If you’re looking for a fun way to kick off discussions of difficult topics, then failure bows may work for you. In September I was at the Agile Coach Camp US (#ACCUS) in Columbus Ohio. Friday was “Games Day”, devoted to fun ways to...
I tend to write blog posts that are too long. Which is why sometimes I don’t blog as often as I should. But I really want to share everything with you that I learned at Agile Coach Camp US (#ACCUS) in Columbus Ohio last week. So instead...
Developing software for the cloud can make test-driven development more complicated, but not impossible. In this article that I wrote for TechWell.com and StickyMinds.com, I offer advice for continuing good development practices in the...
This article was published in Sogeti's QANews on September 30, 2011. See their article here Acceptance tests are a great way to improve collaboration between testers, developers, and customers. When all three parties agree ahead of time...
What is the ideal contract model to use with sub-contractors, and is it any different than you would use with a lead contractor? I'm curious myself, and so I'll just post a couple of quick thoughts and I encourage you to share your...
Are you looking for an inexpensive way to learn agile methods? Improve your agile engineering practices? Or learn about how agile methods are being employed in government? AgileDC is the place for you! I'm very pleased to be speaking...
Why are some developers so afraid of commitment? I'm not talking about relationships, but something equally as important. Committing your code to a repository before it goes stale or you lose the changes. I've witnessed a couple of...
This dilbert strip says it all...
How do Lean principles complement and reinforce the roles in a Scrum project? That was one question on my mind as I drove up to the Agile Leadership Network DC meeting, held in Tysons Corner. People sometimes discuss Scrum, XP, Kanban,...
What's the deal with story points and agile estimation techniques, and why can't we just improve our estimates over time? That's part of the question that a friend of mine asked recently, and I'm going to respond to it in this blog post....
The Innovate Virginia conference will be held in Richmond, Virginia, on Friday September 16th, and I am proud to be one of the speakers there. It will be an excellent one-day conference bringing together many excellent speakers in a cost...
This past Tuesday at AgileCville we had a series of lightning talks on "Agile for Newbies." The meeting went very well, and I'll provide a brief recap of it here. Thanks go to RallySoftware, who sponsored the meeting this month and...
Have you ever been asked for a rough estimate, and then later regretted giving a "rough" estimate because the customer tried to hold you to it? A familiar story This week I spoke with an agile coaching colleague of mine, and he relayed a...
What's this agile stuff all about? Come to the next AgileCville meeting and find out! Our next Agile Cville meeting will be on Tuesday June 28th, from 6-8pm at OpenSpace in Charlottesville. Please note that the date has changed from our...
Have you ever faced prioritizing a long list of stories or requirements and thought, "This is going to take forever!" I have, and so I was thrilled to learn a technique at XP2011 that helps with this dilemma. I had a chance last week to...
Thanks to those attending my lightning talk today at XP2011 on range estimation! I'm enjoying Madrid Spain very much and the conference has been very good so far. Here are my slides from today's talk in PDF and Powerpoint formats. In the...
On Wednesday September 28th, I'll be speaking at the Verify/ATI Conference 2011 in Arlington Virginia at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. According to the recently published schedule at the VerifyATI website, I'm in the 2:15-3:15 time slot. I'll...
As mentioned in a previous post, we played a game last night at AgileCville's meeting last night that was fun and definitely kept the conversation going. We had some very good discussions around a number of agile topics, and so that...
Let's play an agile game! Tomorrow will be the next Agile Cville meeting at OpenSpace in Charlottesville, from 6-8pm. The topic this month is "Agile Failure Patterns", and I agreed to kick off the discussion. Rather than start off the...
Last month the QANews newsletter by Sogeti was released, and I was pleased to have an article I wrote on Agile Database Testing published in it. I've reproduced the article below, and you can also see the original article here. Agile...
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to two undergrad business classes at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. The students are primarily accounting and finance majors, with a few engineering majors thrown...
I'm getting very excited for the XP2011 conference coming up in Madrid in May. I was also very excited to have my lightning talk on range estimation accepted to the conference. If you'll be at the conference, I hope you'll stop by! My...
Tonight at the AgileCville user group meeting, we discussed Scrum in Schools. This was a roundtable discussion of group members, and it was very interesting. Paul Erb kicked off the discussion for us. Paul is an Agile Cville regular,...
About a month ago I was working with a team planning another iteration for the project, when we had an interesting discussion about how to manage our burndown. On all of our previous sprints, our burndowns were based on hours. That is,...
I had coffee with a fellow software consultant friend recently where we traded war stories about recent IT projects. Jay told a tale familiar to many of us (Jay is not his real name, but the story is all too real). He and his team had...