I bet your list of things to do is overflowing. You have a ton of work. You know you need to do it. And, if you’re like me, some of it is work you don’t want to do. I’m not excited about cleaning my office. I have much more interesting work: articles, books, client proposals […]
When I teach agile, I explain I like small and short stories. I want to see value in the product every day. Many developers can’t do that. That’s because they have interdependencies with other teams—not developers on their team, but other teams. They can’t implement in the way the picture next to this shows: small,
I spoke with a Scrum Master the other day. He was concerned that the team didn’t finish their work in one 2-week iteration. He was thinking of making the iterations three weeks. I asked what happened in each iteration. Who wrote the stories and when, when did the developers finish what, and when did the testers
Update: I titled it Predicting the Unpredictable. I have finished the content for Essays on Estimation. But, I need a new title. The book is more than loosely coupled essays. It reads like a real book, with progression and everything. I have a number of ideas. They are (in no particular order): Predicting the Unpredictable:
One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working
If you’ve hired new people or transferred people into your group, you know that they’re not immediately productive when they start. If you’re lucky, they start to be useful in a month, but you most likely spend closer to six months or even a year before they raise the entire group’s productivity. One technique for