Carl Bruiners
I specialise in all things Agile (XP, Kanban, Lean), in particular Scrum. I have a passion for taking on 'problem' projects / teams and turning them into a sucess as well as promoting automated test driven practices.
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I am an enthusiastic, dedicated and accomplished Systems / application Architect, Project / Product Manager, Development Manager and Application Developer who thrives on delivering first class products.
My background is that of a developer who became a product / project manager and the head of application development. I am a certified SCRUM Master and have solid knowledge of PRINCE2.
I Work well on own initiative and can demonstrate high levels of motivation and organisation required to meet targets and deadlines. I have excellent interpersonal skills and communicate well at all levels.
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Recent Posts
- Agile Awards UK 2012 – Nominated…
- Sovereign teams
- Mr Ching keynote speaker at Scrum Gathering Atlanta 2012
- Is limiting what my partner can buy a bad thing?
- Dubai
- Heston and Ramsey got it so wrong…. and why Scrum could help in the kitchen
- Mr Eddie Thomas
- Big update coming for the really simple Agile tool
- A really simple Agile tool – DB structure
- The really simple Agile tool – update
- Book review: Kanban by David Anderson
- Introducing the really simple Agile tool
- Agile Edge presentation
- Agile test curve
- Personal online security
- Over the GUI test automation, Excel and a little VBA
- Identifying an Epic using apple strudel
- Reap the QA rewards by reducing defects
- Development stuff
- Difference between UI and UX
Categories
- .NET (5)
- Agile (29)
- ASP.NET (2)
- Book reviews (1)
- c# (2)
- Continuous Delivery (2)
- Continuous Integration (1)
- CSS (1)
- Development (2)
- ITIL (1)
- JavaScript (1)
- JQuery (1)
- JS (3)
- Kanban (12)
- Lean (11)
- Misc Stuff (21)
- Product Management (2)
- Project Manageent (8)
- QA (2)
- SCRUM (34)
- Scrum Solutions (3)
- Security (1)
- Sharepoint (2)
- Silverlight (1)
- Technology (8)
- Test Automation (3)
- the really simple Agile tool (2)
- Travels (1)
- Uncategorized (2)
- VB (3)
- XP (10)
Blogroll
- Clarke Ching
- Karine Bosch
- Mike Cohn
- Peter Drayton
- Robert Lindström
- Scott Gu
- Simon Cromarty
- Stu Nicholls
- Tobias Zimmergren's
Archives
- April 2012 (8)
- March 2012 (4)
- February 2012 (2)
- January 2012 (7)
- December 2011 (3)
- October 2011 (3)
- August 2011 (3)
- July 2011 (3)
- June 2011 (9)
- April 2011 (9)
- March 2011 (3)
- December 2010 (1)
- November 2010 (1)
- October 2010 (10)
- September 2010 (1)
- August 2010 (3)
- July 2010 (3)
- February 2010 (2)
- December 2009 (1)
- November 2009 (3)
- October 2009 (6)
a really simple Agile tool
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Agile Expert @ GE
Its been sometime since I last blogged, incredibly busy since the end of October and I don't get two minutes spare.
At the beginning of November I moved into the vacant position of Agile Expert with GE Energy 
after spending 9 months with GE I realised that there was a real chance of achieving great things with GE so I jump onboard their bandwagon.
Scrum Solutions
Driven by all things Agile
As a few of you are aware, I setup a company, Scrum Solutions, to supply Agile specific stationary, software (inc. iOS and Android) and consultancy.
Though we have already taken a number of orders, it brings me great pleasure in announcing our go live date of our web site will be the 11th July, www.scrumsolutions.co.uk. This will give our customers greater flexibility to explore and order our extensive range of products as well as review purchase order history.
To celebrate the arrival of the web site, I am pleased to announce that Scrum Solutions is a sponsor of the Agile Diner UK 2011 and I will be presenting the award for the Best Agile Coach / Mentor at the event.
Sharepoint and bad processes – BA’s first
One of my all time favorite frameworks is Sharepoint.
Sharepoint helps me to bring 'togetherness' to teams I'm working with, it helps them to communicate and collaborate with their fellow colleagues no matter where they are in the world.
Not everyone shares the same view as I. It got me thinking, 'Why do I see this as an amazing tool and others don't?' After the cogs had turned a few times I and talking to my teacher friend, the answer hit me. Sharepoint is a great enabler if your business processes / workflow are good, but if the business processes / workflow you feed into Sharepoint is bad or poorly defined then Sharepoint will only further highlight the your process / workflow problems.
When implementing Sharepoint, do it correctly, its not about techies, its about a team of BA's to analyse the existing processes / workflow and improve these before feeding them into Sharepoint.
BA's first techies second.
N-tier stacks only one way
N-tier is vertical only. Once I had a debate with two other very talented developers about how many layers an n-tier application can have. We discussed what number realistically could replace the 'n' part, the most common being 3-tier / layer (Presentation, business and data or model, view, controller) along with some 4-tier / layer (add in service/s). Whilst there are genuine 5+ tier / layer solutions, after 4-tiers / layers it becomes very difficult to see many more layers.
The other two developers disagreed with me on this point, arguing that tiers / layers are not only stacked vertically, but horizontally as well. As much as I could see their argument, to this day I cannot agree. Tiers / layers are vertically stacked and inside each there are objects which we work with.
N-tier vertical only (Click to enlarge)
N-Tier / Layer Architecture is important
Many newbie developers often 'lump' their code together into one or two layers and find it often hard why we should use n-tier structures when developing. N-tier allows us to have clear separation between our UI, business objects and data objects.
A very recent piece of work I managed involved taking a legacy single layer model written in classic ASP and separating it out into manageable layers using .NET services. By creating a DAL and Services layer this helped the developers to deliver code at a far faster rate than the previous single layer as they did not have to 'untangle' the code they were working on and most importantly allowed quick diagnostic / resolution of problems as it was easy to identify the layer where the issue originated from.
Tiers / layers are important in application architecture.
N-Tier Architecture (Click to enlarge)
Nintendo 3DS
Anyone who knows me knows I love my gadgets, particularly taking a new toy and find its limits. Pre-Xmas it was the Kinect, and yesterday the latest toy (abet for my son 
) was the Nintendo 3DS.
Is it amazing? In short, most definitely, the 3D is more impressive than most 3D TV's, but as someone lucky enough to see a the 3D TV glass free demo in St Pancreas just over a year ago, its the future that excites me, imagine convergence between the Kinect and the glasses free 3D? Holodeck anyone....
Kinect rocks / Win Prototype Project
Its very, very rare these days that I get a chance to cut code 
, but the prospect of working on a Win MS Kinect proto-type project was just to much for me to ignore.
For those living beneath a stone for the last year, Kinect is Microsoft's 3D, depth sensing, multi directional array microphone wonder kit. Is it good? Personally as a gagdet freak over the last 20 years, I can say that nothing has impressed me so much in terms of its capability.
The drivers I've used can be found at the site below;
http://ajaxorg.posterous.com/kinect-driver-for-windows-prototype
Voddler
First there was Spotify, now there's an awesome video version (sadly only available in Sweden at present);
http://www.voddler.com/index.htm