On Monday I spent a few hours talkin’ Scrum with Agile On The Boat folk. AOTB is a pretty cool initiative that gathers around scrum masters, product owners, project managers, software developers, and anyone within Wroclaw’s software development scene to discuss the Agile Method.

The topic of this weeks session was “Technically Aware Scrum Master” and it was meant to showcase all of the different tools and techniques, and sometimes just catchphrases, that should be known within the areas of software development. My group was assigned the quality assurance phase and a few of the terms we had on our sheet were ISTQB (test certification), performance tests, and mockups. We then needed to draw and discuss the terms with the crowd. The exercise was at an entry skill level but to many, including myself, a lot of the terms were brand new and I wrote quite a few down for further investigation.

I do believe that software development is where my project management route will eventually lead. Wrocław has quickly become a hub for software houses big and small, and I find that my current work that deals quite a bit with embedded software is a good step in the IT project management direction. Washing machines have so much software onboard that software development is slowly becoming the critical path of every controller I work on. And with IOT and always connected appliances, production of actual hardware will soon be an afterthought.

I’m curious what it’s like managing just a software project. Currently, my projects end up with an actual widget at the end of the line. Sure, software is a huge part, but I also have 200+ components to worry about, EMC tests, approval bodies, warehouse stock, production lead times, component lead times, shipping, and customer quality assurance to take care of. And that’s just a typical Tuesday! I’d be interested to know how managing only software works, leaving all that extra ‘fat’ behind.

And speaking of extra fat, I seem to have added a couple of extra pounds to my already hefty waistline even though I’ve been running more frequently over the past weeks. Gone are the weeks were 10km a week was the goal. I do that on any single run now. This past week I managed a couple of runs adding up to 21km, and a week prior to this one I did three runs with a total of 37km. Yet all that running has me eating more, too, and the scale seems to be tipping north of where I should be going. Gotta work on that.

Here’ are a few photos from a long walk this afternoon. Spring is most definitely in the air.

PS: Ever since we started using a local dropbox option where any online order can be shipped to a local box store for an easy after work pick up, Fado’s been fairing all our packages home for us.