By Hillary Johnson
Last weekend, Chris and I attended a marvelous event called Dare 2B Digital, aimed at addressing the gender gap in computer science careers, and at which 7th through 10th grade girls got to play at writing code, crafting business plans, and other techie things.
By: Chris Sims
Today is retrospective day at Agile Learning Labs. We do regular all-hands retrospectives to continuously improve how we run the business. It's timely then, that my latest article on InfoQ is Rules forBetter Retrospectives. Check it out, and learn about James Carr's top five 'rules' for better retrospectives.
If you are just getting started doing retrospectives with your scrum team, check out my 2-part post Agile Retrospectives.
Cheers,
I was a new manager doing annual performance reviews for the first time. I wanted to do a good job, and truly align my group’s work with the company’s ‘bigger picture.’ I wanted to know why we existed, what we were trying to achieve, and what we valued. So I asked my manager.
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By: Chris Sims
Today finds me in Seattle for the Agile Open Northwest conference. This morning I lead a session called "An Experiential Introduction to Agile" which was based on our Experiencing Agile mini workshop. I invited participants to share their insights on sticky-notes, with a promise that I would post them. So, here they are.
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This year's Better Software Conference in Las Vegas on June 6-11 is all about Agile, to judge by the program. The conference runs concurrently with the Agile Development Practices West conference (with twofer admission). Better Software is also bookended by certification courses in ScrumMaster and Agile Testing Practices early in the week, and the Agile Alliance's one day Agile Leadership Summit , chaired by Polyanna Pixton, on Friday.
Chris' most recent InfoQ article is a preview of Agile Coach Camp, billed as the Open Space conference "delivering value to those delivering value." The conference, which takes place in Durham, NC next month, is a bit different than most Agile gatherings, in that aspiring participants must "audition" for admission by submitting a position paper, guaranteeing a high level of professional discourse. Check out Chris' article for a preview of some of the topics proposed so far. Last year, Chris facilitated a couple of sessions, including one on What Makes Agile Projects Succeed.
Being Agile is hard. Simple, and hard. Simple because, in theory, all we need to do to achieve a yogic level of Agility is to live by the Agile Principles as set forth in the Agile Manifesto. Hard, because the real world impinges on or impedes this effort every %$(^%&! day.
In light of this, Agile Learning Labs' own Steve Bockman has put together a workshop on the first Agile Principle, which reads, simply: "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."
Chris' lastest InfoQ article surveys several other writers' methods for bringing business value to bear on Agile Estimation. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe points out, usefully, that Agile estimation techniques that put the user story first may be putting the cart 10 or 15 degrees askew of the horse: "Pascal proposes that a better starting point is with the question: 'How do we find the User Stories that deliver the Business Values?'" My favorite, however, is Brandon Carlson’s application of Thin Slicing, a concept he discovered while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Carlson writes:
The book cites an example of how doctors at Cook County Hospital improved patient care and throughput using the technique. I thought to myself, if doctors at Cook County Hospital can use a small subset of relevant attributes to effectively prioritize patients in life or death situations such as an ER, it could certainly be applied to even more important decisions such as the prioritization of features, right?
Deborah Hartman has just published an article on InfoQ called Teaching Games – Fun or Serious Business? Hint–the answer is: both. The article is chock-full of good links, including one to our own course, Creating Agile Games for Coaches and Consultants, which Chris co-created with Elisabeth Hendrickson.
By: Chris Sims
The standard Scrum Stand-up meeting, AKA 'The Daily Scrum', has each participant answering 3 questions: