Haihua Lu

Haihua Lu is my Chinese name. Alex is my English name which is more familiar to my colleagues.

I was born in Shanghai 1977 and I am the only child of my parents. I was very curious when I was a child. I once teared down the only desk clock of my family and managed to put it back finally. But the clock never works after that because I can't find the proper places for some gears.

I built my own radio in high school and at almost same time I started to learn basic computer programing. It opened the whole new world for me; and I thought it's very cool and decided it could be my career in future. Besides computer, I also like to play football with my friends in the playground or in the alley.

In 2000, I graduated from TongJi University as a Bachelor of Computer Science. I started my career in IT industry right after my graduation from university. I learned and practiced extreme programing with some of my colleagues in 2000 - 2004 . We tried pair programming, test driven (unit test) and refactoring in our daily works. I thought pair programing is the most important practice to me because I learned a lot from my coworkers by using this best practice. After that I believe it’s the best way to do knowledge sharing.

Around the end of 2004, I quit my job and started to be one self-employed until 2006/07. Although I didn’t achieve my expected result, but I did spend much quality time with my parents during that period.

I became one software engineer of Orient Overseas Container Line Limited (OOCL) from 2006/07. OOCL has five Information System Development Centers (a.k.a ISDC) around world. Shanghai center is one of them. We have about 100 developers in Shanghai center and our focus is building Supply Chain Management System. In next 11 years, I serve in the same team. My role started from Software Engineer, and then Senior Software Engineer and now I am the Team Lead of my team.

When I was software engineer, I was the core member of application client group. I spent several weeks to master C# which I was never used before I joined this company. About half year later, I got promotion because of my hard work and good attitude. After that, I became the coordinator of C# client group which was one virtual team in Shanghai center and members were from different application teams. In that days, Client/Server architecture was the majority. As a coordinator, my job was to share/spread information among teams and setup non-functional goals for team members and encourage them to achieve these goals. By the way, these goals were not defined by me; we made brainstorming for them. Back to my own team, I started to touch server side coding works which was built in Java and I was quite familiar with it before I joined OOCL.

In 2009, we (people in Shanghai center) decided to make some big change on our current development process – waterfall process. We need to speed up the velocity of delivery. Agile/Scrum came into our sight. We attended many Agile/Scrum related events held in Shanghai, like Scrum Gathering, Agile Tour, Agile Community Activities and workshops. We also read articles and books to understand more about Agile and Scrum. Some practices started to try in our team. BA(PO) did Sprint Planning with Dev team and Dev team split stories into Sprint backlog (actually, we have similar meeting when we used waterfall process). Daily Scrum (Standup Meeting) was the very new activity started in our team; it makes the communication transparent and encourages dev team to make commitment. We even made the daily review to make sure we can get achievement in every day.  Retrospective meeting was the next ceremony we adopted. Team members make review for the Sprint and decide what should be eliminated, what should be kept and what should be changed. Meanwhile, we shortened the iteration period from 3 months to 1 month. We are continuing on reviewing and adjusting regularly.

I met my wife in OOCL. Her name is Angela. She is not the member of ISDC but from some other biz department. We happened to be the same team members of the annual outing sponsored by company in 2007. We got familiar after this trip and had some other interactions in other events. Someday, I rescued her home computer from the virus disaster which I thought is the trigger of our love journey.