If you haven’t heard of
Jonathan Coulton yet, now you have. He’s clever, geeky, and his music lends itself to great videos. This one is ‘Code Monkey’.
As a special bonus, here is ‘Mandelbrot Set’.
Code Monkey Like You!
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January Engineering Managers Support Group: The Economy
Next Wednesday, Jan 21st, we will again be holding the Engineering Managers Support Group at the British Bankers' Club in Menlo Park. We had an excellent turnout when we held our last gathering there in November, and the proceedings had a rather festive vibe. Must have been the Guiness and the onion rings.
Read the full article…
Come see Chris at SD West! Register by Friday for a $100 discount.
At this year's SD West conference in Santa Clara (March 9-13), Chris will be leading one of his more popular interactive sessions, Why Do Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? The answers are different every time we do this particular workshop, which involves the structured brainstorming method we've come to refer to as "Group Wisdom Without Groupthink." You can check out the results from the same session at Dr. Dobbs' Architecture & Design World conference here.
SD West Discount Code: 9ESPK
Qcon Q&A: Agile Adoption at the Enterprise Level
Thanks to Cesar Idrovo for passing on the InfoQ link to this juicy paneldiscussion at Qcon 2008 sponsored by BayAPLN and moderated by David Chilcott.
The panelists included Polyanna Pixton, David Hussman, Sue Mckinney and Pat
Reed.
Burn Stories not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. It seems perfectly logical.
Management 2.0: What makes a great manager?
Just before the holiday, we had the pleasure of debuting a brand new course, Management 2.0, in partnership with Wayne Turmel, aka The Cranky Middle Manager. It was also our first course offering in a new market: Chicago. To kick off day one of this action-packed two day course aimed at those who have recently made the move from individual contributor to manager, Chris led the participants through a brief session that examined the question, "What makes a great manager?"
2008 – Agile Year in Review
Greetings,
A friend recently asked me what I saw going on in the agile world in 2008, and what we might see more of in 2009. I looked back through some of the things I wrote about this year and came up with this.
Organizations are not asking if they should use agile, they are asking how they can adopt agile practices. Accordingly, many of the agile thought leaders have moved from talking about why an organization should do agile to how to do it well. Here is an example drawn from Brain Marick's keynote at a recent conference. A related topic that I've heard often discussed this year is The Power of Done.
Bowling Green Students Build Agile Software for Non-Profit Clients
In the first program of its kind, students in Bowling Green State University’s Agile Software Factory program learn about agile development by building real software for local community service organizations. Over the course of a 16 week semester, students go from initial client meeting to delivery of a working system. The program is supported through a partnership with the Agile Alliance.
I was lucky enough to get to talk with Dr. Joseph Chao, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Agile Software Factory at Bowling Green State University, as well as Phil Brock, managing director of the Agile Alliance, about the program. The result of that conversation is this article for InfoQ.
Cheers,
Management 2.0 – Becoming the kind of leader you would follow
I have teamed up with Wayne Turmel, host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show, to create a 2-day workshop to help you move beyond being ‘good at your job’ to helping others excel at theirs. When we take this show on the road in 2009 the price will be $1,000 a seat, but we are holding a ‘dress rehearsal’ in Chicago on December 15 & 16, for a mere $450.
Learn more about the workshop
Claim one of the last available seats
Cheers,
Alternative to the Scrum of Scrums
Scrum has proven effective at promoting communication between members of a development team. The question of how to scale this high-bandwidth communication across teams, especially in large organizations, remains an area of active exploration and debate. Will Read has proposed a mesh-network inspired alternative to the popular Scrum-of-Scrums meeting for achieving this goal.
I found it interesting, and so I wrote about it for InfoQ. Read the article here.
Cheers,