Agile, Collaboration, Life. In German and English.
Im Nachgang meiner Trac-Erweiterung zur Bearbeitung von Tickets via QR-Codes und Smart-Phone kam mein ehemaliger Kollege Paul Herwarth von Bittenfeld auf mich zu. Er bat mich, für seinen Blog ein Paar Fragen zu meiner Lösung zu beantworten.
Hier ist der Link: QR-Codes zur Aktualisierung von Taskboards – 7 Fragen an Matt Müller.
Danke an Paul für das Interesse am Thema und viel Spaß beim Lesen.
Infrastructural development not necessarily improves customer service. This is what I had to learn this morning when I took a flight from Dublin to Frankfurt. I can’t say how often I took this early Aer Lingus flight. Well, it is at seven o’clock in the morning and I often swore to never take it again. However, I did it again. But I was somehow looking forward to it as it was the first time for me to check in at the newly opened Terminal 2 at Dublin Airport. When they started to build the new terminal about three years ago, I was living in Dublin and thought: “Yes, this will be excellent. The old terminal is so narrow and packed with people. The new terminal will be a massive improvement.”
Aer Lingus moved from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 for at least all European flights earlier this year. Until then it was always enough to be at the airport 60 to 90 minutes prior departure. They had this nice and crowdy check-in area 14 for all flights to the UK and Germany. Checking in took no longer than 10 minutes, followed by a medium sized queue at the security checks. However, there was always enough time to go shopping or have a coffee. When I read that my flight was about to depart from Terminal 2 from now on, I was really looking forward to check out this nice futuristic building. It could only get better. More time, more relaxation – a much better customer service and experience.
So, we ordered a taxi which should bring us to the airport to check-in around 90 minutes prior departure. Thankfully the taxi driver was much earlier. That way we had around 120 minutes for completing check-in and boarding. And we desperately needed that extra time!
The taxi driver dropped us off at Terminal 2 and we got into the building. It was packed. People. Everywhere. A huge number of people trying to fight their way through to one of the check-in machines and then onwards to an app. 400m queue for baggage drop. Unbelievable. It took us about 15 minutes to get through to one of the check-in machines. This was not due to long queues at these machines. In fact, there are enough machines but the position of them is so dumb that you have to fight yourself through the baggage drop queue to get there. Hard work. Once we completed that task, we already stood in the queue for baggage drop. If we’d arrived 15 minutes later, we would have found ourselfes at the end of an even longer queue. It literally went through the whole terminal. Scheduled departure time for our flight was 7 o’clock. It was 5:20 when we started queuing for baggage drop. It took us one hour to get to one of the desks. During that time, announcements had been made to tell people that their flights are now on final call and that people should leave the queue and proceed to one of the two extra counters for closing flights. Just the fact that there are these two counters pictures the situation in that terminal more than enough.
One minute before we reached the counter, a final call announcement was made for our flight. We decided to proceed in our queue. Once we got to the counter I asked the Aer Lingus staff member if this was a normal situation and if they deal with this amount of people everyday. And she said yes. Everyday. She told us that she was working from 4 o’clock in the morning and that the situation is not any better at any time in the morning. I have to say that this was a Sunday. Not a working day. She told us that the new terminal is far too small for all these Aer Lingus flights and that – hear hear! – Michael o’Leary was so right when he said that the new Terminal and Aer Lingus’ decision to move there “was rubbish”. Well, I guess that describes the happiness of Aer Lingus staff members perfectly. She was very nice though but was obviously more than irritated.
We finished our check-in and baggage-drop procedure and moved on to the security check. It was 6:20. 15 minutes till boarding should begin. The queue at the security check was long. I was used to that. It was not better in terminal 1. But it seemed like there were more x-rays in terminal 1 and more people had been working there. However, it took not too long and after 15 minutes we were checked-in, baggage-dropped and security checked and ready for a coffee and some shopping. Finally the fun part of being at the airport should start! But wait. Was it 6:35h already? Boarding time. We started to walk to our gate. The direction which the signs guided us to looked very suspicous. And in fact, yes, I knew it! Boarding was at a gate in terminal 1! Surprise, surprise. So, we walked all the way up from terminal 2 to terminal 1. We passed all the cafes, shops, the old empty security checks in terminal which are now far less frequented than the ones in terminal 2 and got on the plane at 6:45. 10 minutes later the machine departed. It was one time, surprisingly. But I don’t think anybody on the flight spent a Euro at the airport because we all were in a rush.
Stupid, huh? They built a new terminal and made the situation even worse than it was before. To me it looks like Aer Lingus wanted to play the new toy called Terminal 2, come whatever. And now they have that terminal along with more angry and stressed customers, lower earnings in shops and unhappy staff. Well done. At least, the new terminal looks much better than the old one. If we experience a dropping service quality, we’re much better looking at least.
We’re now using Trac along TracPrinter for a couple of weeks now and have a pleasant new feature which will evolve during the upcoming weeks:
You are now able to place QR codes on your ticket prints to allow closing them using your smart phone. This is currently really just a simple feature: A small php script which needs to have access to the Trac database, simply takes a project name for database connection and a ticket and sets its status to closed / resolved. In the future I’ll add a nice mobile interface to allow adding comments / changing status etc. The configuration is quite simple: You just need to add the URL of the webserver running the script to your printer.properties file and configure your projects in the ticket_closer.php script if the project name differs from your database name. That’s it. Maybe somebody will love this feature just as I do!
If you’re a proud owner of an iPhone or iPad just like me, you might find it pretty interesting to know that these fancy devices store location based data. I don’t want to start a discussion about security and integrity of this method but if you want to have a look at what data is being stored, you can. On the O’Reilly radar there is a post about a little tool written by Pete Warden which allows you to create a graphical presentation of all the places you’ve been and brought your iPhone to. Seems like a whole lot of data is being stored as you can see on the screenshot below:
Vorbei sind die Zeiten, in denen man, wenn man eine Wanderung machen wollte, im Buchladen ein kleines Paperback kaufte mit der Aufschrift “Romantische Wanderungen im Westerwald (nord)” und sich dann ärgerte, dass man doch eigentlich lieber in “süd” gewandert wäre.
Online passiert dies nicht – mit den Wanderplänen von Alpregio ist man hier wirklich gut beraten. Alpregio ist ein Onlineplaner für Wanderungen und verwandte Outdooraktivitäten. Dabei bietet Alpregio als White Label Lösung unterschiedliche regionale Portale an. Eine einfache Suche bietet den Einstieg in ein Kartenmodul, welches die Wegführung der Wanderungen anzeigt. Man sieht direkt in der Übersicht im Mouseover, wo sich die Wanderung befindet. Bei Klick auf eine Wanderung öffnet sich eine großzügige Detailansicht. Als kleines optisches Schmankerl kann man hier, bei vorhandenem Google Earth Plugin im Browser, auch einen 3D Flug entlang der Wanderroute unternehmen.
Points of Interest werden direkt auf der Karte dargestellt, in der linken Spalte gibt es eine detaillierte Beschreibung der Wanderung, eine Kategorisierung des Schwierigkeitsgrads, das Höhenprofil und eine Bildergalerie. Zusätzlich lassen sich Informationen zu Gastronomie, Übernachtungen und Sehenswürdigkeiten einsehen.
Was mich wirklich überzeugte ist der Download des Guides als PDF: Zu jeder Wanderung kann man sämtliche Daten als PDF herunterladen und als Wanderguide unterwegs nutzen (wenn man nicht sowieso ein iPad dabei hat und das ganze online macht).
Leider habe ich keine globale Übersichtsseite aller Angebote gefunden, die unter Alpregio laufen. So kann man scheinbar nur in den runtergebrochenen Portalen wie “Rhein Nahe” oder “Rhein Main” suchen.
Alles in allem: Dies ist ein tolles Tool zur Planung von Wanderungen.
Eine Tippp für eine Reportage auf ARTE und den Unsinn der Plastikflasche.
If you are using Trac and Scrum, you might have come to the point where you want to easily print ticket cards for your Scrum / Kanban board. At least, this is what happened to me. So, I created a little Java-tool to easily print Scrum / Kanban Ticket Cards.
It is available on Github:
https://github.com/mmuell23/TracPrinter
There is some documentation in the wiki. Basically you may configure the tool in several ways:
It is possible to run the tool either as a stand-alone application or as a Java applet on your web-environment.
This is what a ticket card will look like: In my exampe, it shows the name of the sprint in the header area, the ticket number and summary in the content area below and some information about the reporter, owner and URL in Trac.
Maybe somebody finds it as useful as I do 🙂
As we started to do Scrum a couple of months ago on a project which was about to fail (and sadly did fail, but due to other reasons…), I came across the fact that there is huge potential to change the way we do things not just in project work but in our general daily work. At my company, we work in a great environment with really high-potential team members and a good social atmosphere. We are a small Online-Media & IT department under the roof of a medium sized newspaper publishing company. But even though we are less than 20 people, inert knowledge, intransparent descisions, unclear communication to stakeholders and a lack of knowledge about “who does what and what needs to be done” seem to result in a a re-active and dissatisfying way of work rather than a creative way of getting things done. So, I started to read blog articles and books about self-managed teams and agile development.
One book which in a particular way drawed my attention is Stephen Denning’s “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management”. I am not a manager – as a software engineer I am part of a development team. Nevertheless, this book opened my eyes to what it really is that slows down development and maybe makes people unhappy about work in general – it is often a lack of transparency and responsibility to decide what is to be done in what time and what circumstances. Based on Dennings experience and talks to various managers across multible sectors in several countries, this is due to the fact that companies in the 21st century are still being managed in a traditional and unflexible 20th century way which major goal is rather delighting a client by providing quality services than making money and managing strictly top-down come whatever. Denning uses many stories and case studies to describe ways to achieve the goal of self-managed teams, establishing successful agile development and how to have an atmosphere of high performing work. This shall lead to better quality work and services, delighted clients and last but not least a happy work environment.
Even though I as a developer am not in the position to change things in a wide way across my company, this book gave me a lot of interesting thoughts and valuable information to change things in my surroundings – I’m really looking forward to start changing things in my office by “spreading the word” and trying to get people on board to move forward to a better organised, self-managed way to work. We already started by talking about it, establishing tools to centralise documentation and knowledge and thinking about better ways to handle incoming work in a transparent and productive way. There’s a lot you can do – Scrum is one method, Kanban another but this is all based on an uncompromising transparency, the will to enhance productivity or courage to admit failure and asking for help, which surely are some principles which really need to be learned from scratch – for both: “workers” and managers.
I really enjoyed reading the book and recommend it to everyone who wants to change the way things are done. For both – managers and workers – this book offers great opportunities to start changing things for better. Go and read 🙂
Ein schneller Lesetipp zum Thema “Stimmung im Team”:
Wie man diese ganz schnell und unkompliziert einfangen und evtl. dann auf sie einwirken kann, zeigt der Artikel Teamstimmung sichtbar machen bei projekt-log.de. Finde ich eine schöne und nützliche Idee.
Hier mal ein Sammlung von Artikeln über Scrum und Kanban, über welche ich in den letzten Wochen gestolpert bin. Alle lesens-, hörens- oder sehenswert. Weder ist sie sortiert noch hat sie Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit. Vielleicht aber ist für den einen oder anderen ja was interessantes dabei. Wer noch etwas hinzufügen will, darf dies gerne in den Kommentaren tun.