Ever do the retrospective dance? You know the one, where at the end of the sprint everybody plays all the retrospective games: start-stop-continue, timeline, word-pong, or sprint-painting — and then nothing in your team actually changes? Maybe somebody takes notes, there’s an “action list”, you create new stories, or whatever, but the next sprint there you are with the same items all over again? That’s a fun game, right? [Learn more][1].
[1]: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/09/how-to-really-m-2.php
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Fun Game, Games, Painting, Php, Pong, Software Teams, Sprint
One of the things that fascinates me most is the difference between theory and practice. In theory, you have this value structure from the organization — what’s important to it, what the plans are for next year, what fires need to be put out. But in practice, things get messy quickly. [Learn more][1].
[1]: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/09/how-to-really-m-1.php
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Fires, Php, Software Teams, Theory And Practice, Value Structure
Lately there has been a lot of ink spilled over how to measure technology teams. Small startup teams are reaching the point where they want some kind of metrics, and big-company teams are using so many metrics that they desperately need to cut back to something that makes more sense. Managers would also like to know what to do once they read metrics. Is more training required? Tougher management? Longer hours? Shorter hours? More people? Less people? We’re nerds. We’re really good at creating lots of charts, tables, and reports. What we’re not so good at is using them for something useful. [Learn more][1].
[1]: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/09/how-to-really-m.php
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Lot Of Ink, Metrics, Nerds, Php, Reaching The Point, Software Teams, Technology Teams
While Agile methods have enabled organizations to understand and to adopt more disciplined software development practices, Agile can be taken advantage of by software teams in ways that can lead to less desirable results and even project failure. This presentation tells the story of an agile project staffed with veteran agile practitioners that failed catastrophically, and the principals found in Lean Software Development that helped explain the failure, as well as ways to avoid the same failures in the future. [Learn more][1].
[1]: http://www.tvagile.com/2009/08/21/5-things-i-learned-from-lean-that-could-have-saved-my-last-agile-project/
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Agile Methods, Desirable Results, Lead, Lean Software, Presentation, Principals, Project Failure, Software Development Practices, Software Teams
Last week I did a post called “The Hard Reality”. I made the point that anything you build… any document you create… that doesn’t result in revenue for the business… is wasting time and money. Personally, unless you build software as a hobby……
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Absolute, Great Software, High Quality Software, Making Money, People, Performance Time, Prerequisite, Quality Constraints, Quality Performance, Sake, Scope, Selling Software, Software Metrics, Software Teams, Time And Money, Time To Market, value, velocity, Wasting Time
A short while back I invited Mishkin Berteig to come to Waterloo to talk about agility. I was looking for something that would have a broad appeal to developers, testers and so on but would also have depth. Mishkin drew a full house and gave a great presentation on delivering successful agile projects. He covered [...]
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Agile, Agile Methods, Agility, Baha, Design Decision, Email Signature, Financial Application, Full House, Honesty, Human Virtues, Insane Hours, integrity, Leadership, Leadership Issues, Little White Lies, Llah, Personal Honesty, Refactoring, Scrum Master Training, Software Teams, Speaking The Truth, Stand Ups, Technical Aspects, Technical Decision, truth, Truthfulness