Ahsen Jaffer's Blog

How to be Happy? January 28, 2008

What makes us happy? money? fame? Why is it despite all the wealth USA is # 23 on the happiness list? Why so many famous people kill them selves? Why it is that a poor villager in the 3rd world can be more happy than say a silicon valley millionaire who spends every moment worrying about making the next million?

Happiness comes from inside, but we are schooled to look and compare to others. Very few individuals are lucky enough not to have the spirit of individualism beaten out of them, those are the ones who attain happiness.

A part of the reason we get sad is because we try to rush through life. The reason we rush is either we think we need to accomplish a lot of things, or we got ourselves involved in far too many things. A step in the right direction in the journey of happiness is to exterminate rush in life, by doing less things and doing them slowly.

On the lines of doing less, my list is simply short :-)

1) Know exactly what you want to do/be in life. Do not worry about what others think/want/do, be brave and creative.
2) At every moment of your life do the most important task (to reach your goals in life.)
3) Never take attention away from the task at hand (i.e. do one thing at-a-time.)
4) Exterminate rush, keep things simple, under-promise and over-deliver.

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Agile Sessions August 17, 2007

In the last few days I attended the following talks/tutorials/discussions:



ratings:• great, • okay, • ugh

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Agile 2007 August 13, 2007

I am volunteering at the Agile 2007 conference in Washington D.C. This year the Agile Conference is about "Making Connections, Building Relationships."

Today I talked with Software Developers/Managers/Agilists from many different places including Houston-Texas, Portland-Oregon, Bangalore-India & Iceland.

Being the first day, more than half of it was without any session and I spent it talking, walking and sometime just waiting.

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Scrum Evolution: Type A, B, and C Sprints July 31, 2007

I got interested in Sprint Types after reading Jeff Sutherland’s article. I wanted to implement Type B Sprint, and started to research by asking this on the Yahoo ScrumDevelopment group:

Does anyone know how many companies have successfully transitioned from Type A to Type B Sprint? or even Type C?

A week & 30+ replies later, this generated lots of discussions for & against Sprint Types, it seems to me there is a lot of confusion in the Scrum community regarding this topic. Later I realized that this is an old debate, and a year ago it was discussed that the Type B Sprint is what everyone knows / teaches as just “Sprint.”

I am sorry for rekindling this old debate, and hopefully Ken’s response will help in calming it down:

There is only one Scrum... There are many ways to fill in its blanks to optimize productivity and ROI, but those vary with each situation. I may implement Scrum differently if …but it is all Scrum.

Whoever is interested in finding more about this topic should first read the book “The Enterprise and Scrum,” I just started to.

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Agile Transformations Patterns / Guidelines May 04, 2007

What are Agile Transformation Patterns / Guidelines, for transforming an organization into Agile? At the last Agile Philly gathering, this was the topic of discussion.

After an hour and half long, thought-provoking and engrossing discussion, we came up with the following Patterns / Guidelines:

1. Set upfront (Business) goals.

2. Communicate the goals, processes & tools to stakeholders.

3. Have passionate / excited people on project.

4. Have an Agile (Executive) champion.

5. Advertise the point of success.

6. Have a process to align Developer and Customer Goals.

7. Support personal growth of team members.

8. Recognize context, use shared language, e.g. "Velocity" can be easily misunderstood.

9. Maximize the use of Agile, while fulfilling the client's needs. e.g. in addition to burn-down charts, provide the client Gantt charts, if requested.

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Adapting Holacracy (step 02) February 02, 2007

Today I introduced Holacracy to the Assistant Vice President of IT department at my company. He was excited to listen to what I had to say, and he is planning to implement the integrated decision making process in his meetings!

I will post the feedback later.

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