In a single line, the first semester has been awesome.Some of you already know that I came to Calgary, AB, Canada this fall to start a graduate research focusing agile software development. So, to get started I tried to come up with a research idea by hunting several resources including popular publications, blogs and books. This is not yet over...However, I took a course called Applied Machine Learning and had the opportunity to work on a project that might lead to my MS thesis.

Image taken from: http://www.leansoftwareinstitute.com/images/img_bigpicture.jpg If you read the Poppendieck's book called, "Lean Software Development : An Agile Toolkit", you probably liked it because it managed to get the essence out of agile practices. So, what are these core principles? Well, most of you already know the phrase, "Inspect and Adapt". Now, you also know a bunch of specifications that facilitate this, for an instance, Scrum, XP etc. Reading the book, I had a realization that, its good to talk using concrete facts as much as possible.

This book by Mary and Tom Poppendieck is an awesome read. I just read the first three chapters and loving it. More on this book will come later as I read more...I am tuned to attend the next CAMUG session by the Authors! It should be a lightning session and looking forward to Nov 2nd.

Ever since I started working in the software industry, as a freelancer or representing a company, I found the most challenging part of a remote software development project is "Communication". In agile setup, collaboration plays a leading role to be effective and efficient. By communication, I mean the following:-Getting the spec as intended by the client.Asking specific questions on time.Status update about progress, blocks and forthcoming events.Getting feedback as intended by the client.

If you are like me, with little creativity with UI (!), on a new project you always start with a simple layout, banner followed by a row of menu and then a two column body that ends with a footer. Well, here is an example:-----------------------------------------------------------CampZero zero hassle camping----------------------------------------------------------Home | Place a booking----------------------------------------------------------Welcome | | | | | | --------------------------------------------------------- Campzero.com, all rights reserved---------------------------------------------------------Well, there are other ways and you will almost always see good visual elements in most websites.

I worked on the following story:-"As a partner, when I visit a project's dashboard I want to see five most recently started or updated discussion threads with number of unread comments, if any. If any of these are new, I want to see them in a highlighted view. Next, if I open the thread, I want to see all new comments in a highlighted view as well. However, once seen, the threads/comments should no longer be highlighted from the rest.

Previously I used a few plugins in RoR projects including ScrumPad. On a more recent work, I found the following plugins to be really useful and easy to get started:- 1. I18n: Rails Internationalization RailsCast at http://railscasts.com/episodes/138-i18n Guides post at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html 2. Seed-fu: Initial data loading for application (e.g. admin user, product categories)Tutorial http://github.com/mbleigh/seed-fu A support is now built in for Rails 2.3.4 3. Thinking-sphinx: Full text search RailsCast http://railscasts.

This intro is from the presenters:- PAS was a joint venture development initiative by 4 major oil and gas companies and CGI. Devon, Encana, Husky and Talisman joined with CGI to develop a new Production and Revenue Application. Each company put 3 senior business resources on the project. The development component of the PAS initiative cost $35M over 5 years with up to 90 people on the team. This

We relocated to the northwest section of Calgary, Alberta on the 26th August. I am new to this part of the world and traveling to this opposite time zone (GMT+6 to GMT-6) took around 33 hours. Did you ever take a flight on Qatar? Not? I recommend it. They offer best foods for your south asian delight. My route was Dhaka - Doha - London - Calgary. I enjoyed the trip (don't tell anyone, I was a bit scared when traveling over the Atlantic :-))

Today is going to be my last day with the Code71 team and this is the last post of the series on my Code71 days. The journey started on June 1, 2006 and now at this moment, I just wanted to summarize my takehome from the last three years' of work. I will go short, just touching the bits...Teaming is at the core of Code71's culture. It went beyond teaming just for software development as we met outside for a movie, celebrated even the smallest of personal achievements and shared the excitement of a cricket or tennis match even at midnight from home over phone!