Fabio Pereira

It took about a year and a half for this guy to create a fake, but well done, trailer of a Thundercats movie. He collected scenes from different movies and put some “make up” on the actors, I think that even Garfield has been used…

Well done!

Personal Fun, Video

During the Release Planning phase of a project we usually estimate and prioritize the MSL (Master Story List), also called Product Backlog in Scrum. The output of these exercises is a Release Plan which contains a vision of Time, Cost and Scope of the project. This phase usually happens for the first time during the inception, before the project starts. It needs, of course, to be constantly reviewed and recalibrated in a more fine grained level of details once the project is underway.

One of the main things we need to keep in mind at this time is that these are ballpark numbers.

Definition of Ballpark: A good numerical guess; an estimate.

In order for the decision makers to have an idea of these three variables (Time, Cost and Scope) and then make a decision whether to start the project or not, taking into account mainly ROI (Return on Investment). Most of the time they need these numbers for budget approval so that the project can start. The numbers are not precise at all and they will change for sure when the project starts. But as I mentioned before, they are an estimate, something close enough to the real numbers.
We should only spend enough time to get to a comfortable stage where a decision can be made to take the next step.

One of the clients I’ve been to had a very good way of deciding about funding approval according to the output of the release planning. They knew the numbers were not precise so they had a form with:

How long is the project going to take?

• 1 to 3 months
• 3 to 6 months
• More than 6 months

How much is the project going to cost?

• 10K to 100K dollars
• 100K to 500K dollars
• 1M to 5MK dollars
• More than 5M

The main point is that it’s useless to try and figure out whether the project will take 30 or 35 days at this time, of course we need funding and budget allocation, but nothing stops us from allocating X amount of money, try it and then continue if it works.

“Don’t aim too much before shooting, shoot and then adjust and then shoot again and adjust…”

Technical Agile, IterationMgmt, Scrum

Sometimes it is good to remind ourselves about the obvious…
“9 pregnant women CAN NOT ‘deliver’ one baby in 1 month.”

To understand the metaphor imagine:

Technical Agile, Fun, IterationMgmt

On the last saturday, 13th of december, we celebrated ThoughtWorks Xmas in Sydney. It was a wonderful party. Pretty well organized. Congratulation!!!
The theme was Gangster and when we got to the party we were surprised with the fact that we would have chips to play poker, roulette and blackjack.
It was a glamourous night with wine, friends, gambling (fake money) and delicious food.

You can see all the photos here.

Do you want to see more photos?

My picasa

If you really liked the party and want to see other people’s photos:
Bernarda Maia
Professional photographer
Alex

Personal Party, Sydney, ThoughtWorks

If you have a Mac and you are running out of space on your HD or you want to know how you are using your space (Photos? Applications? Videos?) Disk Inventory X is a great free tool that shows a treemap of your files grouping them by smart categories.

I was running out of space, now I know why…
Solution: 1 TB external HD

Technical Mac, Tool

My friend Ricardo Jun sent me a link to this post about a student who was suspended for calling his teacher the “EJB of school” and I thought that some drawing would make it look even better.

So I did this:

(…)

Check the original post with entire story. I actually don’t know if it’s true, but it’s quite funny…

I’ve been thinking about telling my nephew and niece to call their teachers “the waterfall of school” just to see what happens…

Technical Comic, Cool, Fun, Java

Ok… Ok… I know you don’t like UML…
But, if you need to draw a pretty quick Sequence Diagram, you should consider using site that Phillip showed me today.
It took me less than 15 seconds to draw this diagram:

It has a specific language to draw it:

Phillip->Fabio: showSequenceDiagramWebSite()
note right of Fabio: Thinks it's interesting
Fabio-->World: blogAboutIt()

Give it a go…

Technical Cool, Photo