It’s been a while since my last post.  I’ve been super busy with all the changes happening around here, but things are settling down now.  What’s new you ask?  Scrum is rolling and it’s as great now as it was every other time I’ve been part of a true Agile/Scrum environment.We are just wrapping up a pilot sprint that was run for one of the products with a smaller team. They hit their jellybean targets — jellybeans are used to estimate how much work a team can accomplish — and are wrapping things up with a full integration and regression test cycle and preparing for the next sprint. The development team, which comprises the gamut of skill sets that are required to make a truly cross functional team, are crazy excited about this new way of working.  For the first time they are involved in every step of the process from planning to QA and development and are encouraged to find ways to continuously improve.  We’re all embracing change.We will be starting our first official sprint on Feb 19th which will include all Point2 NLS related products.  The scrum area where our daily stand-ups happen is in the final stages of construction.  By the 5th we will have 25 feet of whiteboard and cork-board space for collaborating and tracking the project, bookshelves for our technical library, and several tables on top of which will be the planned tasks and story cards. I’ll post pictures.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Today’s startup companies are able to launch innovative, web-based companies at a fraction of what it cost only a few years ago primarily because they don’t own their servers and they don’t manage them. They outsource that to companies that are able to take advantage of economies of scale by specializing in provisioning scalable computing and storage resources.

A prime example is recent startup Mogulus, where some 15,000 people host live 24/7 streaming tv channels. Mogulus is hosted entirely using Amazon’s EC2 (elastic compute cloud) and S3 (simple storage service) services.

More and more companies will be enjoying cost savings and decreased operational complexity without sacrificing availability and scalability thanks to elastic compute clouds.

Amazon EC2 is commonly used to run linux instances. For those interested in running .NET applications, check out this post: EC2 Amazon - QEMU Windows Images.

I just read a great post on Logic+Emotion called Waking Up Sleeping Giants. I think the younger entrepreneurs who are involved in creating new companies will get first-mover advantage in this changing environment and many established companies risk falling behind very quickly if they don’t embrace change.

I love the quote from Fuzzy Tail -

We can no longer afford to over-analyze our challenges. We must try to get things launched—learn from these experiences and refine. We must define ourselves and what we do more broadly while retaining the potency of our our crafts. It’s about going from left brain to right brain and ending up on “light brain”. We must become “fuzzy”.