Agile
There are 32 entries for the tag
Agile
In the New Testament in Luke 4:23 Jesus speaks of a proverb, “Physician, Heal Thyself.” What, you may ask, does this have to do with being a good developer or a good ScrumMaster? In my experience, it has quite a bit to do with it, actually, and recently, it’s had far more meaning to me than it used to have in the past. In large part, my own increased awareness has stemmed from reading Lyssa Adkins fantastic book, “Coaching Agile Teams.” My Command and Control Roots My dad owns several independent ......
When teams are first introduced to Stand-Ups, many teams will dread them. Their thought is, “Oh great! Yet another meeting to consume a bunch of my time!” I certainly understand this sentiment, and if run incorrectly, stand-ups are certainly painful and can be a waste of time. Stand-ups are fundamentally about coordination between team members and nobody else. To restate that, stand-ups are for the pigs, not the chickens! This post is to help you understand what a good stand-up is and how best to ......
Is technical talent more important than Team Dynamic? I don’t think so. Read on and tell me if you agree. The Art of the Interview For my job, I conduct quite a few technical interviews. Rarely will I have a week go by where I’m not digging into someone’s brain trying to find out what they know and how they think. However, understanding their technical knowledge is only part of the challenge. We also must understand whether or not they code quickly, and whether or not they they will be a good fit ......
Recently, I gave a presentation on Flow at Agile Executives. It was a fun meeting and a fun topic and lead to several realizations on my part. First, when Alistair Cockburn is in the audience, I get a bit nervous. Second, Lean and Agile aren’t incompatible, they’re complimentary. Let me explain. The Sterility of Lean Lean tends to think of people as nothing more than metrics. Cogs in the grand scheme of things. Little focus is placed on the human aspect of software development when talking about ......
You’ve all seen this team, maybe you’ve even been on this team. I certainly know that I have! What kind of team, you might ask? It’s the team that is simply dysfunctional. Many reasons can exist for a team that isn’t working, and team dysfunction is a complex thing that can’t necessarily be isolated into a simple formula that will always work to make people function well on a team. Cynefin Recently, I attended RallyOn in Boulder with Rally Software Development. This was one of the best user conferences ......
He who fails to plan, plans to fail. – unknown In many ways, one of the most dreaded tasks of every iteration is the Sprint Planning Meeting. This meeting is a very important meeting, but many, many things can go wrong and make this meeting a very long and very painful experience. However, this meeting is critical to the success of the team. If the team doesn’t know what they’re doing at the beginning of the iteration, how can they commit to getting the work done? To hopefully help ease the pain ......
Leadership Veracity consultants are an interesting group of people. We have some of the best and brightest people working to help our customers deliver great products to their customers. While there are a lot of consulting shops in the industry, most are not like Veracity Solutions. Many shops simply want to put a body into a chair. They offer cheap hourly full time employee replacements (contractors) instead of people that can actually help their business be successful. Veracity, on the other hand, ......
An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow ......
Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However, ......
With the release of Internet Explorer 9 RC the browser looks to be in a usable state. So far, my experience has been positive. However, one area where I am having problems is when people are using the jQueryUI library. Versions older than 1.8 cause IE 9.0 to be unable to drag and drop. This is a real pain, especially at sites like Agile Zen, where dragging and dropping is a primary bit of functionality. Now that IE 9 is a release candidate, we’ll see how quickly these things improve. I expect things ......
A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization. Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company. This is unfortunate. Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner! ......
Your Team Needs You The introduction of Agile into a corporation has many impacts on the team, and many impacts to the executives leading those teams. In my experience, many Agile projects fail, not because the team did their best, but because the executives that should have been supporting the team failed to do so. This lack of support can be manifested in many ways. I’ve seen executives fail by doing the following: Failure to help with the prioritization process Failure to pay attention to the ......
With the start of the new year, I’m starting new responsibilities at Veracity. One responsibility that is staying constant is my love and evangelism of Agile. In fact, I’ll be spending more time ensuring that all Veracity teams are performing agile, Scrum specifically, in a consistent manner so that all of our clients and consultants have a similar experience. Imagine, if you will, working for a consulting company on a project. On that project, the project management style is Waterfall in iterations. ......
It’s been half a year since my last post. My how time flies. My new years resolution is to post more frequently. After a short stint at a local company, which shall remain nameless, I’m back at Veracity. Overall, Veracity Solutions is one of the best companies I’ve worked for, and I’m relieved to be back. So, this year, I’m going to do the following on my blog: Finish the Agile posts I started (IN MAY!!!). Blog about some code for a logging helper to make debug logging easier. Blog some resharper ......
So I’m taking a break from writing about other Agile stuff for a post. :) I’m still going to get back to the other subjects, but this is fun too. Something I’ve done quite a bit of is MSBuild and CI work. I’m experimenting with ways to improve what I’ve done in the past, particularly around database CI. Today, I developed a mechanism for starting from scratch with your database. By scratch, I mean blowing away the existing database and creating it again from a single command line call. I’m a firm ......
In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product. Note that I didn’t say about the product itself. Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners. Products only matter in relationship to their customers. If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product. ......
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult. All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner. Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities. I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers ......
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. I’ve often heard similar phrases around Scrum that clue me in to someone who doesn’t understand Scrum. The phrases go something like this: “We don’t do Agile because the idea of letting people just do whatever they want is wrong. We believe in a more structured approach.” (i.e. Work is Prison, and I’m the Warden!) “I love Agile. Agile lets us do whatever we want!” (Cowboy Agile?) “We’re Agile, but we use a process ......
For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all. It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005. I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it. I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t. I still didn’t understand the concept of a team. I still wanted to tell the team ......
I’m going to write my history with Agile here. That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read. Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews. I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early ......
So, I’ve been missing in action on this blog for quite some time. I need to rectify that. Part of the reason I’ve been absent is because I haven’t be able to talk about what I’m working on. A former client watches my blog rather closely, and although we accomplished many good things together, their culture is such that they really don’t like people to freely express their thoughts (you’ll note my blog posts stopped rather abruptly). I learned some really important lessons about Agile in the last ......
Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted. I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example. A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible. As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They ......
So, I was trying to explain to a new team about what an iteration is all about and came up with the following. Basically, this is the template that we use for our iterations. They weren't understanding the spoken and written language well, so I decided to try a different route for them: foreach(day in Iteration) { while(hoursWorked < day.WorkHours) { if (resolveImmediatelyDefectsE... || day.IsDefectDay || !uncompletedStoriesExist) { while (defectsExist) { defect = FindTopUnclaimedDefectInDef... ......
As a ScrumMaster, these are some of my pet peeves, in no particular order: Come late to meetings. Better yet, don't show up to the meeting, don't let anyone know that you're going to miss the meeting, and then get grumpy when the ScrumMaster asks you to not do it again. After all, the team doesn't really need to know what you're doing. Ignore the priority of stories set by the product owner. He loves not knowing what's going to be completed at the end of the iteration. Have side conversations during ......
Read this article today. We've had a couple of bad apples on our team so far, and they caused quite a bit of grief before they were removed. On an agile team, the team can't function if the apples are bad, and a single bad apple can cause much grief for the entire team. Technorati Tags: Agile ......
I've experienced this before, and all you can do is cry. This is why agile is so important. Instead of one person making all of the decisions, you have a team that makes the decisions. The "manager" tends to fall into just a product owner role, which is a good thing. In a team situation, the intern would have had a chance to put out his ideas as to a solution. In agile, they would have been in two to four week intervals, so rather than a 5 month development period, the stakeholders (i.e. the boss) ......
Read a great article on how to make agile fail today. Very entertaining and educational!
Had a problem with WCF that I thought I should blog about. We're in the scenario where we have a WCF service that needs to call another service to do some calculating and then return the result back to the client. For now, the service is hosted on the same server, but eventually, it could get expensive, so we'll push out that calculation to another server. The WCF configuration also has an endpoint address that is not the same as the base address reported to it by IIS; IIS is of course reporting ......
Oh that more people got this. Results Oriented Work Environment is a great concept (don't forget to read part 2 as well). A fundamental principal of Agile is that once you know what the goal is for the iteration, its up to the team to reach that goal by any means necessary. We don't really care when they work, as long as they get it done. We don't care where they work, as long as they get it done. The daily stand-up is a little at odds with this philosophy, but it's still important so that people ......
Previously, we'd been using a combination of Gemini and excel to manage our product. It was doing ok--generating burns in Excel was a pain, making things match Gemini was a pain, but at least something was happening. Because of the pain, we did some research into several different "Agile" management products such as VersionOne, XPlanner, and ScrumWorks. By far, the product that I liked the best was the Rally software product, which really needs a name but doesn't have one. Rally is also the most ......
I'm sure I'll receive at least one comment about my source for this, but the points that Steven Milloy makes are really quite good. The pattern of heating and cooling has been happening for the entire life of the planet. The world is a very big place, and we just don't know enough to say that we're changing the climate of the planet. As short as 30 years ago we had the popular press telling us we were going to have another ice age! Why would we think they're any more reliable now? If you want proof, ......
I hear quite a bit about Agile development methodologies and their use in business, but I'm beginning to wonder if anyone REALLY does Agile development. When I was CIO, we "sort-of" did agile development, that is we tried to enforce it, but because interference from on high, we typically had problems with iterations. The CEO didn't get Agile and was constantly saying things like, "Right, but can't we just insert a little time in the process for working on stuff that Marketing comes up with during ......