interest in Scrum, or perhaps they use it sucessfully. Don’t really care about the discussion. Just want to be surrounded by lots of Certified Scrum people

I’m being deliberately provocative, but this is still a fair summary of the landscape.

I was completely astounded to see a post today from a member of the Board of Directors at the Scrum Alliance threatening to leave the group and the discussion because he was tired of seeing debate and challenge around the Scrum process.
Part of the reason put forward was the time-pressures of the upcoming Scrum Gatherings (i.e. gatherings of True Believers).
In his post to the group, it was suggested that the name of the group should more appropriately be Scrum Debaters or Scrum Challengers rather than Scrum Practicioners.

Amazing… any discussion, debate, and criticism amongst people who are actually evaluating, implementing and using Scrum is now too much to bear??

So I looked a little further afield to see what was being said online about Scrum, and whether I was alone in thinking that it was a very lightweight framework, and needed significant input to make it workable.

And I found a gem of a post that perfectly and lucidly pulls together some of my criticisms of Scrum called It’s time for Scrum to evolve. It’s built around a series of points raised on the Scrumdevelopment Yahoo! Group by Uncle Bob Martin, and repeated here:

1. No technical practices. Scrum is great at giving project management advice, but provides no technical help for the developer. Any good implementation of Scrum needs to borrow technical practices from some other method like XP. The suite of technical practices that should be added probably include: TDD, Continuous Integration, Acceptance Testing, Pair Programming, Refactoring.
2. 30 day sprints are too long. Most scrum teams have either shrunk them to 2
   weeks or perform some kind of midpoint check at the two week mark. I know of some teams that have two 2-week “iterations” inside a single 4-week “sprint”.
   The difference being that they use the sprint for reporting upwards, but use the iterations for internal feedback and control.
3. The tendency of the scrum master to arrogate project management powers. This is not a problem with Scrum out of the box so much as it is a problem with the way scrum sometimes evolves. Perhaps it is related to the unfortunate use of the word “master”. Perhaps the XP term “Coach” might be a better word to use. In any case, good implementation of scrum do not necessarily correlate scrum masters and project managers.
4. The C in CSM (Certified Scrum Master) is unfortunate. Again, this is not so much about scrum out of the box as it is about the scrum community. That letter C has gotten far too significant for it’s intention. It is true that the people in a scrum team need to be trained. One of the things they should be trained about is the role of the scrum master. The problem with the C is that it changes the notion of scrum master from a role into a person. It is the person who has the C. In an ideal case, the members of the scrum team will rotate through the scrum master role the same way the members of an XP team rotate through the coach role. This rotation is never perfect, and sometimes the role sticks to one or two people more than others. But the idea was never to raise up a particular person with a rank. We never wanted that C emblazoned on their chests.
5. Scrum provides insufficient guidance regarding the structure of the backlog. We’ve learned, over the years, that backlogs are hierarchical entities
   consisting of epics, themes, stories, etc. We’ve learned how to estimate them statistically. We’ve learned how and when to break the higher level entities
   down into lower level entities. Epics->Themes->Stories->Tasks.
6. Scrum carries an anti-management undercurrent that is counter-productive. Scrum over-emphasizes the role of the team as self-managing. Self-organizing and self-managing teams are a good thing. But there is a limit to how much a team can self-X. Teams still need to be managed by someone who is responsible to the business. Scrum does not describe this with enough balance.
7. Automated Testing. Although this could be considered a derivative of point 1, I thought it worth calling out as a separate point because it is so
   fundamental. Scrum doesn’t mention this, yet it is the foundation of every agile effort. Agile teams work in short cycles because feedback only works well
   in short cycles. But short cycles aren’t enough. You also need objective measurement of progress. The most reliable way to know how much a team has
   gotten done is to run automated tests and count the tests that pass.
8. Multiple teams. Scrum has little to say about the coordination of multiple teams. This is not a failing unique to scrum. Agile itself is virtually silent
   on this issue. Scrum talked about the vague notion of a “Scrum of Scrums” but that idea really hasn’t played out all that well. Scrum-in-the-large remains in
   the domain of certain consultants who claim to have an answer. There is no real consensus on the issue.

Bravo. Nicely put Bob. And I’ll add my own to the list -

• Managing multiple stakeholders

Large organisations rarely have a single person who is true Product Owner and has executive decision-making powers.
An individual with this power is likely to be far too senior to be co-located with the development team and dedicated to the Product Owner role.
And even when there is a dedicated Product Owner, that person is still usually not a technical manager, and unlikely to ensure that good engineering practices are adhered to or that technical maintenance is performed (system upgrades etc.)
So just by having a technical manager involved you already have more than one person who has a stake in the backlog.
I haven’t even got onto the topic of performance management, discipline and reward on the Scrum team.
Scrum is silent on this point, and advocates usually waffle about “self-managed teams”. As if somehow the team is going to create the budget, recruit team members, manage performance and rewards, and discipline / dismiss underperforming team members.
I know that Scrum doesn’t say that team self-management means no managers in the organisation, but the relationship between team managers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners is not clear.

I don’t think Scrum is broken. I don’t want to throw it out or replace it with something else.
But I think the Scrum community should face up to the challenges in the spirit of the Agile movement that created Scrum, and should not be afraid of change.

I welcome your comments below – is Scrum perfect? Does everyone do Scrum-but? Have you tried Scrum and moved to something else that works better for you?

Related posts:

1. The things we weren’t told about Scrum
2. 24.com Dev team wins an award

This is a short presentation I first delivered at the MIH Tech conference in Prague last year, and then touched up in February 2010 to deliver to a local tech team that is in the process of implementing Scrum.

The main areas I cover are the challenges of innovating within the Scrum process, how to use Scrum techniques for non-Scrum teams, and the key things we’ve learned about Scrum over the last 2 years at 24.com.

Comments are welcome ; )

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I’ve been dipping in to Google Buzz evey day or so since it was released, and so far I really like it.

Like it enough to say that I can’t see myself using Twitter anymore, and suspect Twitter has hit a wall in terms of growth.

Things I like about it:

• Conversations are persistant, not fleeting
• Integrated into Gmail, which I usually have open
• Easy to take a Buzz conversation private into email, or to fire off a Google Talk session
• No 140 character limit!

The last one, the 140-character thing, is a bigger deal than I thought it would be. After using Buzz, I’ve realised how stilted, unnatural, and uncomfortable it is to communicate in single sentences through Twitter. Twitter is great for blasting out short snippets to nobody in particular, but as a medium for conversation it’s pretty ineffective.

I’ve watched posts made to both Twitter and Buzz, and there is no doubt in my mind that the response from Buzz is of a higher quality.

Here’s a great example of the return to the lost art of conversations with strangers on the Net -a Buzz thread started by a Twitter post made by Clay Shirky

In the thread, Clay responds to one of his commenters, prompting the following comment:

Wow, this thread is so different from anything you’d ever encounter on Twitter or FB. Kind of feels like the early days of the internet in a weird way: everyone in a chat room talking to people they don’t know about lofty things, in long paragraphs. Who does that on the web any more?

The comment encapsulated the feel completely – it’s taken us this long to get back to the immediacy and spirit of old tools like IRC!

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We all try to juggle a dozen or more things at once, but sometimes I get to the stage where I feel like I’ve taken on too much and I’m just not finishing things off properly.

Same thing applies when I’m trying to focus on something important and I get people walking up to my desk, and my phone is ringing, and my email and IM are flashing… it’s really tough to complete a task in the midst of the distractions.

I was pleased to discover a link today to recent research from Stanford University that supports the idea that humans are just not that good at multitasking.

In fact, we really suck at it, and those amongs us who try to do it perform poorly.

The Stanford researchers call these people “suckers for irrelevancy”.

This supports 2 related ideas I have…

The first is, technical people really need to be given a quiet space to work without interuption if they are to perform at their best.

It can take 30 minutes or more for a developer working on a complex problem to put the necessary mental scaffolding in place and enter a productive ‘zone’, and it takes only a few seconds to interupt them and bring their mental model and focus crashing down.

My personal rule is that if I’m walking towards a developers desk and I see code in their IDE, I turn around and wait until later to speak to them.

Of course, Facebook, Youtube, FML and others all get interupted.

The second related point is the prevalence of openplan office layouts for tech teams.

In my opinion, we’re packing the devs in too tightly, and we would get more productivity out of them by allowing more space, privacy and sound insulation.

What do you think? Can you multi-task effectively or are you more productive with a tighter focus?

Should developers be sitting closely together in an open-plan environment to promote communication and collaboration, or are do they end up drowning out the ‘collaboration’ with headphones so they can get serious work done?

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I spotted a piece of news today from Mashable claiming that for the first time, Kindle e-Books outsold real books. This is interesting for a couple of reasons…

First off, unlike Apple which is in the hardware business and make high margin on iPod sales but little to no margin on music sold through the iTunes Music Store, I believe that Amazon sees the Kindle as a mechanism to sell content rather than a hardware business unto itself.

iSuppli, a company that takes apart consumer electronics and estimates their cost of manufacture, shows that although Amazon is making some margin on the Kindle, it’s nowhere close to the 100%+ markup that Apple routinely enjoys on their iPods.

The other interesting thing is that the Kindle app on the iPhone already let’s you read books you’ve bought from Amazon on a device that is not a Kindle.

The worst-kept Apple secret ever is that they are working on a Tablet device that should be released some time early in 2010.

If rumours are to be believed, it will probably sport a hybrid LCD/e-Ink multi-touch display that can play back video in full colour and also display crisp text without a backlight in full sunlight. The screen technology that seems to be the best candidate for the Tablet is from a company called Pixel Qi, a company making a hybrid screen in a convenient 10″ size, perfect for a tablet computer.

Now we add this little nugget from TechCrunch in which Steve Jobs talks about eBooks:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

It all stacks up to a possible future where Apple sells a fantastic multi-purpose device that can act as a very good eBook reader by running a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon.

It’s possible that Jobs has cut a deals with book publishers in the same way he cut deals with the major music labels before the launch of the iTunes Music Store, but I think it’s unlikely.

What do you think? Will Steve add books to the iTunes Store, or will the Apple Tablet run a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon?

Perhaps both options can co-exist?

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I’m currently reading for my MBA through Henley Business School, and tackling a module called Strategic Direction.

Reading through my core textbook Strategic Management, Awareness and Change I came across a great set of skills and attributes that are typically exhibited by entrepreneurial strategic leaders:

• A tolerance of calculated risks
• A combination of leadership, general management and financial skills
• Planning, time and project management skills
• Receptiveness to innovation
• A commitment to continuous learning
• A willingness to delegate
• Motivated by factors other than financial gain
• Self-confident, resilient and persevering
• Good communication skills

I wish I had seen this before completing our KPA docs at work – I think the list makes a great framework for a set of attitudes, skills and behaviours that every manager in the online space should aspire to.

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Spotted two interesting links today.

In the first, The Guardian says that Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising to them.

The premise is that in spite of having a massive userbase, one that is now larger than the population of the USA, Facebook is struggling to extract financial value from their audience.

The second link is a Silicon Valley Insider interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, in which he claims that LinkedIn is still profitable with ad revenues up 50%.

LinkedIn has 3 main revenue streams, with online advertising being only one of them.

Weiner doesn’t give any breakdown, but implies that a significant portion of LinkedIn revenues are generated by their premium subscription business and corporate recruitment solutions.

I blogged this week with a throw-away thought that LinkedIn could possibly be built today as a Facebook application, but now I’m not so sure… it’s clear that LinkedIn have managed to build a profitable business quite different to the type of business that could be created inside Facebook’s ecosystem.

What do you think? Will Facebook become super-profitable?

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I’ve never been a big fan of tag clouds as navigation devices, but Wordle is pretty awesome..

You can plug in a block of text or an RSS feed and generate beautiful word layouts with the most frequently mentioned terms appearing more prominently.

Looking at mine, it’s obvious that I’ve been blogging about Farmville too much.

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Very impressive win – 20four Labs walked off with top honours and the $85 000 prize in the Nokia Africa Calling all Innovators competition with their Afridoctor app.

It’s great to see this kind of innovation and rapid turn-around rewarded.

Read more about the development of the app and the people behind it at the 20four Labs Blog.

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