I felt pretty self-conscious as I sat down to lunch at WHO.  I was dining with about 20 academic nutritionists and I’d just realized that they had all chosen salads and water whilst I tucked into a particularly fatty steak, chips and bottle of fizzy orange (followed by a particularly obscene bar of chocolate).  I was suffering this professional scrutiny of my lamentable eating habits for the Optifood project, a WHO initiative in which b-i is working in close collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the USAID-funded Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance II (FANTA-2) project to create a diet analysis tool.

The project has pretty lofty aims – it hopes to revolutionize the way that nutritionists formulate recommendations to place their work on a sound mathematical footing.  It came as quite a surprise to me to learn that professional nutritionists have very little in the way of existing tools to help formulate food-based dietary recommendations.  Just how do they formulate food-based recommendations for a particular group of children who are deficient in iron and once identified how do they know that the iron-rich foods they recommend won’t leave the children deficient in another key nutrient?  Such analysis can be done but it is often very lengthy and time-consuming – finding just the right combination of foods to provide the required amount of up to 20 key nutrients.  It’s akin to solving several dozen equations at the same time and finding the best compromise between each.

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In today’s information technology projects, all project managers know the critical importance of performing important code coverage on their team’s code. Indeed, this investment is costly in terms of development time, but the return on investment is proven since we know that the real main cost of the application is the one for its maintenance, and not the one for its development.

On their end, the developers have also understood that testing their code allows them to detect errors in their programming much more quickly and to insure themselves that their work is of good quality. The tests also allow the developers to guarantee that the behavior of their code will remain consistent even if another member of the development team had to correct or modify it.

The testing also forces the engineer to simplify his or her code in order to make it easier to test, keeping true to the leitmotiv “Keep it simple.” The methods are short, have limited responsibilities, and are less complex. By keeping things simple, it is also easier for the developer to Mock the behaviors for which the part with tested code is not responsible.

This article will, therefore, talk about “Mocking” but from an unusual perspective.

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Two years ago, I was involved in a project for a luxury company. The previous project manager had used Scrum as a tool to manage the project and the deliverables. After a quick introduction to this methodology, I used his tools (mainly Excel) to implement Scrum.

Today I would like to reuse Scrum in another project, but I wanted to see if it was possible to use Microsoft Project instead of Excel to manage Scrum artifacts such as Product backlog, Sprint Backlog and the Burn down chart.

Note that this article will not explain the methodology; you can check this article in Wikipedia or watch this interesting video by Hamid Shojaee for a quick course on Scrum.

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