One of the many valuable new ideas I picked up at Agile2007 is that of Communities of Practice (CoP). The basic principle is not ground breaking, but it puts a formal structure on a highly effective organizational pattern many people forget is available to them. The concept is deadly simple. People of like mind within your company come together […]
Read MoreAgileAdverts.org was a contest put on by Google for the Agile2007 conference. Imagine 2000 people in a room watching these videos on 20ft. screens and pissing themselves laughing (Google provides a free bar at all their gigs, after all). The hands down people’s choice award went to this video, Developer Abuse by Thought Works. Dang, […]
Read MoreI missed the opportunity to blog details of my last 2 days of the Agile2007 conference. One big reason is the volume of activity over the last 2 days plus the time I tool to go see Washington D.C. I had never been there before and I had to do the tourist rounds. The following […]
Read MoreA friend and apparent reader of this blog sent an email asking some questions about user stories and Scrum. The issues he raises are commonly encountered by teams beginning their Scrum implementations and I think the answers to these issues will be of use to all. After getting his permission to use his email as […]
Read MoreWhy, for the love of all that is holy, does my Dell 820 laptop not have a mechanical mute switch? Has it ever crossed the hardware engineer’s mind that maybe, just maybe, I will want to turn on my computer in a crowded conference hall in the middle of a lecture? And that maybe, just […]
Read MoreA Framework for Agile Leadership At the executive level of any well-run organization, effective communications and planning are helped by framing discussions with formal frameworks. The frameworks themselves vary by the thousands, and an entire industry of business books is propped up by this idea. The fundamental idea is that you put a project or […]
Read MoreWhile riding my BMW R1150GS through the Idaho back country last week, I listened to a lot of podcasts, Beastie Boys, and Asleep at the Wheel. Pretty much in that order. Far and away my favorite podcast right now is Ron Jacobs’ Arcast, and I listened to several episodes while power sliding the bike around corners and […]
Read MoreThe Absolute Worst Keynote at a Technical Conference. Ever. Today’s keynote was the the longest 90 minutes in my recent memory. That’s 1.5 hours of my life I will never get back. The keynote address for the Agile 2007 conference was given by Susan Ershler who spent my precious 90 minutes saying things like, “Rah, rah” and “You […]
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