It seems strange to plan for Murphy’s Law, but if you don’t plan for risks, they will happen and they will turn into disasters. Some risks you can’t plan for, but many risks you can anticipate. I plan for some typical risks: I keep a power cord in my office, in my briefcase, in my […]
Shane Hastie and I taught our Working with Geographically Agile Teams workshop last week in Sydney. One of the questions that arose is “What tool do I use with a distributed team?” That same question is on the scrumdevelopment mailing list this week. Shane and I don’t know what is wrong with a whiteboard and
I love it when my readers challenge and question me. Thank you, Sam and Paulo for asking the equivalent of “Huh?” for Refactoring and Redesign are Different. You asked great questions. Let me see if I can answer. For me, the time issue is the lack of transparency about the time required to complete the
I’ve been working with people starting their transition to agile. They are all smart people—some of them scary-smart. And some of them are misusing some of the terminology. Some people are using the word “refactoring” to describe significant work, say, weeks or even months of effort of rework. Sorry, I call that redesign. To me,
I just finished the SDC conference in Wellington and am now in Sydney, ready to start SDC here tomorrow morning. One of the highlights for me was the experiential workshop Shane Hastie and I led about kanban Tuesday afternoon. We started with a backlog and a minimal board: not started, in process with a WIP
I’m in Las Vegas waiting to get on a plan to Los Angeles to go to New Zealand for SDC. I led a workshop yesterday for real estate project managers about how to define success and manage some of the early-in-the-project risks. We discussed issues such as the Hudson Bay start, context-free questions, release criteria,
For years, I have ranted against traffic lights as a way to discuss project status. That’s because on serial lifecycle projects, or on long projects, the traffic light was always yellow or red. And, because managers, especially senior managers expected the light to turn green by itself with no outside intervention. But Lisa Crispin noted
I still have estimation on the mind. I saw The Impact of Accidental Complexity on Estimates and I was wondering about the effect of management on bad code. Do managers sometimes force developers to write bad code by allowing technical debt? Jay’s third point implicates technical debt as a cause: Introducing technical debt increases accidental
In But I Need to Know When the Project Will Be Done, I talked about what you can do for estimating an agile project (do a gross estimate of the backlog, estimate your velocity, better your estimate every iteration and keep talking to your management). What if you have a contract? What if your managers
I was talking with a new-to-agile project manager, who said he needed take the first iteration to do design and estimation. I asked why. “Because our management needs to know exactly when the project will be done.” “Do you think your iteration of design and estimation will provide you a perfect estimate?” “Uh.” He paused.