Practical Agility

Agile Transitions and Human Nature

2012-01-25T13:38:00.013-05:00

Like many people, I've struggled with my weight since my late 20's. I'm currently in the process of losing weight yet again, and have passed the 20 lb. (approx. 10 kg) mark. This isn't the first time that I have lost that much weight - I attained a loss of 24 lbs. about 15 years ago, but each time the loss wasn't sustained (or even sustainable). This time, however, feels different and it has

Riding One Syllable to Success

2011-11-17T10:53:00.000-05:00

Flow. Play. Slow. Although I haven't read nearly as much as I would have liked, over the past decade I've spent a lot of time with my nose in a book learning whatever I could about the many facets of XP, Scrum, Kanban and other Agile topics. Over the past two years, though, my thinking has been markedly influenced by three single-syllable words and the books about them. Back in early 2010,

What I Do When Coaching

2011-11-09T09:51:00.000-05:00

In the past few months I've seen more and more articles, discussion group entries and blog posts that talk about Agile Coaches using words such as charlatans, snake oil salesmen and '#@$!!!#$%$#' (I'm not exactly sure what that translates to, but I believe I can safely assume it isn't complimentary). Of course, I have no control over what other people do to hang up their shingle as an Agile

Agile is a Cop-Out?

2011-10-13T12:00:00.005-04:00

In a blog entry entitled "Agile Software Is A Cop-Out, Here’s What’s Next", Forrester's Mike Gualtieri makes some bold statements about what he sees as hype and a lack of empirical evidence of success from the Agile community. Now, Mike's post is bound to raise the hackles of many people in the Agile community, but I do agree he has some good points. He doesn't specifically use the term "hype",

Great New Scrum Extensions!

2011-10-10T11:25:00.001-04:00

This past week, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber annouced via Scrum.org that Scrum is now open for modification and extension. This is good, and an issue that has been simmering in the Scrum community for some time now. Fortunately, there have been some forward-thinking folks who got a jump on the rest of us, and had their extensions ready to go at the time of the announcement: This extension

Goodbye Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T22:08:00.001-04:00

It was about this time of year in 1981 that I dropped into my high school's Computer Science and Data Processing classroom to talk to a buddy of mine. At the time I thought I was on a track that would lead me through high school to an aeronautical engineering or commercial pilot program somewhere, and I would become a professional aviator. That would have surprised exactly no one, since I had

Slow

2011-10-03T03:00:00.001-04:00

Some recent events came together in one of those "The Universe is trying to tell you something, Dave" sort of ways. It could all just be a coincidence, of course, but that wouldn't make much of a story, would it? First, I've been reading Carl Honoré's book "In Praise of Slow", which discusses the rather negative effects that closely watching time has had on our society. In the book Carl looks

The Need for Speed... and Why That's Bad!

2011-09-28T10:00:00.002-04:00

I've written before about how software development teams are obsessed with going as fast as possible, and how that isn't necessarily a good thing. That obsession isn't something that magically appeared with Agile methods - it has been around as long as I've been in the business. I would assume that the mantra of "we want it yesterday, perfect and for free" came from somewhere! :) I would

Who Should Perform the Sprint Review?

2011-09-22T11:01:00.000-04:00

A concerned ScrumMaster came to me recently lamenting the fact that a Product Owner "ran" a sprint review. My response was, "That isn't necessarily a bad thing." The ScrumMaster then went on to describe how the PO in question directed everything in the meeting and didn't allow much discussion. OK, so some context helps clarify things. :) The question remains, though, is it always a bad thing

Technical Excellence in Scrum

2011-09-16T09:44:00.002-04:00

Jeff Sutherland recently posted a message on the Scrum Development Yahoo Group regarding Scrum and Technical Debt. Jeff mentioned why Scrum eschewed technical practices, specifically: In 1995, Kent Beck asked me for everything on Scrum. In a famous email he said he wanted to use everything he could and not reinvent the wheel. The first Scrum team was doing all the XP practices in some form.

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

2011-08-18T07:59:00.000-04:00

In April 2011 I attended the Agile Games 2011 Un-conference in Cambridge, MA. Given it's proximity to MIT, I'd like to believe I came away smarter simply through osmosis, but time will tell. :) On the first day after Luke Hohmann's keynote, I hummed and hawed about which Deep Dive session to attend. While many of the games sessions sounded interesting, I kept coming back to Adam Sroka's Coding

I'm Not a Resource

2011-08-15T14:23:00.003-04:00

A good number of people have written that we should not refer to people as "resources", and there are plenty of reasons why this is so. However, I continue to hear the term resource applied to human beings on a daily basis. I've created a video on YouTube called, "I'm not a Resource". If you agree, please comment either here or on YouTube. If you would like, send a short (no more than 10

They are All Wrong

2011-07-28T07:09:00.000-04:00

My wife grew up spending a half of every summer living in Algonquin Park. My father-in-law was a bush pilot for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and was based there for all of August every year, living at the cottage at Smoke Lake. While she was there, she had the opportunity to live with a whole lotta nature literally right at the door step, from chipmunks to moose to black bears.

Whither Requirements?

2011-07-25T07:24:00.000-04:00

We accomplish what we understand. If we are to accomplish something together, we need to understand it together.Signature from Ron Jeffries e-mail, circa 2005. A common issue I've encountered with teams starting to use an Agile approach such as Scrum is that they feel they must abandon all existing methods of requirements gathering and start writing nothing but User Stories. Requirements for a

Raising the Water Level

2011-07-22T07:57:00.000-04:00

A phrase you commonly hear in the Agile world that comes from Toyota is that you want to "lower the water level" in your value stream so that you can "see the rocks" that disrupt flow and, to extend the metaphor, could damage your boat! By exposing the rocks, you can then deal with them appropriately and thus reduce or eliminate the disruptions to the flow of value. This is a wonderfully

The Fighter Pilot Who Changed Software Development

2011-07-14T21:45:00.001-04:00

For those in the Agile Software Development community who have spent any time at all looking into the Lean underpinnings of Agile, the name John Boyd should be familiar. Boyd was the originator of the OODA - Observe, Orient, Decide, Act - loop that represents a more detailed refinement of Scrum's Inspect and Adapt cycle. While OODA was created as a strategy for fighting a war, its underlying

A New Home for The Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches!

2011-07-13T07:23:00.000-04:00

The Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches now has a new home of its own at AgileCoachSurvivalGuide.com. The original posts for that series will remain here on Practical Agility, but all new posts will be made on the new blog. So please stop on by, and let your friends know about the new site! :)

A Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches - Are We There Yet?

2011-06-30T10:15:00.001-04:00

I recall driving to Toronto one time with the kids. It's about a 4 hour trip, and somewhere around 30 seconds after we left my son asked, "Are we there yet?". Of course, I patiently responded, "No, we have about 4 hours to go!" After another hour and several thousand additional queries about our arrival status, I decided to change things up. When my son asked, "Are we there yet?", I

Worth Repeating - XP Bills of Rights

2011-06-29T06:44:00.000-04:00

While doing the electronic equivalent of cleaning the attic yesterday, I stumbled across an internal paper I wrote at a client back in late September 2001 describing Extreme Programming. While waxing nostalgic, I did notice a section that remains important today and is worth repeating - the Customer and Developer Bills of Rights from XP Explained and XP Installed. The text below is unedited

A Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches - Patience, Persistence... and Ear Plugs

2011-06-29T03:00:00.000-04:00

For the first couple of months after my son was born, we had a heck of a time getting him to sleep in the evening. After a couple of months I realized that I just had to let him scream until he fell asleep. Once he did he slept like, well, a baby! Getting to that realization was tough. He was literally screaming as loud as he could into my ear (I've been tested, and the hearing in that ear is

My Tribe ...or Herd

2011-06-28T13:51:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I attended Agile Coach Camp Montréal, making and remaking many connections within the Agile Coaching community. This was an Open Space un-conference, and during the opening of the circle facilitator François Beauregard asked the participants to picture ourselves among the community of coaches attending the event, and hold on to that image. We then proceeded to open the

A Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches - Believe in It

2011-06-28T03:00:00.000-04:00

My Dad wasn't one for giving lots of advice about life. Golf, yes, but life, not so much. One thing he did say, though, has stuck with me. Dad was a partner in an insurance brokerage and estate planning firm. He arrived at that point in his life after joining the Personnel group of a very large insurance company in the mid-1950's. He stayed in Personnel, later Human Resources, right through

A Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches - Why?

2011-06-27T03:00:00.001-04:00

When a toddler learns to speak, often his first recognizable word is "Mom" or "Dad" or some variation of those. His second is "Why?" If you were to take a teenager and, like, count the number of occurrences of "like" in their, like, speech, DOUBLE THAT and you would approach the frequency at which a toddler uses the word "Why". The constant questions can drive you absolutely crazy - I truly

Analysis and Design in Agile

2011-06-24T14:20:00.001-04:00

A long time ago in a galaxy a dozen or so miles away, I learned about Extreme Programming. I was actually doing Pair Programming when I heard about this crazy XP concept, so it wasn't really a stretch to do it on a regular basis. Similarly, writing tests for my code seemed like a reasonable thing to do, although it took a few months to really wrap my head around Test-Driven Development Within

Fibonacci Must Die!

2011-06-21T22:42:00.000-04:00

Leonardo Fibonacci died over 760 years ago but he had a profound effect on mathematics in western civilization. He brought what he had learned from mathematician in north Africa back to Europe and authored the book Liber Abaci, which described such things as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and place value of numbers. In the book he also showed how a number of mathematical problems were solved