A few weeks ago, Peter Armstrong interviewed me for Leanpub, to ask me why I enjoyed writing on Leanpub. That podcast is up now on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast page. What’s very funny is that the interview is a few weeks old. I had no idea he was going to post it right after I […]
Long ago, when I was single, one of my managers refused to give me new development work because I was dating a guy who lived out of the state. “You’ll go marry him and then where will I be?” he asked. “I’ll be down a developer.” “If you don’t give me good work to do,
In my role as technical editor for the Agile Journal and as a reviewer for my trusted colleagues, I have the opportunity to read drafts of articles and some books. I see some troublesome behavior. I know it because I exhibit it. In all cases, the author receives feedback the author doesn’t like, but doesn’t
I’m offering a public workshop about Transitioning to Agile in Stockholm, May 28-29, 2012, in English. Developers’ lives change when you transition to agile. Product owners’ lives change. Managers lives’ change. The organization’s culture changes. And, when a project and an organization transitions to agile, the testers and test managers lives’ change, too. Through our
Developing and Nurturing Respect in Geographically Distributed Teams Joseph, a tester, was reading an email from a developer in Germany. He exploded out of his chair, and ran to the product owner. “Those people have no respect for us! How can they ask us to do this?? Don’t they realize what they are asking for?
I’m offering public project portfolio management workshops in Sao Paulo, Brazil on May 8-9, partnering with Adaptworks. I will be speaking in English. This is a full 2-day workshop. On May 30, I will be in Stockholm, offering a special one-day version of the workshop, partnering with Citerus. I will also be speaking in English
There’s an article in the Huffington Post about asking candidates to turn over their Facebook login credentials, so the interviewers can see their “private” pages. If you provide your login credentials, your private Facebook pages are no longer private, are they? I have a difficult time understanding why an interviewer wants this information. Is the
When I teach interviewing, I teach these approaches to interviewing: Let the behavior-description questions sell the candidate on the company. Don’t try to “sell” the candidate on the company or the people. It sounds like a used car salesperson or a bad blind date. It leaves a bad taste in the candidate’s mouth. (Yes, those
As a consultant, I want the flexibility to adapt my work to take advantage of opportunities that might arise in a given week–to write an article or blog post, or to propose a project to a new client. And, while I try to plan a week’s worth work, I need the flexibility to adapt my
I’m tech-editing an article for the Agile Journal. I’m having a discussion with the author about the words “productivity” and “throughput.” I believe that what we measure in agile teams is throughput, the number of features through the team over time. I don’t think we measure productivity, the number of features per person or per