In a recent estimation workshop, one of the participants asked, “How do we estimate something we’ve never done before?” “Is it a feature or a project?” I asked. “A feature,” she said. “How do you do things now?” Based on her previous comments in the workshop, I suspected she was pretty good at what she […]
If you’ve been paying attention to agile at all, you’ve heard these terms: pairing and swarming. But what do they mean? What’s the difference? When you pair, two people work together to finish a piece of work. Traditionally, two developers paired. The “driver” wrote the piece of work. The other person, the “navigator,” observed the
Workshop: Create Your Successful Agile (& Lean) Project Workshop Workshop Objective: Learn how to deliver value as a collaborative team. You’ll use agile and lean principles, and experiment with various practices to help you find your agile approach. Workshop Overview: As you practice with your project, you’ll learn how to create your collaborative team. Then,
I will be at Agile 2014 next week. So will about 1800 other people. I bet some of you are looking for new jobs. Would you like an Open Jam session about looking for a new job? I can conduct a timeboxed, up to one-hour session about Manage Your Job Search. If you only want
In preparation for my talk, Agile Projects, Programs, and Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required, I have created a Minimum Reading List for an Agile Transition. Note the emphasis on minimum. I could have added many more books to this list. But the problem I see is that people don’t read anything. They think they
I have an article in a new online magazine, Women Testers, the July 2014 edition. My article is called “Why Testing?” When I was a tester or a developer, I asked many questions. As a project manager, program manager or consultant, I still ask many questions. One of those is the Why question. This article
In my role as technical editor for agileconnection.com, I have the opportunity to read many terrific articles. I also have the opportunity to review and comment on those articles. One such comment is what do teams do? Do they “gel” or do they “jell”? Gel is what you put in hair. When you “gel” things,
Do you read Rob Lambert’s Social Tester? He’s been blogging about his experiences finding candidates. Some of my favorites: Certifications are Creating Lazy Hiring Managers Here is a quote from that post: You cannot presume someone with a certification is a talented tester. You also cannot presume someone with no certification is a rubbish tester.
See Three Tips to Streamline Your Hiring, Part 1, Three Tips to Streamline Your Recruiting, Part 2, and Three Tips to Streamline Your Phone Screens, Part 3 to see our story to here. When my client talked about his interviews for developers, he said, “I interview people on the phone and then ask the candidate
Standup or Handoff? You have a geographically distributed agile team. You have team members more than six hours apart. (If you’re not sure how far apart people are, take a look at Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Teams). How do you have standups that mean something, when people have completed work, can commit to work, and