I like broad beans on toast with lots of butter (for breakfast).

1. you will most proably need a usb peripheral card. this is different to the normal host mode chips you get on motherboards.
2. you will have to use the linux usb gadget project, it looks like they already have a mass storage driver written.

one day i’ll give this a go

Case Histories

Doc Martin

Original Post by Prabhat Kumar

Prabhat Kumar original post

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Of course!

Back in October, Rally started a project led by Craig Lagenfeld, one or our great Technical Account Managers, and Dean Leffingwell, see more on Dean below, to take the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) out of this application of agile methods.

If we hit this out of the park, we will be delivering guidance to the Agile Community that describes the best practice for developing high assurance software in highly regulated environments. The primary guidance will be a detailed “how to” whitepaper that will include examples of organizations who are already utilizing one or more of the practices and tools that we describe. Other deliverables will include a blog series, webinar, and tool validation guide. In short, the Agile Community will change their question from “can we utilize Agile to create high assurance software and still be compliant” to “how soon can we get the process and tools implemented to take advantage of Agile”.

Now two months into the project, we are trying to broaden the audience and collaborators for this work. We’re excited about this project and the great feedback we are getting from the Agile community. The blog series is generating a lot of interest, with people either wanting to know more or offering to contribute. Heck we even have quite a few emails from the Compliance Community wanting to help us out. Keep the emails coming- or better yet, start directing all of your support, questions, and feedback to the blog posts (and comments on this post) so that we can keep this building in a public forum. In the end Dean and I plan to deliver much more than a series of blog posts. We want to deliver guidance that Rally customers and Agile Practitioners can use to educate themselves and their organization.

The purpose of the project is to bring together Agilists who know that Agile is a better way to produce safe, reliable innovations but are unsure of how to accomplish this within a highly regulated environment. In our second post, Dean and I decided to use medical devices as the focus of our work, providing real examples of how medical device companies are confidentially using Agile practices today (see our recent posts on Abbott Labsand GE Healthcare). My part in the project focuses largely on ensuring that we provide a best of breed tooling suggestion to support the process that Dean and other experts in the field are developing. – Craig Langenfeld

Dean Leffingwell is a great friend, author, and entrepreneur. Before starting Requisite, the orignal makers of Req Pro, Dean ran a company called Rella that manufactured medical devices. Not only does he know software, agility and lean, but has many stripes from medical device certification and compliance. We are thrilled to be collaborating with him again; if you do not know his work, he is the author of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises and the soon to be published Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise.

Again, if you are in this field please join Criag, Dean and your peers in the High Assurance and Regulated category of Dean’s blog.

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, a school board member at Friends’ School Boulder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Craig Lagenfeld is a Technical Account Manager at Rally Software Development.

Dean Leffingwell is an entrepreneur, executive, author and consulting methodologist.

Ryan Martens original post

Original Post by Jean Tabaka

In “The Design of Business“, Roger Martin talks about businesses that find an algorithm and just stick with it. They exploit it and never really dare to explore new ideas or ways of doing things. Sort of like a one hit wonder. You just live off the royalties of that one great idea.

What’s a one hit wonder?

My colleague Mark Gammon and I were talking about Martin’s book and this phenomenon and decided it was time for a “One Hit Wonder Friday”. A one hit wonder is an artist, singer, or group who has made a hit, a really big hit, and yet has not been able to do anything else that really grabbed the public’s attention. Given that the one hit wonder Martin describes in his book is one I’ve loved for a while, we decided to kick-off our Friday series with his example. Here’s who we have in mind: someone who has a song pretty well known even though it is quite old. And yet, the artist (okay, that’s a hint, it is one person) never explored or expanded. It turns out he (okay, it’s a male), has been doing okay living off his royalties. But before we reveal further clues about our artist, first back to business.

Are you living off the royalties of your business “one hit wonder”?

Businesses can end up being one hit wonders too. They find that one “song,” that one big idea, or that one good process and believe they have to stick with it in order to be successful. This is the stuff of bureaucracies. The sad fate of business one hit wonders is that they just aren’t built to last. The idea either dies out or is bought out. One thing for sure, with business one hit wonders there is no room for chance or growth; that is too dangerous.

For your business to avoid the doom of a one hit wonder, you’ll have to challenge yourself continuously in process improvement, in product visioning, and in knowledge sharing. You will have to invite the discomfort of exploration and the unknown. Accepting and embracing the ambiguity of whether you will be a hit or not is not easy. But, as in the Agile world, with frequent feedback and delivery in small batches, you can make quick adjustments through heuristics that set you on  your next big hit.

Back to our “One Hit Wonder Friday!”

Here are a few facts about this week’s one hit wonder (thank you Wikipedia):

He’s a Massachusetts boy, born in the 1940’s. He studied music at Boston University (ah, that paid off :-) Using some of the proceeds from his one hit, he landed a farm outside of Petaluma, CA. So all is not bad for our one hit wonder!  The song itself is remarkably recognizable given that it came out back in 1969-1970 and sold over 2 million copies during that time. (Again, what an algorithm to stick with!) To our one hit wonder’s delight, it has been re-made a number of times, including by the great all girl punk band Fuzzbox (Hint: yes, there is a connection between the term fuzzbox and our song.) This is really good stuff :-)

The song itself had a combination of a sort of spiritual and hippie feel using heavy guitars and hand-clapping. Our artist wrote the song in 15 minutes as his own version of what he thought a gospel song could be. And finally, Rolling Stone rates the song #333 in its top 500 songs of all time.

So who is our one hit wonder this week?

Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Jean Tabaka original post

Original Post by Jean Tabaka

I’ve been pretty passionate about collaboration and knowledge flow throughout the decades of my technical life. This passion led me to author Collaboration Explained. Now I value playing with and applying a variety of visioning, planning, and learning models in Agile organizations. My reading has focused on models for individuals and organizations in how they create flow of value in 21st century businesses. For me, there could be no better place than the Agile context in which to apply these models of rich knowledge sharing. Complex Agile organizations need to consider diverse models that can effectively guide how they plan and deliver.

Agile planning helps us scale and mature across the organization

With this in mind, I’m excited to announce a new series about N levels of Agile planning. I’ll be co-authoring the series with my Rally colleagues Ben Carey, Zach Nies and other Rally folks. Ben, Zach and I want to share some of our informal conversations around Enterprise Agile planning, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. That means we’ll be blogging about various models we think can be useful for capturing and tracking Agile business value up and down the organization.  Our suspicion is that useful scaling and maturing models coupled with overall team practices bring great value at a variety of levels within an Enterprise Agile organization.

In this series, we’ll share direct experience in applying our models both within Rally and with Rally customers. That means we’ll share some insights about collections of practices at the various levels of Agile planning. We’ll also provide guidance around the Rally services and tooling we believe support planning in continuously innovative, value-driven organizations. Also, be sure to check out Ryan Martens’s series about Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level. Ryan and others will be providing on-going guidance about Rally’s “Project Stratus” tool for road mapping and other strategic practices specifically for Enterprise Agile beyond Release planning.

Ben, Zach and I don’t believe we are the sole experts on this topic!

We’re exposing our frank conversations in hopes of gaining your reactions, insights and feedback. You probably already know about some of Rally’s existing guidance on Agile planning. We just want to dig a little deeper, play a little more with these perspectives and some new approaches that could help you innovate your own Enterprise Agile adoption. While we do this, we’ll be reporting on how we are experimenting with these models here at Rally in our own practices using our own tools and our own services as well as new practices.

Look for our first blog in the next few days describing the overall model of  “Why, How, and What” in positioning the value of Enterprise Agile planning. How many levels of planning will emerge in our exploration, and what will they look like? We aren’t yet prepared to declare in a definitive fashion. Instead, we’ll peek into that together with your input.

Join us as we go into N levels of Agile planning and beyond. We’re looking forward to great dialogue with you through the comments you bring.

Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Jean Tabaka original post

Original Post by Jean Tabaka

I’ve been pretty passionate about collaboration and knowledge flow throughout the decades of my technical life. This passion led me to author Collaboration Explained. Now I value playing with and applying a variety of visioning, planning, and learning models in Agile organizations. My reading has focused on models for individuals and organizations in how they create flow of value in 21st century businesses. For me, there could be no better place than the Agile context in which to apply these models of rich knowledge sharing. Complex Agile organizations need to consider diverse models that can effectively guide how they plan and deliver.

Agile planning helps us scale and mature across the organization

With this in mind, I’m excited to announce a new series about N levels of Agile planning. I’ll be co-authoring the series with my Rally colleagues Ben Carey, Zach Nies and other Rally folks. Ben, Zach and I want to share some of our informal conversations around Enterprise Agile planning, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. That means we’ll be blogging about various models we think can be useful for capturing and tracking Agile business value up and down the organization.  Our suspicion is that useful scaling and maturing models coupled with overall team practices bring great value at a variety of levels within an Enterprise Agile organization.

In this series, we’ll share direct experience in applying our models both within Rally and with Rally customers. That means we’ll share some insights about collections of practices at the various levels of Agile planning. We’ll also provide guidance around the Rally services and tooling we believe support planning in continuously innovative, value-driven organizations. Also, be sure to check out Ryan Martens’s series about Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level. Ryan and others will be providing on-going guidance about Rally’s “Project Stratus” tool for road mapping and other strategic practices specifically for Enterprise Agile beyond Release planning.

Ben, Zach and I don’t believe we are the sole experts on this topic!

We’re exposing our frank conversations in hopes of gaining your reactions, insights and feedback. You probably already know about some of Rally’s existing guidance on Agile planning. We just want to dig a little deeper, play a little more with these perspectives and some new approaches that could help you innovate your own Enterprise Agile adoption. While we do this, we’ll be reporting on how we are experimenting with these models here at Rally in our own practices using our own tools and our own services as well as new practices.

Look for our first blog in the next few days describing the overall model of  “Why, How, and What” in positioning the value of Enterprise Agile planning. How many levels of planning will emerge in our exploration, and what will they look like? We aren’t yet prepared to declare in a definitive fashion. Instead, we’ll peek into that together with your input.

Join us as we go into N levels of Agile planning and beyond. We’re looking forward to great dialogue with you through the comments you bring.

Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Jean Tabaka original post

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Congratulations to the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute on their recent 2 year birthday and on a very successful quarter including a $92,000 Technical Assistance Grant from the Community Development Financial Institution Fund (CDFI). That grant and others will assist in building their capacity and efforts toward being certified as a CDFI. The CDFI focuses on enabling ”financial institutions to provide credit, capital, and financial services to underserved populations and communities in the United States.”

Rally is proud to be a 2010 partner with RMMFI as part of our ‘1%Fund’ program which encourages employees to spend 1% of their paid time volunteering. In 2009 this program led to the contribution of over 2,300 volunteer hours. As part of an effort to increase our skill-based volunteering during 2010, Rally recently collaborated with RMMFI on a non-profit Salesforce.com Foundation implementation of Salesforce.com.

Rally’s Matt Harutun from customer support led this initiative after learning about the RMMFI team’s desire to integrate Salesforce.com into their business. Matt’s reflections on this partnership underscore the value of shared vision and continuous collaboration in creating a successful outcome.

I started the project, having enough knowledge of the Salesforce.com to be dangerous. I eagerly jumped at the opportunity to partner with RMMFI and help them deploy Salesforce.com successfully in their organization. There were many keys to making this venture successful, one of the key drivers, though, was having a shared vision of the world made that made for an easy introductory conversation.

A quick glance at RMMFI’s site tells you three things: the team is focused on learning, lending and coaching. Right away, we saw two areas of shared vision: learning and coaching.  Part of what I love and enjoy about Rally is our commitment to being thought leaders in our space as well as challenging ourselves with new and innovative ideas.  This translated well to RMMFI’s goal of teaching their clients about transforming dreams into a business plan. Similarly, both groups valued learning which provided both parties the ability to teach one another and also share and adapt ideas. During our project kickoff, we were fortunate to have the talented Rachel Weston, Rally’s Director of Services, facilitate this meeting. The RMMFI team was so enamored with the way she facilitated the kickoff that they took more notes on the Scrum process than the actual project! The RMMFI team takes a systems based approach to helping their clients improve their businesses – akin to what our Professional Services team does when they are engaged – drive client success through business transformation.

Another interesting outcome was RMMFI’s willingness to adopt Agile principles into their business. Not only were flip charts and Post-It notes a fun way to collaborate, but using key Agile principles like constantly prioritizing the team’s backlog and teaching their clients to focus on the highest priority items in their businesses helped increase visibility into the work being done and also opened new avenues for knowledge transfer. As a shameless plug, the project was run in an Agile fashion which was a very effective way to get RMMFI’s data model up and running quickly.  

Finally, the team was also fortunate to have Rally’s own Salesforce.com Administrator, Rich McGuire, volunteer some of his time to guide the team through the Salesforce.com cloud. His expertise at the keyboard and affable personality quickly made him a team favorite. All this combined with his leadership in the local Salesforce.com User Group, we were able to continue the development effort by leveraging the development community at large who were also excited about the opportunity to pitch in.

At the outset of any projects, there are countless roadblocks, impediments and challenges that can derail any effort. Having good team chemistry through similar beliefs, actions and values – while not a surefire recipe for success – certainly helps pave the road to success.

Find a partner:

Finally, you should know this project involved partnership with other firms to get this done. Aptly nicknamed Michael “S’ Force, from Salesforce.com in Denver, has been a critical resource to help RMMFI all the way to the finish line. In addition, the folks from Application Experts, other Salesforce.com partners and members of the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado are moving in to help RMMFI operate, scale and maintain the Salesforce solution beyond launch. You know, it really does take a community to make these things work. Thank you everyone for your help.

The partnership with RMMFI is a great example of Rally’s move toward skill-based volunteering as part of our larger social mission that includes the forming Rally Foundation and our recent certification as a B Corporation. As an Entrepreneur Foundation company in Colorado, we use many of the resources available from the Entrepreneur’s Foundation to help us build a great corporate social responsibility program. In addition, the folks at Intersector Partners, were invaluable in helping us set-up a great working relationship with this young and amazingly effective non-profit.

Have you thought about your own social mission and the steps you’re taking to move that mission forward? One great way to build momentum is to seek out partnerships that provide opportunities and rewards for all involved. We are reaping those rewards in skills development, recruiting great folks and building intrinsic motivations through working towards a purpose. 2010 has been a stepping stone year and we are now primed for another big step in 2011.

Is corporate social responsibility something you care about? How are you making this a strategic part of your business?

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, Executive Director for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Ryan Martens original post

Original Post by Ryan Martens

I am excited to say that this week we announced, at the Gartner AADI Summit and Agile Development Practices East, the availability of a new service offering and product from Rally. To support this launch and amplify the feedback loops from the community, we are starting a blog series on this topic. All of the blog posts in this series will show up in the blog, but also get linked into a summary page focused on Scaling Agile to the Strategic level (above release level, including roadmap and vision level for products, programs and solutions).

If managing Agile at the strategic level is something you are expert at or struggling with, you will want to follow this series. It is going to be written by a team of folks from Rally including myself, Jean, two internal Coaches at Rally, eighteen external Coaches at Rally and product experts.

In the last year, we have read a ton on strategic execution and lean, blogged on many of those ideas, experimented with talks and exercises and worked with a number of our customers. In addition, we ran our fellow Rallyers through many of these concepts. As a result of this work and the rapid development of our supporting product, code-named “Project Stratus,” we feel that we are ready to offer some value in the form of professional, product and community services to educate, enable and explore these concepts, methods and tools with our customers.

From sharing our experiences, we have learned that managing above the release level, at the roadmap and vision level, is different than project or program-level management. It is NOT:

• as focused on the big epic feature as the desired outcome
• an extension of the integrated agile release train as much as management of flow and contention

These offerings are brand new; we know they will change with more feedback and experience; as a result, they are being released now with less packaging and polish. The service offering starts with a two-day assessment and training effort, but then moves into a custom statement of work. The Project Stratus product offering will remain in preview status for the short term. We assume that focused work with 15 to 20 key customers will shape these solutions for all.

If you think you could be one of those customers, please do not hesitate to contact your account managers, coaches or customer success representatives. We are anxious to share these breakthrough concepts with customers who are willing to co-develop them with us.

With regard to the blog series, we see the following topics getting explored over the next three months:

• Introduction
• Our Theories and Why Project Stratus?
• Our Agile Strategic Planning Service offering
• The making of Project Stratus
• Prediction in Kanban versus Scrum commitment
• Enterprise Kanban and AgileZen
• Others, based on your comments and feedback

If you have topic ideas or comments, please post below. Again, don’t forget to subscribe or share the RSS feed or email feed for the blog to be part of this discussion. We want YOU to participate in this Community of Thinkers!

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Ryan Martens original post