Cross Pollination: What can agile practitioners learn from filmmakers like Werner Herzog?

One of Herzog\’s early stars

One of the blessings of having a diverse (some might say schizophrenic) background is that I have friends like Anne Thompson, who has worked for Premiere and Variety and now has her own influential blog, Thompson on Hollywood. Today I read a post there by Sophia Savage about the filmmaker Werner Herzog, discussing some remarks he made as keynote at the Film Independent Forum, including this passage, which I think maps directly onto dilemmas in any kind of agile project environment, including software development using scrum:
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Agile Publishing: Lessons from academia in getting it right

I am always looking for others who are experimenting in the arena of agile publishing, as we are doing with our side venture, Dymaxicon, and I ran across a fascinating article today on a Bryn Mawr college blog called Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education. The article is by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (affectionately nicknamed RPR by her students), a professor of Writing and Publishing at Elon University in North Carolina who learned about scrum from her geek husband and decided to try using it to teach collaboration skills to her students, who would be working on some publishing projects. (Since it’s academia, the blog post is also co-authored by several of her students–apparently publish or perish extends to blogging now.)

I loved the description of how the students viewed “collaboration” before the project:
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5 Reasons Scrum Helps Teams Become High-Performing Faster

Scrum masters and product owners know how hard it is to get their team to become high-performing. They can rest assured that they’re on the right track. Scrum helps teams become high-performing faster than other work methods. The reason is simple. Becoming high-performing is baked into the scrum recipe. In my experience coaching agile teams, I have observed over and over that teams that use scrum go from forming, storming, norming and ultimately to high-performing more quickly and reliably than teams that don’t. Here are five reasons why:
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What if you were more like Steve Jobs?

My friend’s daughter took this picture of the front of the Apple store in Manhattan last night. What are you doing in your life that would make people remember you with this much passion? Something to ask yourself next time you realize you’re the person saying “That’ll never work because….” or starting every reply with “Yes, but…” Jobs made our world bigger, sleeker, cleaner, more beautiful. Life is not a zero-sum game, which means we’re all free to make our world bigger, and better. So if you catch yourself being the person saying, “Yes, but we can’t all be Steve Jobs….” I’d beg to differ. Yes, we can.

Speaking of yes we can, our Director of Business Development, Laura Powers, is walking her first marathon today. Go Laura!!!

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Agile in California with QA in China?

After visiting a start-up that is adopting scrum, I received the following email from “B” and I’d like to share the answer here. As you will see, they are trying to be more agile, and wondering how to deal with their remote quality assurance team.

Hi, Chris,

Great agile session today. I learned a lot from you. Here are my two questions:
What is the impact of agile to the remote team? We have an outsourced QA team in China.
For the QA testing, how often should developers deliver a stable build to QA for testing?
Thanks,

B.

With part of the team in California and part in China, the biggest source of trouble will be communication. Of course, this is true even if you are not trying to work in an agile way.
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What’s An Agile Paycheck Look Like? A glimpse into Agile Learning Labs’ new compensation model

What kind of agile training company would we be if we didn’t try to build our company from the ground up using agile methods for everything from team decision making to hiring to how we pay ourselves? Here’s how we arrived at a radical new way of paying ourselves. (Hint: if you’ve seen the heist movie Ocean’s 11, our team compensation model is a lot like theirs.)
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Test Driven Development – Life Beyond the Insanity

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
~ Albert Einstein

 

Are you a survivor of insane software development? Design-code-integrate-test-deploy. Maybe it’s time for a different approach.

Test driven development takes some of the insanity out of the software development process by shifting the emphasis on testing from post-development necessity to the first objective in the project. Create a test and see it fail. Then write enough code so that the test passes. Then refactor mercilessly.

The result?
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Agile Learning Labs launches Dymaxicon with a pretty darn swanky party

Our thanks to everyone who turned out for Saturday’s Dymaxicon launch party at Internos Wine Cafe in the city. If you have been too busy building software to keep up with our hijinks here at Agile Learning Labs, we’ve launched a publishing company. We publish agile titles like The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson (me) and we also publish controversial literary fiction, graphic novels and gardening books. Why? Because we’re just that agile.
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Agile Learning Labs is having a book party! Come find out what agile publishing is all about

Late last year, Agile Learning Labs began incubating a new venture, Dymaxicon, to explore the publishing space for agile-themed books, and beyond. This Saturday, August 20th, we’ll be celebrating the success of our first two titles, The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson, and The Bad Mother, a novel by Nancy Rommelmann. We’ll also be introducing a rash of new titles.
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