Open Space is a conference format of the people, for the people, and by the people. Participants cooperatively create the agenda and host sessions on topics that they feel passionately about.
Agile Open California 2007
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Category Archives: agile
FogBugz 6.0 – Stunning
I went to Joel‘s demo of FogBugz 6.0 this morning. I have to say that Ben, the engineer in charge of UI, has done some spectacular work. This is the most usable web-app that I have ever seen. It seems every bit as interactive as a good old Windows application. Congrats to Ben, Joel, and the whole FogBugz team.
Agile Project Leadership Open Space
Tonight I participated in an open space event put on by the Bay Area Agile Project Leadership Network. I did a short workshop on how to make the business case for agile. Though the presentation used no slides, I made use of some of the concepts and diagrams from this PowerPoint deck, which is in turn a subset of what I present in the Agile Overview workshops.
The event was well organized and the participants were a smart and enthusiastic bunch. I look forward to the next get together, on Tuesday September 11th.
Facelift
Checkout the new look over at the Technical Management Institute. Many thanks to Hillary for the new look.
Agile Development Resources
Tonight I’m a guest lecturer at USF Cupertino, thanks to Juan Montermoso. Juan is an instructor as well as being president of Montermoso Associates, a marketing and training consultancy based in Silicon Valley.
South Bay ABC
This morning I went down to Santa Clara to enjoy some fine IHOP breakfast and the company of a dozen other consultants. I was pleasantly overwhelmed with the responses I got when I asked the group for advice on marketing my training services. Most everyone was aghast when I told them that I’m currently giving some classes away free.
Paper Prototyping
LinkedIn has a cool feature that let’s you ask a question of your whole network. This morning, someone in my network asked this question:
Tools for visualising interactive prototypes? What do you prefer?
Powerpoint, ConceptDraw, Omnigraffle, Flash, Ruby on Rails?
We are reviewing the tools we are using to help visualise interactive storyboards and concepts for our clients. What are other people using? How important is it that the tool supports experimenting with real data and conditional branching in order to explore with the development team the consequences of their design decisions?
My reply:
Consider Paper Prototyping.
It is low cost, easy to do, and will quickly teach you how a real user will react to the system. With a paper prototype, a human acts as the computer, so your prototype can support some very sophisticated logic without the need to create code. Modifications are trivial, encouraging experimentation, discovery and improvement. I was skeptical at first, but after using it a few times I have become impressed with the power of this tool.
Photo courtesy of
Nertzy
Nertzy
To Script, or Not to Script?
MBA Panel Discussion
Last night I participated in a panel discussion about the career of consulting at Santa Clara University, put on by the newly formed consulting club of the MBA program. My fellow panelists were Ken Wirt and Megan Shields. Mike Levenhagen moderated the panel.
My First Meeting at Geekaplex
This story has been updated and republished as Lessons Learned From My First Failed Meeting. That version is better. 🙂
It was a bad day at Geekaplex. A star developer’s computer had crashed hard, taking a week’s worth of new source code with it. The big boss was furious! How could it be that there was only one copy of the code? I spoke up, “We need source control, and a backup system.” The big boss looked at me and said: “OK, then get some people together and make it happen!”