This blog continues on the last week’s blog about introducing Agile to newcomers to the practice. The focus this week is on 2 things – The agile team and the artifacts that they work on, namely “backlogs”. Agile Team Agile team is a self contained team that can by itself complete a user story in the backlog.

Introduction In the earlier days of the software industry, the process of developing software products mirrored engineering practices of the day. Like a bridge construction needed elaborate planning, design and construction, a software product went through a “waterfall” model of requirement definition, design, development, testing and release, with each phase occurring one after another.

“Introduction to Data Mining” by Pang-Ning Tan, Michael Steinbach and Vipin Kumar has been recommended to me as a great book to learn about Data Mining. Read the first chapter and it felt very inspiring as though it was beckoning me to keep at it and read more. Thought I will capture notes as I read.

Reading “The Proof of Heaven” by Dr. Eben Alexander is almost like experiencing the NDE that he went through, to really be at the hospital with him where his loved ones were holding his hand 24/7 while he was in a coma, to be with him while he went through the underground, the gateway and the core back and forth experiencing the bright light and the melodious songs and the angelic being, to be able to hear with the whole being without anyone talking, to be able to see without physical eyes, to not have a concept of time, to feel a divine presence and be overjoyed to the fullest.

Notable Quotes

“Ankle deep, he waded through the bluebells. His spirit rose and exalted… as he breathed in the sun-drenched air. The glorious day was in its last decline. Long shadows lay on the sward… and from above the leaves dripped their shimmering drops of gold-green light. Moths and butterflies swarmed in merry hosts… flittering here, glimmering there.

More than a year whizzed past without me writing anything here. When you’re working for a company that does more than double the work in less than half the time that the client does it in and if the client happens to be this uber-fast techie company that rolls out 8 million lines of code once every 2 weeks with almost 50K lines of code changing every week, time is a pricey quantity.

A has given me the ultimatum. “It is too much. You’ve been fooling me for more than a year. Write now. Just 10 minutes. Whatever comes to your mind” She’s been hitting the url for over a year expecting me to surprise her by writing something and I’ve always been saying.

I’m lying flat on my back and looking at the open sky. It is clear. There are no stars. Only a single moon. Is the queen of the night sky smiling at me ? Or at the seabird sitting at the stern. Or at her own beauty that is reflected by the sea ?

Thought of finally taking a break to roll up my sleeves, blow the dust off the writing desk and sit and gather the fluttering paper rainbow butterflies and stick them to the book. They’re around, just a catch away. The touch of the rainbow butterflies, oh boy ! they almost take my breath away.