No news good news?

As the blog post says, I haven't been too active on the blogging front for the past 2-3 months.  This has been mostly due to the career move I made to Pragma Products beginning of June.  Having been at the company now for just more than a month I am very happy with the move.  The company, people and the opportunities going forward are great.  Moving from a big corporate environment into a smaller company has been a very positive move for me.  It is great to be able to add immediate value to an environment!  We are embarking on an exciting re-write of the company's core enterprise asset management application.  We will be utilizing new and exciting technologies like Silverlight 2 and WCF so expect some future blog content on this as we get to know the technologies more intimately.  The first release is for a big international customer and we will have to support multiple languages like Chinese and German so I guess we will be taking the Turkey test  

Currently I'm spending some time on improving the SDLC.  We are using Team Foundation Server 2008 and we want to use the Conchango Scrum for Team System process template.  I haven't worked directly with Scrum before, but having had some experience with the Open Unified Process and Rational Unified Process the concepts are familiar.  I'll miss working with Subversion though   I know about SvnBridge but to me that is fighting your tools in stead of trying to work in the way they prescribe.  I'm looking forward to figuring out how to implement Continuous Integration using Team Build to see how it matches up with the process I documented using open source tools.

One thing that I am still getting used to in the new environment is the fact that more than half of the team members work from home for large portions of the week.  This makes it quite challenging for a newcomer to get to know everybody.  We have a weekly team meeting that is held mostly at our offices and I met most of the team through these meetings.  Needless to say it has taken some time for me to get to know everybody.  Fortunately the planning sessions we had last week was mandatory attendance and I was able to interact a bit more with them.  The team uses Skype and Interwise for video conferencing to keep in touch.  After being a bit skeptical at first, the technology works quite well.  I'm however still a bit cautious about the whole distributed agile development team so I might blog about my experiences of this process going forward as well.

Till later...