Black-out

Last week, Barbara Flores and I did a training session about metrics. During our studies for this presentation, we found some interesting information about black-out (the period of time in the beginning of the project in which no information is available).

According to Alistair Cockburn, this amount of period is defined by the unit of measure chosen to be used in the Y axis. The coarser is the unit, the longer is the blackout period.

Here we have an example extracted from Chapter 3 of “Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams” (Alistair Cockburn, Addison-Wesley, 2004).

This charts are based in the "house packing" example. The chart in the left shows in Y axis the number of floors. The chart in the right shows the number of rooms (a much smaller unit of measure).

We can notice that using floors as a measure unit we would take almost 15 days to discover that packing would take much more time than expected. Using rooms as a measure unit, you would take only 3 days to discover it.

So, keep one thing in mind: choose the smaller non-expandable unit of measure, because the smaller the unit is, the shorter the initial black-out period will be.

Gremio or Inter fan?

My first post for this blog couldn't be anything else other than Gremio and Inter fans at TW Brasil.

If it wasn't enough having the majority of TWers in Porto Alegre supporting Inter (Suzi, Camila, open eyes :)), most of Gringos are becoming Inter fans too. I've heard that it is like "Mary following the others"? or perhaps because Inter was in "good" phase when they come down here (playing Libertadores - league that Gremio has 2 throphies already)? also Inter fans took them to VIP box in the stadium and they got facinated?

Anyway, I trust and love Gremio, no matter the number of Inter fans that we *have* to live everyday with, what matters is the quality of gremistas that we have in the office and the ones that are coming on board. Go Go Gremio!!! :-P

Gringos' brazilian names

Gringos name's sometimes are just so hard to pronounce. Then to make them more easy to say and also to make them even more Brazilian we give them some brazilian cool names.

Here is the list that I can rememeber:

Hippie = Jorge

Amit = Amiltom

Jimmy = Jaime

Tarek = Túlio

Pat = Patricio

Mike = Michel

Joanne = Joana

Some of them are still anxious for their brazilian names :-)

btw, we do have to call them with their "new temp names" wherever we are.

Real "gaúcho" barbecue