T-496 days for New Horizons … brings back a lot of memories of precious friends, books and a noisy generator during a power failure :)

Funny what your brain pulls from the memory folders when you are waiting for VMs to spin up in Azure during an evening troubleshooting session. In 2007 my colleague Geoff Bruce and I got together to discuss the concept of writing an ALM book that would be read by all of the developers, testers and leads in the teams we were helping to embrace Agile, Scrum and get visibility of progress, or lack thereof. Give an ALM book to a developer and it is either turned into a mouse pad or used to raise their monitor by 1-2 centimetres

Most of the techies were interested in space missions and in those days all of us were watching the Firefly TV series and the Serenity movie. “Bingo” … Geoff and I decided to write a science fiction story. The story included teams building and flying in their own space craft to then planet (now dwarf planet) Pluto.

It was a nightmare to convince the leadership and get approval for the “crazy” idea. It was fun and a privilege to work with Geoff, and interesting to see how our artist Tony converted the stories within the story to images.

However, it was amazing to watch the techies plough through the story, not realising that they were actually reading an ALM book   The final success was witnessed when the techies released their solution to production. As expected, we had a power outage in Johannesburg and we had a noisy power generator on the balcony delivering power to machines and emergency lighting, and a very passionate and competent leader (Margie) continuously motivating her sleep deprived team! We should really have captured the atmosphere on pictures, but unfortunately the Smartphone with the camera feature was not mainstream at the time.

Anyone recognise this phone? My reliable, big and heavy companion at the time we wrote the book.

 

If you visit https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html you will note that the New Horizons space craft is getting closer to Pluto and is scheduled to arrive in 2015, after 10.5 years in space. A phenomenal adventure!

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ newhorizons/main/index.html	https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/ 141388main_06pd0081.jpg	https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/gallery/ 137120main_hst_pluto1_br.jpg

We carved out two other books for the teams and the ALM community in South-Africa … enjoy the memories:

 

Thanks to BBD for giving me permission to share these memories and the book downloads with the community.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2014
  @Margie, a truly awesome time with an awesome team .... and we shipped that night :)

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2014
  The comment has been removed