Research in progress paper to Agile 2008

I've just posted a research paper at Agile 2008.
It describes partially the work I have been doing in my masters. I will post the abstract since it was not supposed to be in the paper itself:

Agile methods and open source software communities share similar cultures with different approaches to overcome problems. Although several people are involved in both worlds, neither agile methodologies are not as strong as they could be in open source communities nor are those communities known for their collaboration in agile methods. This work intends to identify and expose the obstacles that separate those communities in order to extract the best of them and improve both sides with suggestions of tools and development processes.

I think it might have been better but I am quite happy with it. I will correct a few details thanks to Barbara Dieu, my former english teacher who is responsible only the correct parts of my writing, no the bad ones (I learned those on my own).

Agile 2008 has two very good proposals related to the work I am doing. The first one is from Mary Poppendieck (very strong player in the Lean community) and Christian Reis from Async that I had the pleasure to meet about a month ago. I am pretty confident they will get accepted and I will surely be there to see this. Another work that is related to their but kind of opposed to it in the sense that it uses Open source as a basis instead of Agile is this one by Dennis Byrne and Naresh Jain. I think (and hope) that it will get through also so I can attend to both and get some more material for my masters.

Finally, I also submitted a session proposal with Danilo Sato, about the Coding Dojo he started and I'm keeping running with a couple friends here in São Paulo. Since it is a very long session, we're not sure people will understand the benefits of it or difference with previous Dojo experiences. Let's wait an see if people like the idea or not. I also helped Danilo submit another proposal related to the Dojo with Mariana Bravo and they are bit more confident since this session was a much shorter one. Let's hope both happen. And for now, feedback for all of those is welcome. See you!

A research about developers' education failures

I'm working with a group of teachers, students and ex-students of my university with agile methods, as I already mentioned. In mid December, we've got a project approved with the Brazilian government to research what are the greatest problems that companies find in their developer's education.
We've set up a nice rails (Ruby on Rails) application with our questions to interview project leaders/managers in all sorts of companies. So far we have interviewed around 20 companies in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Campinas (our very small Silicon Valley) and Sao Carlos. There is no clear problem so far but I will be able to give you more information once we compile all the data to generate our report.

This report will be delivered in about 2 or 3 weeks with our conclusions to the responsible institution. Then we hope to request more funding to develop the courses that the companies selected and offer them. The best part of this is that all the material we produce will be available under a Creative Commons license in our website: www.agilcoop.org.br.

Note that the bad part of this is that all will be in Portuguese which means people will have to translate this work to be able to use it somewhere else. Since it's an open research, I hope I will be able to post a link with our report. As they say:
To be continued...