I write a roughly monthly email newsletter, the Pragmatic Manager. I (finally) posted Refocusing: Emerging from the Split Focus Schedule Game. Yes, I’m working on the July issue now. Enjoy!
I have a Stickyminds column up, Does Exploratory Testing Have A Place On Agile Teams? The column arose out of an email conversation I had with Jon Bach. Please leave comments there.
Many hiring managers are looking for initiative, especially for agile team members. (In agile, the team members self-organize, which means they are looking for ways to do work better and to solve problems without requiring management’s involvement.) I was thinking about initiative how to look for it, and I realized that at least some people
Dwayne’s comment on my post, Architecting from the Features, made me realize I hadn’t provided an example of how I’d changed the book. Head slap on me! One of my rules of writing, which I use when I’m revising because I rarely remember as I’m writing the first draft, is to explain what I’m writing
I’m writing the portfolio management book, and I just finished a whole big re-architecture. I’m so excited. I realize most people aren’t that excited about a rearchitecture :-), especially not of a book in progress. But I am, because I took my own advice. When I started writing the book, I had several partly done
On the long weekends, Mark and I make a concerted effort to clean up the house. That means I have to address all my little piles: go through them, recycle what I can, throw out what can’t be recycled, file others, figure out what to do with the rest. While Mark was helping me bring
Lisa has a nice post, How to Hire a Manager – A Time Tested Recipe. She’s close. I’m not so sure about the “humble” part, and I would add something like “advocates for team.” But the piece Lisa missed is integrity. Without integrity, the other qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills are useless. To be fair,
I’ve been wanting to start podcasting for a while. Now, I finally seem to have enough tools that I can do it! Thanks to Clarke‘s suggestion, I’m using libsyn, and I do believe iTunes is syndicating the podcast also. So, here is the link to my first podcast: Timeboxes Help Multisite Teams on libsyn. I
I led a 90-minute Hiring for an Agile Team workshop at AgileItx! this past week. I ask each team in the workshop to call out a candidate’s quality, preference, or non-technical skill that they look for in a team. One of the teams said, “teamwork.” Well, teamwork means a lot of things to lots of
One of the nice things about the social networking sites such as LinkedIn, is that they allow me to reconnect with people I worked with years ago. I recently re-met a colleague from my undergraduate days, and a colleague I worked with 25 years ago. I mentioned to one of these colleagues’ peers that I’d