In 1970 the Coordinated Universal Time system was devised by an international advisory group of technical experts within the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU felt it was best to designate a single abbreviation for use in all languages in order to minimize confusion. Since unanimous agreement could not be achieved on using either the English word order, CUT, or the French word order, TUC, the acronym UTC was chosen as a compromise.

See, you can have fun reading documentation!

I became hooked on Innovation Games when I read an early draft of Luke’s book. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. I’ve found using Innovation Games really helps with situations like this. Luke has lots of practical ideas for Agile Teams.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 17th Nov at  Zuhlke Engineering‘s offices  (43 Whitfield Street, London W1T 4HD).

It’s free, but please signup on the XTC website so we get an idea of numbers.

Many thanks to Luke for doing this and Keith Braithwaite for kindly offerring the use of the Zulke offices to run this session (knowing Luke, there will be lots of noisy audience participation so our usual pub venue wouldn’t work too well).

Dave’s now uploaded a version to YouTube… Fantastic stuff. I love the deadpan humour.

Today I witnessed a session on agile software testing that made be rethink this.

The key problem was that the person had been told to do it – it was not something he volunteered to do. He had no passion about the subject.

He started berating the audience for producing “crap”. Not the best technique for wining people over to your point of view!

It also appeared that he didn’t have much experience in using test driven development techniques (as he had some rather strange viewpoints).

Perhaps this is an indication of the corporate culture?

While on the subject of decision making, Joachim de Posada shares a landmark experiment on delayed gratification — and how it can predict future success. With fascinating video of children trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow. I must read more about this.

I’m also interested in what’s happening as the worlds of TV and the internet collide. So this one by Peter Hirshberg also caught my attention.

Bamboo does not support git repositories out of the box. I found this Git Repository Plugin by Atlassian’s Don Brown, but it didn’t like the GitHub style repository URL’s when I tried it.

So I wrote my own GitHub repository plugin that is fully integrated with GitHub:

• Adds the option “GitHub” to the list of available repositories when you add or edit a build plan.
• Shows the changes that triggered the build.
• Links the code changes back to the GitHub page containing the commit/diff.
• Trigger the build via a GitHub Service Hook (Fires service hook on each commit)

See the plugin wiki for some screenshots and installation instructions.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 13th Jan at The Counting House pub (50 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3PD).  It’s free, but please  signup on the XTC website.

Just to whet your appetite:

The Solutions Focus approach is creating a stir in the fields of psychology and management. Whereas conventional approaches assume stable environments and predicable outcomes, SF is bringing a new, simple and effective flavour to the workplace and the therapy room with a view on ways to make progress while everything changes. Surprisingly, the approach is as effective, if not more so, than conventional methods.

In this session Mark will share his experiences of using SF in many business settings and help us to experience the approach in some quick interactive exercises. We will discuss how SF sits alongside Agile, how the two philosophies reflect each other and how Agile processes like retrospectives might be even more agile with the inclusion of some SF techniques. This will be a session to appeal to both the pragmatist and the philosophical.