Scrum Cheat Sheet - click for larger image

Often tasked with explaining Scrum to people new to it, we have debated thoroughly about the essentials of Scrum. What should you focus on? In a short presentation you do not get the luxury of being exhaustive and tailoring the explanation to the person you talk to is a great strategy but when speaking to a larger audience not always an option.

Well, a quick Internet search answers the question with a Scrum Cheat Sheet. It sums up the key elements in Scrum without getting you bogged down in details. Of course this is not enough to teach someone Scrum but it can serve as a great conversation starter.

There are several of the short points on the cheat sheet that deserves highlighting even to functioning Scrum teams and that is a testimony to the quality of the points.

The two points that are actually highlighted with a different color are some of the vaguer points about Scrum: “DONE” = potentially shippable and Visibility+flexibility = Scrum. Not neccesarily the MOST important points about Scrum but maybe the author of the cheat sheet has some experiences that makes these points especially important to her.

Personal experience makes me focus on the following:

• the responsibility of the Product Owner,
• that items on the product backlog can be added by ANYONE,
• that functionality not done is not shown at the sprint review

I would probably have added to the part about retrospectives that they are not about assigning blame (a simple but in practice difficult rule). The explanation about story points is also a bit off compared to my experience and I would have mentioned planning poker, but I can live with the current form of the cheat sheet and applaud the author for making it. Nicely done!

What would you have highlighted? Does the Scrum cheat sheet match your take on Scrum?

Last winter we visited Thailand for the first time. We have recently extended our family with a branch in Thailand (long story) and we wanted to see their country and learn about their history and culture.

Our trip started out in Bangkok. The city is, as all big cities, crowded, busy and sizzling. We loved it from Day 1. From a Danish perspective the prices seems ridiculously low with an hour of foot massage for 200 Bath, which is about 30 DKK or 5 Dollars and you could probably find it even cheaper. Shopping in Bangkok is an incredible experience and I bought so many books, some clothes, bags and gifts for the family back home.

We visited at Christmas time and the decorations was tacky and beautiful all at once. You can’t help but smile when you see how far the Thai people will go to mark a holiday that is not even celebrated by the majority of Thais. The dominant religion in Thailand is Buddhism but they do a lot for the turists at Christmas. The Christmas decorations on the big photo of the Bangkok traffic is the same as the one at the header of this blog.

Bangkok traffic

Even in winter Bangkok is hot, hot, hot and a whole day walking around the city can be hard work. A great break is a trip on the river with one of the fast boats. We chose the biggest turist boat and regretted it.

Fast boat on the river in Bangkok

After New Years Eve we decided to find us a deserted bounty beach and we rented a car (driver included) and headed south to a place called Blue Beach Resort near Pranburi. The only thing we knew about the place was that they had a website, free internet and free kayak’s. The place was a mixed experience. We stayed in the cheap rooms at first but had to move to a better room because the beds in the cheap rooms was really only a wooden board with a blanket over. On the other hand we found our deserted bounty beach. It was beyond words.

The Blue Beach Resort was a nice place but a bit plain and simple, so we decided to explore some of the other hotels at the same beach. We found a great place with a pool just up the beach. They served the best food, drinks and even though they had some problems understanding and speaking english the service was great. They brought us towels so we could use their pool even though we weren’t guests at their hotel. We ended up hanging out for a couple of days at this hotel only returning to our own to sleep at night.

The pool

We had 10 beautiful, happy days at that bounty beach with just a few days on tours to Hua-Hin and it was almost perfect. We returned to Bangkok a few days before we had to fly home and did some more shopping. Both of us were sad to leave Thailand.

Lego is the greatest toy company ever and I’m not just saying that because my husband works for them. He and I have both played with Legos as children and kept playing until now… Even though there is officially no children in our household we both would qualify as children when it comes to Lego. Our passion for bricks is not ours alone; We know a lot of people who love Lego bricks.

The computer science department at Aarhus University (my old hangout) has a Lego Lab and many fun og cool projects has come out of that lab the last 15-20 years – some more serious than others. A fairly recent project is especially close to my heart because it was done by a group of my friends. It is… wait for it… a Lego Turing machine!

To promote it they made this short video:

Geeky and beautiful!

As many other Danes we like to visit the Greek islands and we have been doing so every summer for years. Even for our honeymoon. This year the Greeks are experiencing a drop in turism most likely because of the deadly riots in Athens and the bad publicity with the economic trouble in the country that threathens to bring down the European economy. This is a shame because the Greek islands are in my experience both calm, safe and beautiful. The last few years we have visited Crete, Samos, Zakynthos, Rhodes and ancient Olympia at the Greek mainland.

This year we decided to visit the Greeks in Cyprus – an independent country since 1960 but with strong ties to Greece. Their language is Greek and the population are 77% Greek. Our decision not to visit Greece has nothing to do with the problems the country is facing as we booked the vacation many months before the riots. If we had not already booked this vacation I think we would have visited Greece – the prices are low right now and we would like to help the Greeks in these difficult times. I can certainly recommend visiting the Greek islands – I love the food, the people and the ancient history.

The view from Platanias, Crete

Greek sailor (Yannis?), Samos

Mozaic from Rhodes

Jumbled column, Samos

Taking pictures is really Poul’s thing, but recently I discovered what seeing the world through a camera can do to your perspective. We visited my parents and I took a tour of the garden with our camera and even though I know nothing about shutter speed, image composition or getting the right lighting I think I got some really cool images.

My trick was to zoom in on details and especially the beautiful flowers and trees. Suddenly the garden was full of treasures just waiting to be discovered. Let me just include a few of my favorites. The last one was taken by Poul but I had to include the cute pixie that in reality is about 5 cm high and almost hidden at the edge of a flower bed.

“We like to travel!”

Let me just break that sentence down for you. “We” are a Danish married couple (Poul and Therese) – both geeks working in IT as software developers.

The word “like” is a bit of an understatement – we actually love to travel but “love” is an overused word which we try to avoid. Alternatively we could have written “We ♥ to travel” or “We ♥ travelling” but that is also much too cliché – so we settled for “like”.

And then we come to “travel”. By travelling we mean both vacation, business travel, adventure and just getting out of the country for any reason. Denmark is a very lovely country but 30+ years here is enough; we need to see something new. In 2009 we travelled 8 times between us – some for business but mostly recreationally. We started the year in the African continent, spent most of our days in the European continent, visited the North-American continent and ended the year in the Asian continent. Our plans for 2010 is to work hard and eventually save enough money to travel in Asia for 6 months to a year.

So yes, we like to travel!

This blog is our diary

We started this blog because we would like to have a channel of communication when we travel and also to have a place to rave about our geeky projects. Right now we are both working full-time while also doing our own projects in our free-time and trying to keep up with interesting trends in software development. Our background include 3 ScrumMaster Certifications between us, one academic education as a Computer Scientist and one education as a Computer Engineer and we have been working for IBM, “Den Blå Avis” (Ebay), Lego, Aarhus University, one local hospital and the JAOO IT-conference to name a few.

When we travel we tend to take a lot of photographs and we intend to share a lot of them with our blog readers. The photo in the blog header is also one from our travels – it is taken in Bangkok at Christmas time. The blue spots on the picture are Christmas decorations that hung in front of the view. Beautiful isn’t it?