Over the past months, the team has folded over a thousand modules, and I have spent each morning looking at the growing model and determining the most painless ways to fit the new pieces into it. It’s up to me to keep the big picture in mind, because when we make a mistake and connect a piece in the wrong way, it’s almost impossible to take it back out without damaging the structural integrity of the whole.

Honestly, I long for the days when I got to fold. Folding is my passion and the thing that drew me into this project in the first place. I understand that I have an important responsibility, and that as the model grows, it is because of my vision that the structure is growing and maturing smoothly. But instead of delicately forming each perfect crease, I spend my mornings with glue on my fingers (we need robustness, and I cannot let external teams come in and tear down everything we’ve built; one cannot be a purist in an enterprise environment). A few times I have stepped back and let the team go where they will, but they often go for the easy wins, building up the outer walls first — the result of which is hardly extensible. As I find ways to fit the pieces together, It is up to me to make sure we stick to the structural principles of the model and to find ways to adjust for those modules that didn’t come out of folding exactly right (no one is perfect, and we can only afford to refactor those pieces that are blatantly flawed).

The end of the project is in sight, and when we get there, hopefully I can return to my roots as a folder and embark on a new, smaller project with my fingers back in the fold. Given that we are always pushed to bigger and brighter things, I fear this will not be the case.

Related: The complete Scrum Task Origami series

The bad side to this is that the project budget doesn’t always align with these lofty goals — especially when you’re based in one of the most expensive cities in the world. To combat this, our project has historically been divided across three major offices with teams of contractors based in two more.

When we first started to introduce Scrum, the natural divide was along geographic borders, not the least because each of the three centers was already home to a specific area of domain focus. The hiccup was that our team of contractors, who held key framework knowledge and responsibility, sat far, far away in Budapest. Our team in Oslo faced the problem of incorporating these invaluable team members into a very hands-on, interactive software process.

After months of trial and error, we finally got a decent sound and video system in place, so that they could easily participate in our daily standup meetings. The crucial part of this was finding a way to talk to them each morning  that would not hinder the already-irritating process of attending a daily meeting. Traditionally, videoconference systems (and even teleconference systems) have been difficult to set up and often require a dedicated meeting room, but we knew we needed videoconferencing, because too much meaning is lost over the phone.

Our contracting team works for an external company, so with no dedicated team room in their office, the overhead of finding a meeting room at all was prohibitive. We needed something simple and painless enough that we could meet every day. The solution we found was to set up a dedicated system with a microphone and roundtable webcam in our team room in Oslo (where the Post-It-generating task board is located) and to have the contractors each connect via headsets and webcams from their desks.

The team dynamic changed instantly. Suddenly our contract developers were real people with faces — not just names on emails and login IDs in the source control system. We continued to rotate out one of the contract developers on site here in Norway, but when a new team member arrived, the only real difference was that we could see his legs.

Scrum was working fine! Origami, on the other hand, was not.  By this point, we had three full-time folders in Oslo (including our new PM who recognized the benefits of the origami project and has even been known to fold during management calls). We also had two contractors who had learned to fold during their on-site rotations. With so many hands, we were running out of raw material! (There’s a problem you don’t usually see in software: too many resources and not enough work!)

Obviously we couldn’t increase our velocity just to generate more used task Post-Its per sprint, so instead we enlisted the help of our sibling Scrum team in the UK. For a few months, they diligently collected their used notes at the end of each sprint and eventually sent over a packet of papers with a visiting colleague. Like any component that has been developed fully independently, there were some integration issues when the new pieces arrived. Unlike our square Post-Its, the UK team was using rectangles. Thankfully we were both on 3M sticky-note technology, so the shorter dimension was identical to our notes, and it was a relatively simple process to cut the new notes into to the required squares.

Now we had a huge pile of unfolded notes, but one of our best folders was back in Budapest with idle hands. To address this, we sent him a stack of unfolded notes, and eventually we got back a big pile of Japanese Brocade Sonobe modules to integrate into the model.

In spite of the challenges, we had found a way to work as a distributed team!

[Editor's note: This article should have been posted in late 2010. Apologies!]

Related: The complete Scrum Task Origami series

So now let me preface this post with my favorite Yuri Gagarin story:

Back in college, I once went to a party and randomly met a guy named Yuri.  I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly (How many people named Yuri have you met in the Midwest?), so I tried to clarify.

“Yuri?  As in Yuri Gagarin?”  He didn’t reply right away and was giving me a strange look, so I added, “You know?  Like the first man in space.”

“Yes, I know who Yuri Gagarin is.  It’s just that you’re the first person who’s ever made that connection.”

Yuri and I didn’t really hit it off, so I didn’t see him again for a few months.  Eventually I bumped into him again, and it turned out we had a mutual friend.  Not knowing that we had met once before, our friend made the effort to introduce us.

“This is my friend Yuri.”

“Right!  Like Yuri Gagarin!” I laughed, figuring it was an easy way to point out that we’d met before.

“Wow!” he replied.  “You know, you’re only the second person to ever make that connection?!”

Sometimes when I tell this story, I still get a blank look when I mention Yuri Gagarin.  I always assumed he was a household name, which I suppose he is, in the right context.  Apparently Yuri Gagarin came up a little more often in our household while I was growing up.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen The Right Stuff.  I started watching this film when I was so little that I couldn’t sit through the entire movie or completely understand what was going on.  For years I think I assumed that the shuttle astronauts still went through that test of blowing bubbles into a tube with floating ping pong balls.  Even years later, when Apollo 13 came out and I was much older, I just couldn’t fully get behind Ed Harris’s character.  After all, what was John Glenn doing working in mission control?

Strangely, seeing the film’s clips of the failed rocket launches over and over acclimatized me to the image of rocket explosions.  I’ve heard from other people my age that seeing the Challenger disaster on television was a poignant childhood memory.  While I remember the event, it didn’t phase me as much as it did my classmates.  I can only assume that it just didn’t look all that much different from those early failed test launches I’d seen over and over.

A few years later, our elementary school Explorations class (our skip-recess-once-a-week-in-favor-of-more-learning gifted class) focused on a space exploration theme (which may have led in some small part to my best friend‘s lifelong astronaut obsession).  We learned about the space program and its history, and we did all kinds of cool things like driving across town in order to create a scale model of the solar system.  My end-of-year project was on commercial products developed from NASA spin-offs, and I’ve never been able to look at a handheld vacuum cleaner in quite the same way. (Did you know that Dustbusters were first developed to collect moon rocks?  Now you do.)

I’m pretty sure that was the only time I actually studied the space program in school, but somehow it kept creeping into things that I was doing.  The last bit of my space exploration history was fleshed out while working on a stamp collecting project for 4-H. (Yes, I collected stamps and researched space exploration for 4-H.  It’s not all pig farming like some people think!)  I put together a collection of commemorative stamps outlining the history of space flight from the first rocket launches up to the most recent shuttle missions.  It even included an actual stamp that had been up in the shuttle — a Christmas gift from my parents.  The project involved writing 20 one-page summaries explaining the different phases of space exploration (to accompany the related stamps).  This probably wasn’t the way most high school students spent their summer afternoons, but I was willing to go the distance for that frilly purple ribbon and the satisfaction of winning.  And all these years later, I guess I have a better-than-average knowledge of early space exploration history to show for it.

Well, that and an amusing anecdote to share on Yuri’s Night.

Now that we have finished our prototypes, the time has come to begin the final product, the Level 2 Menger Sponge.  Looking at the completed Level 1 Menger Sponge, we tried to visualize just how large the Level 2 model would be.  The task seemed daunting.

So, to get an idea of how long it would take us to finish this new version, we began some high-level project estimating.  Of course, the first reaction was to consider the Level 2 Menger Sponge to simply be 20 times that of the Level 1, since it would take 20 Level 1 cubes to build a Level 2.  However, wherever two cubes are joined together, the connecting faces would be inside the model and should therefore be eliminated.  Thus, 20 months (20 cubes x 1 month/cube) was probably a significant overestimate.

Instead, we decided to look at the work in terms of faces of the Level 1 cube.  Although this wouldn’t be exact, it should hopefully be much more accurate than estimating by cube.

Defining a story point as a Level 1 cube face, we could say that our initial velocity was 6 story points per month.  Splitting the Level 2 cube into three layers, the top and bottom layer are essentially the same.  Each is composed of 8 faces on the surface, 12 around the outside, and 4 faces forming the inside edges of the hole.  That makes 24 faces for each of the top and bottom layers.  The middle layer forms four pillars that connect the top and bottom, and each pillar has four faces.  Thus there are 16 pillars in the middle layer.  So the total number of Level 1 faces is roughly 64.

Given our past velocity of 6 faces/month, we should expect to finish the Level 2 Menger Sponge in around 11 months.  Of course, like all engineering projects, there is a cone of uncertainty, so vacations and business trips will skew this estimate.  Also, we have started to write fewer and fewer Post-It tasks lately, so there is also a risk of resource limitations.

After about a week and a half of work, we’ve completed roughly two faces worth of modules.  That means that we’re pretty much on schedule.

Now if only software was this easy to estimate.  Unfortunately, programming rarely involves doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way (despite what books on software estimation seem to imply)!

Related: The complete Scrum Task Origami series

Unfortunately for us, we tend to avoid the roaming data charges that a lot of said travel-related iPhone apps depend on, and I don’t have the 3G option on my iPad anyway (we were concerned about how easy it would be to get a data plan for an early-adopted foreign-purchased device).  Also, a lot of interesting travel apps are US-centric, so when I read about exciting new iPhone apps on my favorite travel blogs, I’m always disappointed to find that they have no international coverage.

Up to now, my travel app repertoire has been mostly limited to iPhone apps in disguise (if you can call stretching the app to double screen resolution a disguise).  I have Skype to call home for free, Angry Birds and Word Warp to keep me busy at the airport, and Google Maps on the massive iPad screen to help me find my way across Houston to Lan & Debu’s.  I also have a few handy translation and unit conversion utilities.  The one glaringly obvious iPad travel advantage is of course its e-reader dual-identity.  I’ve already overdosed on iBooks classics and free Kindle book downloads!

Lucas and I briefly toyed with the idea of travel guides on the iPhone, since paper guides tend to be heavy and awkward, but the small screen made them prohibitively hard to use.  Thus I sense an iPad-shaped opening in the travel app market, but so far no one has stepped up to fill it.  I plan to buy a few Lonely Planet PDF chapters for our visit to Tallinn, Estonia next week, so we’ll see how that goes.  It would be fantastic if Lonely Planet also started publishing them in the EPUB format, since I like the iBooks app much better than our PDF  reader.

However, other than the utilizing the e-reader functionality with existing digital guidebook support, I have yet to find much that’s truly useful for travel.  Despite having read plenty of articles and blog posts with titles like “5 Great Travel Apps for the iPad” and “7 Wonders of the Travel App World” and “Three Ways to Use Your iPad on the Road,” I continue to come up empty-handed.  Most of the apps seem to be useful only in online mode or only in the US.  Most of them require both.

So a few days ago I was trying to catch up on my favorite travel blogs, and I came across a post about an upgrade to an older iPhone/iPad app.  Technically, this one falls into the “Only in the US” category, but I’ll forgive it that caveat because it fills a personal niche (and maybe some day it will expand to cover some international territory).

The Point Inside app, which previously served as a portable map inside the nation’s shopping malls has been expanded to cover airports!  This could be hugely useful!  When I’ve just gotten off of (or am just about to board) a long-haul flight, the last thing I want to be doing is trekking all over an airport looking for a place to sit down with a beer or a cup of coffee.  Problem solved!

I don’t really fault the app too much for not having international airports, because honestly I find this much less of a problem in the big European hubs.  Schilpol, Frankfurt, Heathrow, etc. are all dripping with full-service cafes and restaurants in dozens of cuisines and price ranges.  However, on my last jaunt through O’Hare, I explored three entire concourses, visiting every single dining option on the terminal map, before finally finding a Chili’s that actually employed wait staff rather than just counter jockeys.  I would like to believe that this little app would have saved me at least a half hour of searching.

Also, as much as I hate to admit it, the mall-mapping portion of the app is also slightly appealing.  One thing we do without fail when we’re in the US is shop, and my first trip to the Galleria meant studying the mall directory in detail, trying to figure out the best route to get to the Apple Store while minimizing the shock of American consumerism.  Inevitably, I will have more shopping to do next time I’m stateside, so I’m sure I will be able to find more uses for this.

So I’ve been excited about the iPad since it was announced, and i pre-ordered one to pick up in the States on this trip. I would have liked the 3G version, but originally I would have been here too early to get it (volcano delays changed that), and we didn’t know if we could get a data plan for it in Norway anyway.

In general, I really like it. It’s a convenient way to browse the web, and I actually like the iBooks e-reader app more than I thought I would. It’s heavier than a paperback, but it’s easier to turn the pages and bookmark my page, and it weighs less than a hardback or heavy paperback. Also, it can take some muscle to hold open a mass-market paperback without cracking the spine (pet peeve), so in some cases it’s more comfortable to read with. Especially in landscape mode, where the shape and size is book-like and familiar.

So far, reading is the only productive thing I’ve tried to do with the device, and there is one productivity pitfall: Whenever I pull it out to start reading (not uncommon when traveling alone), it’s apparently an open invitation to be interrupted. “Is that an iPad?! What do you think of it? I’ve been considering getting one, but I’m not sure. Do you think it’s worth it?”

Since Lucas could already get a job for Apple selling iPhones, MacBooks, and just about everything else the company makes, he would probably relish this, but I’m not much of a talker, and I made my iPad pre-order knowing that it filled a very specific niche in my life. I’m sorry, Mr.Stranger, but I don’t know if you should buy one or not! Though as an Apple shareholder, I should really get my spiel together so that I can convince everyone else to buy one and keep the stock price up. But deep down, I’d really rather just read.

* This post was written on the iPad, making it the second productive thing I’ve done now. But it was in the comfort of my home, with no interruptions from chatty business people.

First, our pile of cranes was getting unruly, so I finally brought in some thread and started stringing them up. They’re hanging in groups of 40, so there are still some odd cranes lying about on the table, waiting for us to pick that project back up so that we can string another set.

Our progress on the product owner’s modular origami request is also progressing. In keeping with the ideas of iterative development, we’re slowly building up towards the final grand vision.

Our first step was to complete a Level 1 Menger sponge built out of basic Sonobe origami modules. The team worked together to make the components, and it wasn’t long before the model was complete:

(Sadly, our sculpture has seen better days before this photograph. Apparently it was so well constructed that people felt inclined to pick it up and poke at it, and I came in one day to find it in mangled pieces that no longer fit together quite so nicely!)

For our second iteration, we moved up to the more complicated Japanese Brocade modules. This is the origami pattern specified in the original requirement photo. Each module takes longer to fold, so this structure took slightly longer to complete. That turned out to be a good thing though, as we were folding the basic Sonobe modules faster than we were finishing the scrum tasks they were made from! With the Japanese Brocade modules, our origami velocity is now better aligned with our programming velocity.

Unfortunately, we failed to have a design review before we started assembling this one. After we had completed the module, one of our team members was looking at the original photo given to us by the product owner and pointed out that it didn’t really look the same. Apparently we had put the modules together wrong! This is a good reminder of the value of early technical reviews, since we now had to restart our work on this iteration. We considered disassembling this cube and reusing the pieces, but they now had creases in the wrong places that would make them harder to assemble in the re-architected solution.

After a bit of experimentation, we established the correct way to connect the Japanese Brocade modules and began again. It turns out that the proper structure is actually much larger than the one we had made and will require more modules and more time to finish. So far, we have finished the first of the three layers in the cube, but it looks much more like the model requested by the product champion:

When we eventually finish this structure, it will be time to move on to the final product: the Japanese Brocade Level 2 Menger Sponge.

Related: The complete Scrum Task Origami series

(If you’re not a software engineer, that’s a pun on “pair programming,” an agile development technique involving two programmers working together at one machine.)

The Pink Toque

The shop is mainly focused on creative handmade soap designs, but there are a few other fun products tossed into the mix.  A few of my favorite items:

Operating System Soaps:

I love that little Mac soap!  It kind of looks like a little soap version of the Mac Mini.

Star Wars Soap:

I enjoy things like this that are subtly geeky. Because chances are that you would only recognize that as Star Wars soap if you are also a geek. Or frequently in close contact with one. In which case, a nice scented soap would probably be a good thing, right?

Plush Sock Cthulhu

How cute are these little plush Cthulhus?  (Cthulhu?  Cthulhi? What is the plural of Cthulhu anyway?) With an embodiment of evil this adorable, I might consider switching over to the Dark Side! [Apologies to purists for the blended references.]

Check out the Etsy shop for more fun and geeky products.

Bonus Points – The creator is from Indianapolis!  Hooray for Hoosiers!

Adobe Photoshop Cook from Lait Noir on Vimeo.