Agile TechDay 2009

I was happy to be among those nice experienced agile guys! That was the second event in Rio about Agile methodologies. These one was special not just because I was invited to give a talk at the end but because the people who talked was really involved with scrum. For my surprise, rather than just agile ways in IT the principals of the Accenda Group gave a talk about Scrum in the marketing industry. They are trying to incise scrum at heart of marketing industry by doing what they call Agile Marketing. Nice approach but also a lot of people to convince!
So.. we are in InfoQ, have some pics.

Toyota side effects

On Jun 18, 2008, Reuters published an article exposing the Toyota’s human rights abuses and aggression to the worker’s rights.
The main subjects are:

• Trafficking of foreign guest workers, mostly from China and Vietnam to Japan
• Assembly line workers in Japan are low-wage temps who have few rights and earn less than 60% of what full time workers do

The auto industry has affected us so far through the Lean Thinking, Scrum and so on. In software industry, many ones are talking about Lean Thinking and how amazing we can be if we learn from other industries.

We are pround of Toyota’s managerial style which facilitate communication, avoid time-waste, spread knowledge across multifunctional teams and rush things to be completed. Now, our software projects has a good style to actually produce good results to our customers. Thus I hope the Toyota style side effect, exposed by Reuters doesn’t happen to us too. I’m really willing for the market get mature to see how this new organising will set.

u-hu-hu-hu-hu….

Read more: Toyota Linked to Human Trafficking and Sweatshop Abuses

IT professionals in Brazil must now be registered

As lawyers, the Brazilian IT professional will need to be registered in a federal counselor. They will possess a number indicating has higher level degree and authorization to work in software development and all other areas. Time experience will be considered in the initial phase.

A lot of people were dreaming about it for more than one decade. Especially for the ones who went to university. It happens that many professionals changed the degree diploma for technical certifications in a day-to-day basis experience due to the market’s steam. And most of those professionals without high level education wages equally or more than the ones whose possess the high level degree.

Apparently for these reason it is common to hear people decreasing the importance of a high level degree in favor of an indubitable “competence” and technical certifications like Microsoft, Sun, CISCO among others.

Of course time and experience rule our professional’s lives but the timeline to be a good professional might be leaned after computer science or other bsc. degree’s course.
The certifications are important too. It demonstrates the professional skills to deal with certain technical product. But that isn’t enough to make you solid through this turbulent and changeable industry.

I have a similar post in portuguese language at Cairo Noleto’s blog.

All Over the World

All over the world,
There’s more than meets the eye
land and sea to share,
red yellow black and white
All over the world,
There’s darkness and there’s light
sad stories are told
But it’s good to be alive

Spy Vs. Spy

“Unable to find assembly”

A few days ago my service provider changed from windows 2003 32bit to 64bit. I’ve been in hell doing a lot of extra configuration to get my asp.net application working in the 64bit environment. In fact, no one less than the windows service could give so much problems. All about dll references…

I’ve got so many error messages and after going deeper, the last one was “Unable to find assembly”. Hell…

Google here and there… I found out that to work in 64bit environment, all .net projects has to be homogeneous regarding the target platform.

If the deployment environment is 32bit, it’s ok. You can do any mess and mix AnyCPU and x86 platforms types. But it the deployment environment is 64bit you may need to set up all your projects to x86 or x64.

But, why change to 64bit plataform? Gaurav Seth’s WebLog is nice guy which has answred I lot of my basic questions. Please, follow the links:

Cross compilation in the 64-bit .NET Framework world for platform specific features

Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit application development on .NET Framework

Is 64-bit a superior platform as compared to the 32-bit platform?

MCP Digital Certificates Are Here – behind the blasphemy

Microsoft Environmental Initiative brings MCP certification to the digital Era (lately I mean).

They argue about the need to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. That’s ok, but they don’t talk about reducing the exam fee. Actually, everybody knows that their profit will raise with no regard.

Microsoft does need to take care about the community wrath shown on Born to Learn blog. People complain about I lot of things, mainly, the one who is academic Microsoft education and is gonna have a rubbish digital certification or have to spend more money.

Have a try on Born to Learn make your point there…

A new world with MbUnit RowTest

One thing I love the most on MbUnit is RowTest functionality. It brings the possibility of removing extra lines of code and keep all test clean and functional.
For example, testing e-mails:

[RowTest]
[Row("eduardo@temploxv.pro.br", false)]
[Row("edu@temploxv.com.br", true)]
public void CheckEmail(string email, bool Expected)
{
    bool Result;
     Result = false;
     this.Email = email;

    Console.WriteLine(“cheking on email {0}”, email);

    Result = _controller.CheckEmail();

   Assert.AreEqual(Result, Expected);

} 

You may consider use this for validation like that. But pay attention to the Row tag which doesn’t have parameters for expected values. To your assertion works you may actually need create a parameter for the value expected to be.