Planning the next Sprint
With the newest version of the manuscript out of the way it is time once more to move the focus a little bit.
With the manuscript getting close to being complete, at least relatively speaking, it is time to think about life beyond it.
One thing I definitely plan on concentrating in is disseminating the results of my ph.d. work. I mean not only academically but also making them available to the game-based learning practitioners.
In this (re-)starting Sprint I’ll focus on the ACE 2009 Conference and my presentation there. I’ll also start the blog where I will publish all the results of my study in a practice-oriented way.
I think that is the best option to go; the blog will offer the results of my work in a popularized form whereas the academic version will the Ph.D. thesis and related articles themselves.
Add comment October 9, 2009
New Up-to-Date Version of the Manuscript
I’ve posted a new version of the dissertation into the dissertation text — work in progress page. It is probably the last version I will be able to produce before the ACE 2009 conference and it’s also the first version that was sent to the prospective supervisors.
There are no more chapter by chapter files, just the whole shebang in one pdf file. As before remember that this is still a work in progress and that I reserve all the rights related to the work (at least for now).
Add comment October 7, 2009
Changing Direction Mid-Air
Ouch. It has officially happened. This is the first time, too.
I’m suspending my current Sprint and starting another one. This is a case of caving in to outside pressure. I had anticipated that it would take some more time for me to get feedback on my dissertation, so I decided to focus on other things for the time being.
But fortunately I’ve got feedback on my Ph.D. already. And, with my supervisors eager to get the thing forward, they suggested I try to get a review version as fast as I can. And when I thought about it, it made sense.
So now I’m off to polish this manuscript. I’ll deliver on the 6th of October.
Add comment September 25, 2009
Staying Up-To-Date with TweetDeck
TweetDeck has this amazing feature of following the tweets related to your search key words. I’ve used it for a week to track news related to game-based learning and it’s working like a charm!
Most tweets in Twitter contain nothing useful to the average user. In fact the typical user seems to tweet highly useful and really interesting stuff once in a while. The problem is that by following someone you get also the not-so-interesting stuff.
Using the searches provides another channel of potentially interesting tweets. And it’s not restricted to the peeps you follow, either. There’s some tweaking needed, however: The keywords Game-based learning produced a search feed that has a very high signal-to-noise ratio but when I tried the same with the keywords game design, the ratio was so low that the search feed was practically useless.
So you need to narrow your search by additional keywords to achieve the desired signal-to-noise ratio and the desired tweet frequency. It’s worth a try!
Add comment September 25, 2009
Daily Scrum 38 – 24.9.2009
Work done
- Completed the ACE2009 article
- Started working on submitting article for DigiTel 2010 (not done yet)
Issues
- Nothing more significant at the moment
Will work next on
- submit article for DigiTel 2010
- start working on next version of dissertation text
Estimated Sprint work left: 26 (a lot of items added)
Add comment September 24, 2009
Daily Scrum 37 – 18.9.2009
Work done
- Sprint review
- Sprint planning
- ACE 2009 article:
- added notes of other empirical process control models
- changed wrong references of experimental pc to empirical pc
- added citations, still to do the layout
Issues
- Nothing more significant at the moment
Will work next on
- Complete the ACE 2009 article:
- Complete the interview citations
- add a process control model comparison table if feasible
- add process diagrams if possible
- add more info on action research method if possible
- check for spelling errors
- check citations
- submit the article
Estimated Sprint work left: 20
Add comment September 18, 2009
Sprint Planning
The goal of the next Sprint will be to prepare myself to the ACE 2009 Conference. The deadline will be 6.10.2009. That makes the sprint about three weeks long.
The reason I chose this goal is two-fold. First, I’m really expecting some solid feedback on my dissertation manuscript from JYU this time around. If they do not deliver, I’ll make some noise 
The second reason is that if I’m going to continue in this field after my dissertation is done, it is a good idea to start disseminating the results of my study and market my expertise right on.
Aside from submitting a good article and making a good presentation that will mean blogging about my research results and networking with other people in this field. I’ll be launching my new blog before ACE 2009.
Now, onto the Sprint work itself!
Add comment September 18, 2009
Requirements: Make Acceptance Test Cases Too
This post is related to the other part of my professional life’s spectrum: Software engineering. I work as a developer in a client firm, a big software house specialized in this huge system for a particular field of business. Our team is responsible for maintenance and also development of 2-3 versions of the system each year.
Lately our team has had reason to doubt our requirements process. The issue rose after we got the first batch of reports from acceptance testing. We got a number of error reports of new features or changes that we’ve made. What happened was that we were able to shoot all the reports down as the system worked according to the new requirements in every case.
So, happy end, yes? No. From the reports the testers (members of the organizations that use the system) we could figure out that even though the system was implemented according to the requirements, the requirements did not match the testers’ expectations.
by berlinbrown (CC)
Stakeholders of the same organizations that were involved in acceptance testing had been an active part in the requirements specification process as well. So, we figured out that the problem was that we hadn’t been able to elicitate all the information needed to specify the requirements according to the needs of the users.
I’ll illustrate our development process a bit to give some context. We use a fairly traditional waterfall-like setup: Decide the scope, specify requirements, design, implement, system test, acceptance test, deliver. For requirements specification we use use cases. This is the methodology our client supports so we use and promote it.
We brainstormed about the weaknesses in our requirements specification process. The most plausible explanation was that the use cases were too complicated. The users could not what effect changing one part of the use case would have on that part of the system as whole.
As a solution we came up with making acceptance test -like test cases along with the use cases in requirements specification. This seems to be what executable requirements method advocates. For us, the immediate advantages would be to have concrete input – result chains based on the requirements changes that we could go over with the users. The level of abstraction that our use cases have would be removed.
The secondary consequences would be that we would have stakeholder-approved test cases straight from the requirements specification stage. Also, if and when the stakeholders would see the link, they could save time on acceptance test planning by using the generated tests as a baseline. In the future, it would be feasible to streamline the process so that the stakeholder-made acceptance tests would be a part of the requirements process and there would be no overlap.
It must be noted that the use cases for that particular system are probably more cryptic than would be optimal. They are more general than advised for use cases. We would have less trouble if each use case only covered a single way of using the system. However I think that executable requirements would be the way to go in 2009.
Moral of the story: From now on, regardless of the specifications format chosen, I intend to include making acceptance test cases as part of requirements specification.
Add comment September 17, 2009
Daily Scrum 36 – 15.9.2009
Work done
- Written the metamodel descriptions
- overall process
- conclusions
- Written the first version of conclusions chapter
Issues
- Nothing more significant at the moment
Will work next on
- Sprint review
- Sprint planning
Estimated Sprint work left: 0
Add comment September 16, 2009
