At last week’s Agile 2006 conference, I led a tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team.” I made a statement that some of the participants challenged: Using puzzles and riddles discriminate against anyone who isn’t a (middle-upper class) white American suburban male. (I’d forgotten the middle-upper class part when I was leading the session.) So,
If you’ve ever tried to look at my articles page, you know how hard it was to find anything. Well, my updated version of the site is finally up. I have a few broken links, which I expect to fix, hardware willing, in the next week or so. If you find anything broken, do let
Last week at the Agile conference, a participant in my “Hiring for an Agile Team” session asked how to know if the people she was interviewing–who had no experience as part of an agile team–might actually work in the team. As she said, “I can’t wait for the perfect person. I can train, but I
A couple of weeks ago at our Managing One-on-One workshop, Esther and I were teaching about how to give feedback. Here’s the “recipe”: Create an opening to deliver feedback. Describe the behavior or result in a way the person can hear. State the impact using “I” language. Make a request for changed behavior. When
Also this week, over at the AYE Conference, my Starting With Rolling Wave Planning is up.
I’ve had technical debt on my mind recently, so I’ve been writing about it. This week, the good folks at Stickyminds published my column, An Incremental Technique to Pay Off Testing Technical Debt. Enjoy!
I coached a manager who’d hired seven people in the previous year–and had fired five of them. His manager was ready to toss him out, too. Instead, the senior manager decided this manager needed coaching about how to hire people. When I asked the manager about his interviewing style, he explained that he used what
So you thought the project was on schedule. And now, someone in power has requested you finish the project earlier. Earlier than you can manage with the people you’ve got.You have a bunch of options, including moving to 2-4 week iterations. But that’s something I would normally discuss on Managing Product Development 🙂 So, here
I was at the Better Software conference last week, met a bunch of great people (including Jim Shore and Joel Spolsky). Another important person is someone who’s not famous–and important nevertheless. A senior tester explained her situation and asked for some help. “Most of our testers can’t read code. And, we don’t know what
A reader was reading Characteristics of Great Project Managers and asked, “Do you feel that to be a great Project Manager one need not know completely about the technology involved?” No. Project managers need to understand enough about the technology so that they can make tradeoff decisions (or help product owners make tradeoff decisions) about