Karmona`s Pragmatic Blog

* My daughter first words were ‘Aaa…Baa’ :-)

* The Delver Alpha was released and deployed – Want an invite?

* Ron Gross, Ofer Egozi and Tal Shiri have joined Delver’s R&D team.

* Video Bitz is a striking success story

Updates from “Rabbit-Hole”
We came out of stealth mode at Demo Conference…

• Techcrunch - Delver comes out of stealth with a new twist on social search - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/delver-comes…
• Delver Presents Socially Connected Search at DEMO 08 - http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=…
• TheMarker -http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/2660
• Damn clever… - http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109…
• Boston Herlad Blogs - First an attempt at Google-killer, and not a half bad one - http://news.bostonherald.com/blogs/news/hub_20/?p=…
• Delver debuts socially connected search engine - http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7780
• Mashable - http://mashable.com/2008/01/30/demo-08-roundup-2/
• Technology Review - http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20138/?a=f
• DEMO: search companies bring up the rear, starting with Semingo (now Delver) - http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/2008/01/30/demo…
• Leading the “why didn’t I think of that” category is Delver - http://blog.laptopmag.com/the-sun-sets-on-demo-08

We have a new Facebook page @ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Herseliya-Israel/Delver/7851012277, our IT operation is ready …and we are still looking for Smart people to join us…

“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

I am currently deep down the Rabbit-Hole…
Cya after the Delver* Alpha ;-)

– Moti

* Semingo have changed its name to Delver…

Semingo is looking for great people to join our A-Team (Excuse my “eighties”)

Please email us (jobs @ semingo . com) with resumes if you are ready for the Semingo challenge.

Good Luck!

My rough estimation is that the number of software project managers in the world is smaller in (at least) one scale from the conceived time-estimation techniques and this post is my humble four-cents contribution on how to do pragmatic time estimation for software projects (just finished one in Semingo).

• Start with the mother of all lists to store your Product Manager wish list– We use eScrum Product-Backlog to store our work-items
• Prioritized them – We use 0-Yesterday; 1-Must; 2-Important; 3-Nice-to-Have and 4-”Forget-About-It”… ;-)
• Get relative estimations on all items
  • Granularity is the bronze-bullet for time estimations - Strive to the finest grained possible in reasonable time-frame  e.g. We usually aim for 2-5 days granularity in 2-3 days of time-boxed-estimation-period since the finest granularity in planning without reasonable time-box might take twice the time of doing the planned work (a.k.a. The Estimation Paradox)
  • Experience can turn your bronze bullet into silver one (ye ye, a silver one) - Relative estimation is calculated relatively upon a common scale of known work items from the team history e.g. We use Scrum “Story Points” and constantly measure the team velocity for time estimation adjustments
  • Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 etc.) can be used to “embed” the complexity and risk of rough (with insufficient drilldown) estimations e.g. if your estimation granularity for specific task reach ~40 days then your pragmatic estimation should be around 55 days (= the closest Fibonacci sequence) since it is reasonable to believe your (insufficient) granularity conceals risk, complexity and unknowns issues which requires Fibonacci-like-”buffering”
  • Strive to synchronize your time estimation techniques into very simple one - different time estimation conventions in the same development team is the 2nd reason for time delays. (I will give 0.95$ grant if you can guess what the 1st reason)
  • I know I am different but personally, I do prefer to have “pragmatic hours” vs. the normal Agile “ideal hours” and to start the project when 1 “Story Point” =  1 “Pragmatic Day” so long everyone understand this will change as soon as you start the project and then you need to return to velocity tracking to calculate the end
  • Don’t be naïve (a.k.a. “Ideal  Days”) with two known flavors:
    • Optimistic time estimations,  assuming 24*7 of concentrated programming ability with no outside interference (a.k.a. no such thing)
    • “Stupid” hand-waiving time estimations a.k.a. It is only 10 min to code this (but ~5 days to Integrate, Review, Design, Test, Schema and DAL changes, I18N support, Styling etc.)
• Get the rough project estimation = Sum of all product backlog story points / 22 (work days in month) / Number of relevant people
  • Usually this calculation will show you don’t have enough time for the project (even without project dependencies buffer which can be added later)
  • Start the “Tradeoff Game” - Try to cut items (content) based on the relative ROI
  • Revalidate your priorities since they will be the main tool (beside dependencies) for creating the project work plan.

As I see it, estimating software projects in a realistic time-frame is a statistic prediction of chaotic, time-delay-series of events and will never be straightforward nor easy so you can only do your best in the estimation and then track the project as it goes and make the needed adaptation on the way upon crystal clear project priorities.

Good Luck!

My boss have returned from the recent techcrunch with a “brand new multimedia and Internet-enabled quad-band GSM EDGE-supported” iPhone and missed (yet again) the trendy next generation iPhone Killer gadget -  iPoor @ http://ipoor.org

Oren and I, have decided to form an invite-only Scrum Clan.
We would like to tag Pasha Bitz (snapshot attached) as the 3rd clan member.

Pasha, please choose carefully, you can only tag one Scrum-Lover like yourself to this distinguish clan….

Good Luck!

P.S. The web 2.0 tag was added to this post since it is a genuine-user-generated-content-post especially made for Pasha

Google Trends (a.k.a. my experiment - part III)

• Clytie Lane
• Moon Bloodgood
• Deceptively Delicious
• Rotten Neighbor
• Melinda England
  

Almost a month ago, I have moved to my own hosted blog due to google blogger outage.

Last week (September 3rd ~00:00), I was visiting BlogCatalog and I got the Internet Service Outage-Lie-of-the-Day: “Database Error – We’re sorry, but our database servers are currently overloaded. Please enjoy a cup of coffee and then try refreshing this page – Blog Catalog” [BlogCatalog Outage September 3rd - 2007] … so I followed the site recommendation and I have enjoyed a great cup of Italian coffee but I was very sorry to see that it didn’t helped the BlogCatalog database to recover…

These days, we are working intensively on the last sprint goals; One of the goals was to finish the architectural design of our unique internet service.

So… Yesterday we where guesstimating (until the very late hours of the night) on the scale needed for this service and started mapping the IT topology, Database implementation and software back-end options that are viable to support it.

I have a lot to say on the process, technology challenges and options for my future posts and I can sum it up now saying: We all hope that by taking the right decisions when reaching a critical-architectural-junction these days, we will be able to enjoy a good cup of Italian coffee while our databases are down for maintenance… but we also know that simple risk management on our guesstimates is also to be prepared for rainy days with a good enough Internet Service Outage-Lie-of-the-Day ;-)

As I posted when I just started this blog - Almost 2 month ago I have decided to leave a promising (& cozy) career @ Mercury to join a challenging new-born start-up… called Semingo.

This was an offer I couldn’t refused…

Semingo is a venture-backed internet startup developing cutting-edge web application in the domain of Internet Search and Meta Social Networks.

It is more challenging, inspiring, interesting and exciting than I expected, imagined or I can put into words so you will have to join to understand… We are looking for top-notch algorithm researchers, .Net coders, mySQL DBAs, “Hackers”, QA experts and out-of-the-box thinkers… to join our unique development team (e.g. Pitz, Boo and Gabel)

Stay tuned (…)

I wanted to share two name proposals I got from my colleagues in my new “we-will-change-the-world” startup:

Scottie Marmona - a.k.a. my-alter-evil-(manager)-ego (our scrum-master suggestion)

Scrumotika - a.k.a. scrum-practicing-moti-karmona (our DBA suggestion)

I must admit, I am not completely sure what to choose and if I should change it now or take the risk waiting for better options…