What is the very first question one is supposed to answer during a standup meeting? If your answer is: What did you do since the last standup? then congratulations. You have given the canonical answer recommended by Mike Cohn himself. But I am now convinced that this is the wrong question to ask. When you […]
The SIM4Blocks European project held its kick-off meeting on 5 and 6 April 2016 in Stuttgart, Germany. A consortium of 17 European partners (including 3 Swiss organisations) have answered the H2020-EE-2015-2-RIA call for proposals for: … real time optimisation of energy demand, storage and supply (including self-production when applicable) using intelligent energy management systems with […]
When you read through the biblical books of Kings, you may have been struck by a phrase that repeats itself for every monarch: In the Xth year of (king of kingdom B), (name of king) became king of (kingdom A). He reigned N years, and did (evil|good) in the sight of the Lord. If you’ve […]
We once spent almost a week chasing after a mysterious memory leak in our application, built on top of the highly regarded eCos real-time operating system. The leak appeared after we had rewritten some of our code in C++ after recognising that C’s object-oriented capabilities were no longer adequate for our needs. After about half […]
A few weeks ago, our team held a sprint retrospective (which I unfortunately couldn’t attend) during which it was decided to shorten our sprint length from two weeks to one. The team was right in their decision, but probably for the wrong reasons and here’s why I think so. The main driver behind this decision […]
On thing has been bugging me for quite some time now as I observe our team at Neurobat. Most stories on our sprint board are being worked on by one developer each, leading to daily scrums where everyone reports on work that is completely independent from that of the others. Even though we encourage people […]
CARNOT (Conventional And Renewable eNergy systems Optimization Toolbox) is a set of MATLAB & Simulink models for simulating buildings and building systems, e.g. boilers, heat distributors etc. It’s been developed by a collaboration involving several companies and universities and is generally well-regarded. It’s one of several MATLAB toolboxes dedicated to the problem of simulating building […]
Over the past five years, our team has attended more than 120 daily standup meetings, carefully following the “canonical” format and having each team member answer the usual questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Any impediments? There seems to be one flaw with this format, however. The flaw is […]
… you find a wireless room temperature sensor in your fridge:
When I take a picture with my vertically-held iPhone, here is what happens when I insert it as-is in this blog: But the picture shows up correctly when I open it in any OSX application, such as Preview. The issue is that when you take a picture with your iPhone, a meta-data tag gets written […]