We're blushing. Drew Powers, the new editor of the SF Bay Area Chapter of the Project Management Institute's newsletter, attended our Certified ScrumMaster workshop in September and has written a thoroughly glowing account of the class, concluding that Agile is indeed highly relevant for Project Managers:
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Chris recently co-taught Agile Learning Labs' Certified ScrumMaster training course under the visionary tutelage of Jeff McKenna. Jeff, as you no doubt know, was a member of the first Scrum team, and he knows a thing or two on the subject. He and Chris worked well together. One student quipped, "It's like Chris is the Mom and Jeff is the dad." If your mom is a former lounge lizard with a beard…. No, it makes sense. Chris is the nurturer who wants to provide you with a safe place to learn to crawl, then walk, then run; Jeff, on the other hand, is the wise and wisecracking veteran of the front lines, with a satchel full of war stories–and riveting delivery. Having both in the classroom made for a fun, dynamic learning environment.
By Hillary Johnson
… or, enough already! Is Agile dead, alive, stagnant, the future, the past, the ultimate, the end, the Will of God? Am I doing it right, wrong, backwards, sideways, on a boat, with a goat? Should I get certified by the Scrum Alliance, or the Scrum Horde? And should I even care?
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.
Craig Brown voiced a common concern project folks have in "A Downside of Agile Development?" on his Better Projects blog, writing about his fears for his company's proposed transition to Agile:
Chris and I are at Disney World for a few days of R&R after hosting the Open Space at the Orlando Scrum Gathering, but the park will have to be pretty supercalifragilistic to compare to the conference, which was wonderful. So much engagement–250 people there, and yet it felt intimate. I left feeling I had got to know more people than I'd normally meet in a year. Check out the wiki to get to know some of them yourself.
Here, just to incite envy among the far flung, is a list of all the sessions posted on the Open Space market wall in Orlando. Disclaimer: These were handwritten, and often hard to decipher, so some titles and names are my best guess at spelling, and some sessions may have been added or changed after I took my notes. Feel free to amend in the comments if you know better!
In this week's InfoQ article, Chris covers the debate over high tech vs.low tech toolsets (what Alistair Cockburn refers to as information radiators) for managing agile projects: eg, which is the lesser evil, killing a tree and taping its carcass to the wall one notecard at a time, or clicking through an annoying heirarchical menu every time you want to see your data?
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This week Chris wrote his Monday morning InfoQ Article on Scrum Club, which organizes software developers to train in scrum practices (which can be applied to their Certified Scrum Practitioner requirements) by working on projects for charity. Their promo video looks eerily like something written by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher. To call it irreverent is a drastic understatement:
Chris just published an article on InfoQ called Refactoring is Not A Substitute for Design about the debate over what role design plays in agile development. The worry is that agile processes shortchange the very principles of good design, because so much of agile happens at the granular level while design is seen as a macro-level activity. But is that the case? Here is the bit that I consider Chris' main point: Big Design Up Front is not design; it is just one way to accomplish design.