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Kiril's web log
Some shots from this morning 
Thursday, December 28, 2006, 01:47 PM - Personal
Today I got some nice shots of my dog while we were on a walk in the mountain.

There seems to be a lot I need to learn about taking pictures of moving objects.

Click on the picture below to open the album in Picasa Web


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On the way to become CMMI Instructor 
Thursday, December 21, 2006, 11:15 AM - CMMI, Personal
The latest news about me is that I took the way to becoming instructor for the Introduction to CMMI course. I already attended the course in November in Frankfurt and am now looking to schedule and conduct my observation. For this I am partnering with the Bulgarian ESI Center .

Perhaps many would like to know more about the Instructor course. Well the course is superb in my opinion. We had excellent trainers that have been working with CMMI for many years and had very deep understanding of complex concepts. The other important part is that you learn a lot about training by watching the instructors as well as the other students.


The model training



Even though the training is not aimed towards the model you do learn a lot about CMMI in these 3 days. To learn at this level about CMMI one must have very good idea of the process areas and the discussion will bring new level of understanding of the model. Some of the things discussed include Process Area relationships, evolution of concepts through the levels of the model, better understanding of how to read and apply CMMI and last but not least the concept of institutionalization.


Trainer training



The other aspect of importance to me was to acquire or enrich my trainer skills and better understand what it takes to teach the course. Again the experience and professionalism of the trainers helped a lot.
The intro training is very fine balance between interactive and engaging training experience and racing against the clock. The training gives you some guidelines how to avoid loosing time, save time if you lost some and how to keep the discussion to the point and avoid distractions.
On the trainer training one is able to see two experienced trainers and several other individuals in my case all form different cultural background. This combined with the ability to experiment with different approaches makes the training valuable experience that sets guidelines for further improvement.


I guess some of you will be interested to take the instructor course yourself and are wondering how difficult is the training and what preparation is required. The answer is that one needs to know the model well and spend a week or two in preparation on the model and few days for completion of the pre-class assignment. The training itself is intensive and not easy, but the instructors do help a lot and aim to have all successful classes. During the course there is one examination and several presentations for assessing the capabilities of the candidate instructors. These should not be a problem provided one knows the model well and is serious about becoming instructor. Indeed during the presentations you will be encouraged to experiment and try out approaches you would not otherwise attempt in front of audience.

Finally if you are new to CMMI and would like to learn more get in touch!

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Updates! 
Thursday, July 27, 2006, 10:28 PM - Personal
Hello from me. So to bring a quick update to all who is peeking at the site. I have made few remarkable achievements for me. One is that I finally presented my thesis work and this completes my studies for Masters degree !!!

The thesis work itself is a web site and IS for managing a scientific conference - Computer Science 2006. You can see the web site by following the link to Conference Website. So far it is running successfully for over a month and we have around 120 article abstracts submitted.

The system is simple and flexible, so if anyone wants to host a conference and needs an IS let me know.

On the process side few interesting things too.

I received from SEI the Watts Humphrey book "Winning with software". It is very interesting book. Gives a good perspective what ingridients make successful software projects and introduces the TSP.

There are as well some interesting developments and I may soon be helping people take on the path to improvement.
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Picutes of Parade 
Sunday, May 7, 2006, 04:50 PM - Personal
6-th of May is a holiday of the Army here in Bulgaria, it is the day of St. George.

I were to the parade and took some quick picutres. Bad part is I still do not have a telephoto lens.

In the begingin there was speech by the president and lots of soldiers and yet more observers.


Then the parade was open by a helicopter.



... and several training planes..


... then some real figther jets, though a bit antiquated...



Then a lot of tanksand soldiers passed by ...



...and finally all packed and went back.
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Photos 
Friday, March 24, 2006, 09:44 PM - Personal
Well it has been a while since my last post. So what is new.....

I have not done much new things on process related activities at least not remarkable enough to put here. But I bought a Digital SLR camera (Konica Minolta Dynax 5D). It is very nice camera.

I am learning now how to operate it and am taking lots of ugly pictures. Below is one of my best shots so far.


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