Daniel Ruoso

Sometimes I hear people saying they're going to use the "PMBoK methodology" to drive some project. One of this days I saw a controversy about an article at iMasters (brazillian web-related e-magazine) where the author was criticizing agile methodologies, and in the comments section that also was repeated.

I think it's worth to clarify: PMBoK is not a project management methodology, in fact, the acronym stands for Project Management Book of Knowledge, which describes a common vocabulary in the knowledge areas related to project management.

Putting it simple, nothing stops you from using what is described in PMBoK to manage a Scum or eXtreme Programming project the same way that nothing stops you from managing a non-agile project and still being far from PMBoK recomendations.

The greatest value of PMBoK, to me, is to stablish the 8 axes that any project manager (in any area) should pay attention for. The axes are:

• Scope
• Time
• Cost
• Quality
• Risk
• Human Resources
• Communication
• Procurement

The book itself says that it's up to the project manager to define how much each of this axes are relevant to the success of the project. The same way, despite PMBoK describing a set of processes in each of the axes and each of the phases of the project management, that processess have a role of equalizing the "language" for the project managers, since it lists almost all the possible procedures in project management. It's up, again, to the managr to decide which one will generate value to the project

In summary: methodolodies are always specific to the theme, and to clarify, the curring line, imho, for agile vs non-agile methodologies is in the previous definition of scope vs the definition of a floating scope where some small part of the software already generates a lot of value. If you say your're using agile and your project doesn'g fit here, you're just butying your head in the sand..

The recent message from Gabor Szabo for all the leaders of the perl groups sounded me like a reminder of something I've been in debt for a long time, which is to get things moving in the local group. Let me start doing a small history of the group.

The group was officially created in 2005, as an attempt to gather more attention to Perl in the local Free Software community. We were sharing the social meetings with the local debian group, that gathered at the Benfica mall in alternate saturdays to drink some beer. I was able to mention Perl once or twice.

At the same time, I presented some talks in local free software events, in special FLISOL, which also served as advertising, as much as I didin't see the impact at the time, I was surprised to see a Perl workshop in one of the first editions of SESOL (Free Software Week, today CESOL - Free Software Congress), someone else was presenting it.

The main problem of this process is that at the time I had my dailly job in Java J2EE, which limited my possibilities in effective contribution to the language (my uploads to CPAN have a gap from that period).

But in fact, I think the major problem is connected to the dismantling of a team that, I believe, had meanings to move a local group by its own. This team worked for Inova, which was my first job which primary function was Perl programming -- in a way, Alex (company's director) was kinda my mentor in the learning of the language, as he was the one pushing me into uploading my first CPAN module: Server::FastPL (kind of FastCGI but for regular scripts using Unix Sockets, today only on backpan).

Inova had a Perl lab with around 12 people, that developed the webmail service Velop, which supported around 300k active email accounts around 2000. This team learnt and matured toguether in web development, and even got its own framework, not MVC, but got it's job done..

This team was dismantled around the end of 2001, and with that went the opporunity to have an active group here in Fortaleza.

In 2006 I moved to Lisbon, where I lived until 2008, which also didn't help with the local group, which didn't even have a leader at that period.

When I came back to Fortaleza, otoh, I came back working on Perl again, and most importantly, I came back in a good coding rythm, I came back as a SMOP developer (Perl 6 implementation) and I came back as the core developer for the Sistema de Atendimento, a Perl Catalyst solution using SOAP over XMPP, which was published in the Brazillian Public Software Portal, and was already mentioned by the Lula president and by Rogério Santanna (logistics and IT secretary for the planning ministery).

This is getting thing moving again around here. At the same time I got into a devel team at the Prefeitura de Fortaleza to maintain the Sistema de Atendimento and there I'm doing my lobby to the spread of Perl, and the result is that two people are already inside the Catalyst world, and getting excited about it, there's the prospect of a workshop in a local college as well as we're already going to have a Epitáfio hackathon at CESOL. And, one other day, when I was in a meeting at CGDT, I saw one person passing with a copy of "Programming Perl".

Soon we should have support from Oktiva, which uses Catalyst to deploy its sites, to have a new home to Fortaleza.PM. I think I'm on the right track.