Category Archives: agile

Agile Games Par-tay! Yes siree…

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Think we don't know how to have fun here at Technical Management Institute Agile Learning Labs? Oh yes, we do! We're throwing a wild party on Wednesday, April 29th at Ristretto Roasters in Portland, OR with our pal and test obsessed training partner Elisabeth Hendrickson of Quality Tree Software. It's a warm-up for our day-long class May 1st for Agile coaches and consultants on how to create agile games, but it's also a stand-alone event. There will be coffee, pastries, and the opportunity to have some geeky fun playing Agile learning games with your compatriots. It's free, so come on down!
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Do talentless hacks make the best leaders?

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Journalism is a lot like software development (or anything else for that matter) in that it's common practice for top performers to eventually move into management, in large part because that also happens to be the path to financial well-being. The worst editors I've ever worked for, and I've worked for a lot in a 20 year freelance career, were genius writers turned editor. The best editors where those who had experience working as writers, but never felt that role was a good fit. Sometimes they had even failed as writers. As editors, these people appreciated and respected their writers precisely because: 1) they knew how challenging the job was, 2) they were never inclined to think they could do a task better themselves, 3) they didn't perceive themselves as having risen "above" those they managed, but as having taken a different path.

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What I learned at Startup Weekend SF: Agility is the state of nature

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What's a good mother/son spring break activity? Why, going to Startup Weekend and spending 50 hours building a company with ten total strangers. Perfect because my 17 year-old vastly prefers the company of adults to that of other teenagers, and because he's been on the high school treadmill for so long that I thought it would be nice for him to see what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like–that the world of work can be a rather thrilling place.
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Focus Improvement on Bottleneck Constraints

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In My Framework is More Productive than Your Framework, Ken DeLong examines approaches to making software projects more productive. He finds that despite the hype about frameworks, languages, and project management tools, these tend not to be the bottlenecks. Ken believes that the largest productivity gains are likely to come from improved communication, code readability and debugability.

Read the whole story I wrote about it on InfoQ.

Cheers,

Chris

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Creating Agile Games for Coaches & Consultants

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Dogs Playing Poker Yesterday Chris and Elisabeth Hendrickson led a day-long dress rehearsal for a class called Creating Agile Games for Coaches & Consultants. The idea for the course grew out of various experiences: Chris has led sessions on Agile learning games at several conferences, and they've always been hugely successful, and Elisabeth has taught learning games, and held "game days" for coaches at her Quality Tree Software offices in Pleasanton. She's also done a lot of work deconstructing games, and building a set of principles and processes for how to create or adapt them to target specific learning objectives, as well as amassing an amazing array of boards, markers, spinners, dice and the like.
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