Category: Microsoft

Agile@School 2017 – This is the end

All the good things come to an end, right? And this is true also for Agile@School 2017. However, no worries, although I’m becoming a dad, I’m pretty sure I’ll keep making the students more aware of the Agile principles and practices.

There are only good news, to be honest. The first one is that Michele Ferracin, a friend of mine at getlatestversion.it community, is starting to keep in touch with schools (we really don’t know how many of them will participate) in order to start Agile@School also in Padova. “Bring the project in two cities”, perk reached! The second news is about the students this year. Everything is set up and running. Everyone is ready. Each team has chosen how to present the results to the exam’s board:

Software and Tech

The Messinesi team (Amanda and Alex) has prepared a Prezi presentation, whose goal is to depict the tools they’ve involved. They explain also the technologies and the usability of the collaborative chat they’ve created. Additionally, the board can try the “product” interacting with laptops and mobile phones.

ice

AI and Bots

The Random team (Thomas and Luca) and the Scrubs team (Enea and Sebastiano) have created a 3 min pitch video with:

  • an introduction of their chat bots (via Prezi and Power point)
  • simple explanation of the tech behind them
  • a couple of self interview (twice per bot) in order to add something fun

IoT

The Domotic team (Nicodemo and Mattia) and the Bar Santa team (Simone And Mirko) will show how the projects work, since they’re totally based on hardware. Smart Home vs Hacked Remote Controlled car. We’ve got already some spot:

Cognitive Services

The Human Recognizers team (Marco and Francesco) will present a website in which the exam’s board can play with cognitive services. They demonstrate how the webcam can recognize faces, mood and so on, using a mobile application.

This is the Prezi presentation.

As you can see, they’ve worked very well. The project are amazing and we’ve awarded everyone with the diploma, as usual:

20170527_111146

This year we’ve reached great results and we’re proud of all the work done together. We’ve asked also to fill in a survey and the feedback are the following:

And now, good luck guys! see you next year, hopefully!

Stay tuned

SQL Server Latest Updates (Jun. 2017)

Directly from the SQL Server Release Service blog, here the latest updates for SQL Server 2012 and 2017:

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 4

(SQL Server 2012 SP4 will be released next month in September 2017 and a release announcement with detailed information on improvements will be shared at the time of the release.)

SQL Server 2017 & Replication Management Pack CTP 4

Stay Tuned! 🙂

Agile@School 2017 – When the projects come true

Last time we had a great time. I’d have expected some trouble, some problem to manage. Well, everything has been well done. Anything goes. This is the reason why I’m attaching the pictures of the results hereafter, because it’s the best way to describe how the students were making their ideas. Keep in mind that we’re speaking about 18 years old guys, not startups!

Pictures paint a thousand words.

Introducing the teams:

The Messinesi team (Amanda and Alex) is developing a real time collaborative chat. Similar to the famous Slack, its purpose is to make the team’s member more aware of technologies used nowadays, like SignalR and the latest releases of the .Net framework. The name of the project is Notify. The guys are also following an interesting course with Visual Studio, in order to be prepared to become real developers in the future. As you see below, the development is still in progress, it’s just a matter of design. Due to the nature of the project itself, we need to wait for the next releases.

The Random team (Thomas and Luca) is presenting us a natural language bot, without any deep learning in this first release, which replies to a set of questions about Italian famous writers. It replies showing links, information and texts about the author requested by a real user. The name of the project is Italian Authors and it’s been made by integrating the Wit.ai APIs. It will eventually run on Facebook Messenger via Heroku platform. Lots of technologies!

The Scrubs team (Enea and Sebastiano) is working on a similar project, based on a natural language bot, without any deep learning in this first release, which replies to a set of questions about two topics which we should take care of, sports and photography. Also in this scenario, the real user interacts with the chatbot. The name of the project is CPP and it’s been made by integrating the Wit.ai APIs. It will eventually run on Facebook Messenger via Heroku.

 

The Domotic team (Nicodemo and Mattia), as the name of the team describes, is realising an IoT real time application which interacts with a prototype of a “smart house”. You can open and close doors and windows, turn on and off the lights. In this first release, you cannot clean the floor, but I guess we need more time for that feature… Actually the guys could integrate a robot 🙂 . The name of the project is Future House and it’s developed for Arduino using also php.

 

The Human Recognizers team (Marco and Francesco) is developing a face recognition Android app, which associate pictures of people in order to get information about age, mood and so on, also printing a string related to the mood itself. The name of the project is iFinder in consumes Android sdk and Face API by Microsoft. The result is impressive.

The Bar Santa team (Simone And Mirko) is hacking a remote-controlled car. As a result, they’ve got a super car with a camera onboard, stepped motors for wheels, and sensors. Everything mixed in a dedicated chassis, printed by the school’s 3D printer. The name of the project is SuperCar (do you remember Kit?) and it’s been made for Raspberry Pi3.

 

I don’t want to bother you with the teams’ retrospectives and ceremonies, but this time they worked perfectly. Each team started to discuss with us about the pros and cons of their choices, the things to do and the ones to avoid in the future. They depicted everything using starfish diagrams (in italian):

 

What can I say? AWESOME! This is how I’m feeling right now. Lots of ideas, technologies, integrations, and definitely FUN! I hope that everyone else agrees with me.

I guess that the exam will be a great show for those guys, also. The next post will be about the pitch videos they’ll create for each project. I’m excited but I have to bite my tongue, because I’ve already seen something and I don’t want to spoil anything, so…

Stay Tuned!

Agile@School 2017 – let’s start over

As a recurring project, Agile@School is started again on February, with a new set of projects and ideas. Gabriele will help me again, but it will be a very difficult task. During the past year we followed a Scrum approach, in order to comply the team structure. As you can read here, there were one team with a small bunch of members. Now, we’re getting “bigger”. As a result, we’ll have micro-teams of two/three member each. Great chance for Kanban. Let’s give it a try.

01

How will we approach in the beginning?

  • defining a set of micro-team, that we call “task forces”
  • designing a Kanban board
  • describing personas
  • speaking of some ceremonies we’d like to get rid of
  • speaking of some ceremonies we’ll keep
  • describing the customer journey and the story map practices

The task forces

The term not fits very well, actually; indeed, a task force is something that could be considered as a “defcon 1” team. However, we would give the teams a label which is “strong”. To be honest, we have a little amount of time, so in the end we can say that we’re in hurry already 🙂

The Kanbard board

As we said above, we will have more task forces, most likely six. Therefore, the board will use columns (as usual) for the status management and rows (aka Swimlanes) for separating teams and projects.

02

The board will be created in Visual Studio Team Services, in order to use also the Source Control Manager which relies on it.

Personas

Each team member will populate a simple card, the Persona card, which is depicted in the picture below:

03

As you can see (in Italian), the first column is for Persona details, the second for interests and the third is the “role” which the member would like to have. I know that the last column is not included in any best practice, but I feel that some student could start to think about its job and its future. Could be interesting.

The customer journey

During the next meeting, we’ll ask the students to show us their customer journey. Each team will have to describe the journey of a typical user, with mood for each action it takes and the value which it gets by the action itself.

Conclusions

Kanban, task forces, boards, customer journey, personas, etc. This year is full of new things to get knowledge from. Also the source control manager will change. We will use git on VSTS so we will get different projects in the same place in a quicker way.

And now, let’s start over! 🙂