Jan
10
Common Mistakes Teams Make in Retrospectives
January 10, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Something has been bothering me about the way I see many teams handle retrospectives. To be fair, it’s really several things. These common mistakes do more than make a retrospective less effective, they destroy any ability to achieve the purposes of a retrospective. Read more
Nov
18
Reconsidering Pragmatic Agility
November 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment
I consider myself fairly pragmatic when it comes to agility in software development, or at least I used to… I’m having second thoughts. As long as I’ve been around agile development (it’s been, what 6 or 7 years…) I’ve been exposed to what some people call Agilistas. You probably recognize what I mean if you’ve met one: they refer to principal thinkers in the field by first name, and have a tendency to absolutist statements like “there are no project managers in agile, we don’t need them.” I’m beginning to think they may have a point, just not the one they think they have. Read more
May
24
New Agile Training Courses
May 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I’m happy to announce the availability of the first two courses in my series of agile training courses, a one-day agile overview course, and a two-day course called Agile for Data Professionals. There are a number of other courses in the works, but if you find yourself with a burning need for one of my courses, just let me know and I’ll see what I can do to move it to the top of the queue.
For information on the classes visit the new Training Page!
May
13
Time, Resources, Scope… and Quality.
May 13, 2010 | 1 Comment
Project managers will sometimes refer to the “iron triangle” of time, resources and scope for a project. The idea here is that each of these facets of a project are the leg of some theoretical triangle, and you can adjust your project by making one of the legs shorter if you need to. How does that relate to software projects? Read more
Mar
1
Just Enough vs. Just In Case
March 1, 2010 | 8 Comments
It’s amazing to me the lengths people will go to in order to have something “useful” to do at work. The problem is, in their quest to have something to do, they tend to make more work for, and slow down, the rest of us. Read more
Jan
26
Is it Agile, or Chaos?
January 26, 2010 | 4 Comments
Every so often I’ll run into a product owner, project manager or other stakeholder who thinks that “agile” is the best thing since sliced bread. But it’s not really for the reasons you’d consider healthy. “We can change what we want at any time, because we’re being Agile!” they say. Read more
Jan
5
Temptations of an Agile Project: But that’s Easy! Can’t we just do it?
January 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Some ideas that seem perfectly sensible are really disasters waiting to happen, and agile teams are not immune. I’ve started to notice some frequent mistakes that inexperienced, and sometimes not so inexperienced, teams make when they’re trying to be agile. These things seem like perfectly good, common sense ideas, but they have undesirable consequences, and we’re going to see what those consequences are.
Sometimes teams get too enthusiastic, and while enthusiasm is a good thing, it can get out of hand. The temptation to add additional bells and whistles to a story in the sprint backlog can be a temptation that’s hard to resist, but resist we should. Why, you ask? Read more
Dec
14
Temptations of an Agile Project: Let’s Make the Sprint Longer
December 14, 2009 | 2 Comments
Some ideas that seem perfectly sensible are really disasters waiting to happen, and agile teams are not immune. I’ve started to notice some frequent mistakes that inexperienced, and sometimes not so inexperienced, teams make when they’re trying to be agile. These things seem like perfectly good, common sense ideas, but they have undesirable consequences, and we’re going to see what those consequences are.
It’s surprising to me that making the sprint longer is such a temptation to a project, but it is. There are lots of reasons that people give for wanting longer sprints, usually it boils down to “we can’t get our work done in two weeks, but if we had three, we could get it finished.” When questioned about why two weeks isn’t enough, testing seems to be a common sticking point. “We got all the development done, but couldn’t get it tested in time.” Read more
Oct
14
Temptations of an Agile Project: Too Many Stories
October 14, 2009 | 5 Comments
Some ideas that seem perfectly sensible are really disasters waiting to happen, and agile teams are not immune. I’ve started to notice some frequent mistakes that inexperienced, and sometimes not so inexperienced, teams make when they’re trying to be agile. These things seem like perfectly good, common sense ideas, but they have undesirable consequences, and we’re going to see what those consequences are.
We’re going to talk today about the product backlog. For those unfamiliar, the backlog is the list of functions or features that the product owner or business want in the eventual product. On a Scrum project, these are usually user stories, a sentence in what I call “Cohn Normal Form” is:
I as type of user, want to perform some function so I can receive some benefit.
For instance: “I, as a customer of the bank, want to withdraw money from the ATM, so I can buy a cup of coffee.”
Aug
31
What’s Wrong with Test Driven Development?
August 31, 2009 | 3 Comments
I’ve recently been working on a project that is making a very determined try to use Test Driven Development (TDD). For those who are unfamiliar with the practice, rather than writing your unit tests after you write your code, you write the tests first. I’ve known about the practice for years, but this is the first time I’ve worked on a team that’s really doing it, and I’m no less puzzled than I used to be. Well, we should probably talk about first things first. Read more
keep looking »Blogroll
- Ars Technica
- Dark Reading - IT Security
- Help Net Security
- InformIT
- SANS Internet Storm Center
- Schneier on Security - Dr. Bruce Schieier’s blog
- Security Info Watch
- What to Fix - Daniel Markham, fellow consultant
- Wired Gadget Lab
- Wordpress Documentation
- WordPress Planet
- Wordpress Support Forum
