Life of an Agile Manager

Judging Code Simplicity? Fit It Through the TUBE!

Zachary — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:55:10 +0000

We coders have all kinds of definitions of simple code. To some, simple code is code they understand and read easily. Others believe simple code follows the coolest, most appropriate design pattern. Some crazy person may even say that simple code has the fewest characters. To attempt to settle that [...]

The Trouble With Triangles

Zachary — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:21:18 +0000

The iron triangle has been redefined several times in the last few years. There’s Jurgen Appelo’s Iron Square, Jim Highsmith’s Agile Triangle, Max Pool’s Iron Line, and any number of other variations. At first glance, these seem like good thought models which will allow you to balance needs. But There Is a Flaw. The [...]

On Retrospectives: Video Lunch and Learn at Covenant Eyes

Zachary — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:07:25 +0000

I had opportunity to discuss retrospectives in a presentation at work, so I recorded it and published the slides on slideshare.

Project Teams? Product Teams? Which One’s Better?

Zachary — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:36:17 +0000

In agile methodologies there are two generally accepted ways to group teams: project teams and product teams. Project teams are generally focused exclusively on a well defined goal or objective, and have a completion date to meet and/or a budget to run out of. Product teams generally are intended to support and improve an entire [...]

The REAL Reason We Automate Testing

Zachary — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:20:07 +0000

We were discussing implementation of an automated regression test suite, and this scenario kind of popped into my head. It’s funny, dagnabit.

Unscaling Agile: When You Have More Products than People

Zachary — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:01:03 +0000

In some of the agile discussion groups I follow, people have been discussing how to scale out an agile product over multiple teams. These discussions are generally very informative and seem to lean in the direction of breaking product teams into feature teams for the product. But what about when we have more products or components [...]

Agile Development is Like CalvinBall

Zachary — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:03:46 +0000

I was reading a great article by Jurgen Apello called Managers Are Not Game Designers! I found the article to be amusing and informative, especially considering how at the office we’ve joked around about how we could make a collectible card game for how we do our development. The most important element of his post is [...]

The Iteration Social Contract: Knowing When to Change a Teams Direction

Zachary — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:58:41 +0000

One of the most attractive aspects of agile is its ability to allow you to change a teams direction when a business needs change. However there can be confusion about when it’s appropriate to change a teams direction. In this post I will attempt to discuss the iteration social contract, what threatens it, and how [...]

Experimenting with Test Driven Development: BEHOLD The GUMBALL machine!

Zachary — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:27:37 +0000

Last weekend I got the itch to do some development again, so I built myself a gumball machine out of PHP. I haven’t built an actual interface for the machine, but I wanted to see if I could create a system using TDD that didn’t require a user interface at all. I normally build interface [...]

Metrics are Hard: Rewarding Performance in an Agile Environment

Zachary — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:21:02 +0000

Recently I was reading a post by Matt Heusser titled Performance Improvement, not Process Improvement. While I agree with the post I’m concerned with an assumption it appears to be making. It seems to be making the assumption that rewarding performance based upon metrics creates better overall performance. I don’t necessarily think this is true in [...]