Every so often I meet someone who asks, “Don, what do you do?” Over the years I’ve found the best way to answer this question involves asking what that person does, and then share part of my coaching experience that relates to what they do. You see, an agile coach does many things. What I [...]
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I settled into the visitor’s chair across the desk from Nate. Looking at Nate I said “So tell me about your project.” RULE II: START WHERE THE SYSTEM IS1 Nate smiled and wistfully said: “Well, I’m the project manager and ScrumMaster. John will be the Product Owner. He works in our North East office. He should be [...] In Better Process, Better People I talked about retrospectives as a process for learning and improvement. My colleague Esther Derby and I will be conducting two one day workshops on Effective Agile Retrospectives. If you want to make the retrospectives you lead more effective, we would enjoy having you participate in the workshop. We’ll be in [...] One of the great questions in software development revolves around “Is it done yet?” And since the answer is usually “No” the follow on question gets asked, “Well, when will it be done?” I recently chatted with a ScrumMaster looking for estimating training for his teams. The teams work on a 4 week sprint cycle. [...] You can tell a lot from how a story starts. If you hear “Once upon a time …” you’ll probably hear a fairy tale like “The Three Little Pigs” or “The Little Red Hen”. Around camp fires, kayakers like to tell stories that begin with “No kidding, there I was …” and a tale of [...] Hear me out. It may not be as far fetched as it may first seem. I’m not going to say how long I’ve been around, but I have two copies of The Mythical Man-Month. I have the Anniversary Edition and the 1982 edition of the original 1975 book. I’m not sure why someone on Amazon is [...] The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. Reading Better People, Better Process may make it seem like I’m one of those touchy-feely “people over process” types. I confess I have a fondness for people but I’m also a big fan [...] Joe Little does a marvelous job recruiting speakers for the Agile-Carolinas meetings. This month was no exception. Israel Gat from BMC Software discussed “Leading the Disruption”. This presentation focused on releases 2.3 and 2.4 of their distributed system management software. Near the presentation’s end Brooks’ Law was mentioned and the question posed, “Does Brooks’ Law [...] The current mantra for software development hinges around “better, faster, cheaper.” To support these efforts, companies attempt to improve their development process. While helpful, improving the current process has two negative side effects: diminishing returns. The more improved a process becomes the less room for improvement exists. Eventually the process will be as good as [...] One of the smartest things I did as Interim VP of Engineering for Padcom was let Don talk himself into coming to play with us over the course of several hours overlooking the Puget Sound one weekend morning. Padcom was a small tech company with some unique internetworking technology in the process of building-out into [...] |
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Copyright © 2010 Donald E. Gray - All Rights Reserved |
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