ATT charges over $20000 for three days of Gmail in Iceland!

The Darth Vader of USB Modems. ATT USB 881. It will suck all your money out of your wallet!

Digg this post!

Evidently, deceptive business practices are the norm for ATT and the iPhone. William Gillis in San Diego is already suing Apple for false advertising.

Is it OK for vendors to blatantly lie about their products? It is very difficult to introduce Agile practices based on truth, transparency, and trust when vendors are constantly lying.

Evidently there are laws against this.

Prohibited Practices: Federal Communications Commission
Overcharging or engaging in other unjust or discriminatory practices by telephone or telegraph companies. 47 U.S.C. §202(a)

Unfair or Deceptive Acts and Practices: Department of Commerce
Engaging in unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting interstate commerce.
9/15 U.S.C. §45(a) (1)

Consumer Products - Packaging and Labeling
Unfair or deceptive labeling of consumer commodities.
15 U.S.C §1452(a), 1453
Engaging in deceptive packaging, including misrepresentation of retail sale price.
14/15 U.S.C. 1452(a); 16 C.F.R. 502

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Apple argues only a fool would believe its iPhone 3G ads
By Sam Oliver
Published: 04:10 PM EST

Apple isn't lying in television ads that tout the iPhone 3G as twice as fast as its predecessor, but customers would have to be fools to take those claims at face value, the company argues.

That's essentially Apple's legal response to a lawsuit filed by San Diego resident William Gillis back in September alleging that Apple and AT&T knowingly oversold the new iPhone alongside misleading ads that promised it would perform twice as fast as the original model.

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When I recently purchased an iPhone, I told the sales guy I needed a USB modem for my Mac that worked globally as I spend 2-3 weeks a month in Europe. He said the ATT USBConnect 881 was an ideal choice as it worked in 177 countries, covered all of Europe and supported Global roaming. He didn't tell me if I used it in Iceland, I would have to buy an ATT corporate exec a Mercedes!

While I was in Iceland recently, I got a call from ATT telling me to dispute an outrageous charge. They were billing me over $39000 for three days of Gmail usage in Iceland. After filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, ATT lowered the charge to $20000.

So instead of buying an ATT executive a Mercedes for Christmas, they will settle for a Toyota Prius, all for using Gmail for three days. Maybe Google should get into this business!

It turns out that ATT cannot notify you of outrageously high fees until after you have already used the modem. Their system doesn't support this!

Needless to say, our corporate lawyers propose litigation if we cannot settle for a reasonable fee from ATT. I had a Vodafone USB modem in my bag that would have cost me less than $400 for the same usage in Iceland. Stupid me thought ATT would cost less. Duh!

American Express has already refunded all money paid to ATT for this fiasco. Evidently they think the charges are a little unreasonable.

Recent comments from others indicate there are many iPhone and ATT USB modem users out their who feel they have been mistreated. Is there anyone interested in joining a class action suit against ATT if they fail to resolve this issue in a reasonable way?

Arduino: Open Source Hardware

Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?
By Clive Thompson Wired Magazine 10.20.08
A circuit board for the masses: the Arduino microcontroller.
Photo: James Day

Check this out," Massimo Banzi says. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmaking robot—a "pick and place" machine the size of a pizza oven. It hums with activity, grabbing teensy electronic parts and stabbing them into position on a circuit board like a hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds. We're standing in a one-room fabrication factory used by Arduino, the Italian firm that makes this circuit board, a hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders. The electronics factory is one of the most picturesque in existence, nestled in the medieval foothills of Milan, with birdsong floating in through the open doors and plenty of coffee breaks for the white-coated staff. But today Banzi is all business. He's showing off his operation to a group of potential customers from Arizona. Banzi scoops up one of the boards and points to the tiny map of Italy emblazoned on it. "See? Italian manufacturing quality!" he says, laughing. "That's why everyone likes us!" Indeed, 50,000 Arduino units have been sold worldwide since mass production began two years ago. Those are small numbers by Intel standards but large for a startup outfit in a highly specialized market. What's really remarkable, though, is Arduino's business model: The team has created a company based on giving everything away. On its Web site, it posts all its trade secrets for anyone to take—all the schematics, design files, and software for the Arduino board. Download them and you can manufacture an Arduino yourself; there are no patents. You can send the plans off to a Chinese factory, mass-produce the circuit boards, and sell them yourself — pocketing the profit without paying Banzi a penny in royalties. He won't sue you. Actually, he's sort of hoping you'll do it.

Roots of Scrum: Object Technology

Scrum was originally designed to support emerging object technology environments, which have now become the dominant paradigm in software development. One of the goals was to get the organization of the team to reflect the potential flexibility of the software since software rigidity always reflects the organization that built it. This is Conway's Law. Fred Brooks cited Mel Conway's 1968 Datamation paper in The Mythical Man-Month and the name stuck. "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."

Object-oriented languages have a small set of interoperating principles. Break any one of them in creating a language and many of the benefits of object technology evaporate. A similar analogy could be made about Scrum. So here is a candidate set of principles.

Inheritance
It is easy to extend the Scrum pattern to fit the local environment without modifying the metaClass represented by the Scrum organizational pattern.

Polymorphism
The same message sent to a different Sprint can produce a result dependent on the environment.

Encapsulation (information hiding)
Work is packaged in increments. Scrum teams can scale by making a Scrum of Scrums look like a Scrum tream to another Scrum of Scrums. Using an object-oriented network to scale allows potentially unlimited scaling.

Emergent Design
A small change can have a ripple effect that causes refactoring and a new design emerges.

Messaging
OO is a messaging environment. Constant high bandwidth communication works best.

Self-Organization
There is typically no "control" object. Behavior emerges from the interaction between objects in languages and between people in Scrums.

Aggregation
Objects can be aggregated into components. Components aggregate into an architecture. Scrums can be aggregated into Scrums of Scrums orchestrated by a metaScrum. A metaClass creates the framework for all classes. The Scrum framework could be viewed as a metaClass laying out the minimal attributes of a Scrum and the relationship between components.

Reflection
Constant review and analysis at a meta-level leads to increased functionality and flexibility. This is an extremely powerful feature missing from some languages, which tends to cripple them. It leads to the Retrospective in Scrum.

All software implementations of objects use the metaClass of a specific language to create coherent structures. There were hundreds of people who created new objects languages and 99% of them failed in the market. These are like homegrown implementations of Agile. "We are doing Agile" has no meaning. It is like saying we are doing object technology. In the last decade we would look into the code of a C++ application and see nothing but old C procedures. There was often not a single object to be found. Today we see hierarchical organizations implementing hierarchical teams and calling it Agile. They can't help themselves. They have to change the organization first to get it right or Conway's Law assures that they will fail.

Certain languages are structured to work together like JRuby with Java. This is analogous to Scrum and XP. Others like Java and C++ inherit features from a common ancestor but do not interbreed well. Those that take pieces of Agile languages and cobble them together get what you would expect - a horse designed by a committee. It can't run but maybe it can store water.

Cool Tools on the Web - DropBox, Code Collaborator, and Poodwaddle

There is no end of cool tools popping up on the web. Do you want to have file folders that automatically sync on every Windows, Mac, and Linux box that you own instantaneously and transparently - you need DropBox. Or maybe you are having problems with code reviews and want to make them fun, easy, and totally automated - check out Code Collaborator. Or maybe you just want to know the worldwide numbers in real time on the environment and health - see poodwaddle.com below:

iPhone, ATT, T-Mobile and how to avoid getting ripped off

My phones - ATT iPhone 3G, HTC T-Mobile Touch, Sony/Ericsson Walkman

I spent over half my time for the last few years outside of the U.S. doing Scrum training and experimenting with mobile phones. There are lots of options and some of them can cut your costs by 98% compared to U.S. vendors. That's right, you can make local calls for 2% of the cost of a U.S. roaming cellphone. ATT and T-Mobile cash registers make a loud k-ching sound when you travel abroad and you may not know it but they sometimes think Canada is as far away as Europe.

I couldn't resist getting the iPhone 3G to test out on my travels. The iPhone is a very cute and very expensive toy. I love it. Too bad I can't use it as I travel around the world. I spent a week in Canada last month and got charged $100 extra on top of my $100 monthly charge for using Gmail and Google maps. Pretty expensive map.

ATT claims an award for "the best wireless network in the world." They must be drinking their own Koolaid. At Logan aiport in Boston the signal on the iPhone is so weak my wife can't hear me so I have to pull out my HTC T-Mobile phone which works fine. Same thing happened to me in Toronto. Also, my HTC T-Mobile has all the services of the ATT iPhone for $25.27 a month added to my wife's Blackberry bill as a second line. This includes no extra charge for international roaming data services.

So for the price of spending a week in Canada with my iPhone, I could have eight T-Mobile phones added to my wife's account. I'm keeping my T-Mobile phone so I don't have to use my iPhone, particularly when traveling abroad which is about 2/3 of my time. Also, I have the TOM TOM GPS system on the HTC. I need a real GPS, not a fake GPS like the iPhone for many things although I really like Google maps on the iPhone.

Now let's look at call charges. I'm in Denmark right now where phone charges are cheaper than most countries. Here is what a local call costs me:

ATT iPhone - $1.29/minute
T-Mobile - $0.99/minute
Lebara Mobile - 9 ore = $0.017/minute

Always get a local SIM for your phone. Buy a European phone if you need to. Otherwise you will be spending 100 times more for local calls. I might hack my iPhone to swap SIMS but I can already swap them in my T-Mobile phone so it is probably not worth it.

A markup of 10000% is a little steep so maybe ATT could qualify as the biggest ripoff of cellular networks in the world, although other U.S. vendors are not far behind.

But maybe they should be compared to major European vendors like Telenor, Orange, or Vodaphone and for their SIMs (I have several of them) I will get charged 20-30 cents a minute so maybe the ATT markup is only 500-600%. The iPhone is so cute it might be worth it as long as you don't travel more than a week a year.

Scrum and Fighter Aircraft

In 1993 at Easel Corporation when we started the first Scrum, I thought the ScrumMaster needed to see how to land a Sprint on a date, just like landing a fighter aircraft at the end of the runway. If you are high on the glidepath in a fighter you can easy land in the middle of the runway and if it is wet or icy can slide off the end of the runway. At the end of every runway there are trees, a deep hole, or water. It is always bad.

So the Burndown Chart along with the Scrum Emergency Procedure was developed. What do you do when bad things start to happen in a Sprint?

More specifically, what do you do when an Agile system becomes unstable?

But I digress. Jim Coplien just sent me a great video of an unstable Agile system, the latest Euro fighter. It takes 70 computers just to keep it flying and if they fail it stops flying.

Here we see a race between a Bugatti and the fighter aircraft which reminds me of the time I flew F4 Phantoms in Europe in the air while I was driving a Porsche 911 on the ground. Here the Bugatti races the fighter to the end of the runway and back while the fighter takes off, flies straight up for a mile, then does a reverse loop in an attempt to beat the Bugatti back to the takeoff point.

Click here for an exciting ride!

HICSS 42 Call for Papers due 15 June 2008

It's time for you to get your most scintillating Agile theories
together, write a kick-ass paper that could get published in the IEEE
library and spend a week in beautiful Hawaii next January. Sound good?
Then get writing!

HICSS-42 CALL FOR PAPERS - due 15 June 2008
http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_42/minitracks/st-asd.htm
January 5-8, 2009
Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort
Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii

HICSS-42 offers a unique, highly interactive and professionally
challenging environment that attendees find "very helpful -- lots of
different perspectives and ideas as a result of discussion." HICSS
sessions are comprised primarily of refereed paper presentations; the
conference does not host vendor presentations. All papers are peer
reviewed and accepted papers are published in the IEEE Digital Library.

Software Technology Minitrack
Agile Software Development: Lean, Distributed, and Scalable
(Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield)

Agile software development processes have been influenced by best
practices in Japanese industry, particularly by lean product
development principles implemented at companies like Honda and Toyota,
and knowledge management strategies developed by Takeuchi and Nonaka, now at the Hitotsubashi Business School in Japan, and Peter Senge at
MIT. This Minitrack will focus on advancing the state of the art or
presenting innovative ideas related to agile methods, individual
practices and tools.

Accepted papers will potentially enrich the body of knowledge and
influence the framework of thought in the field by investigating Agile
methods in a rigorous fashion.

We are open to research papers on multiple aspects of agile methods,
particularly those that bring best practices in knowledge management
and lean development to scalable, distributed, and outsourced Scrum,
eXtreme Programming (XP), and other agile practices. Topics include:

1. Research on existing or new methodologies and approaches: informal
modeling techniques and practices, adapting/trimming existing methods,
and new product/project planning techniques
2. Research on existing or new techniques or practices: pairing,
war-rooms, test-first design, paper-based prototyping, early
acceptance test driven development, exploratory testing, refactoring,
or others.
3. Research on special topics or tools: configuration and resource
management, testing, project steering, user involvement, design for
agility, virtual teams or others.
4. Research on integrating ideas from other fields, e.g. interaction
design, requirements engineering, cognitive science, organizational
psychology, usability testing, software security, into agile processes.
5. Research studies of development teams using ethnographic or social
6. Research on agile software engineering economics.
7. Quantitative and qualitative studies of agile methods, practices,
and tools.
8. Research on agile compliance and cost benefits within CMMI, ISO
9000, and FDA certified development projects.

Papers are particularly relevant when agile process implementations
are shown to produce quantitative and qualitative benefits on
distributed, outsourced, large, or standards compliant software
development projects which have been previously been viewed
(erroneously) as unsuited for agile development.

To submit papers and read more about the conference please go to:
http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_42/minitracks/st-asd.htm

Jeff Sutherland
Scrum, Inc.
332 Congress St., 3rd Floor
Boston, MA 02210

Gabrielle Benefield
Scrum Training Institute
Mountain View,
CA 94040
Email: gabriellebenefield@yahoo.com