I spent yesterday at p-camp, an unconference for agile product managers. The event was hosted at Yahoo! and put on by the folks at Enthiosys. I led two sessions: Agile 101, and Why do Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail)? This post is about the Agile 101 session. Watch for future posts about my other session, and some more pictures.
Today’s engineering managers need to be able to manage projects where some, or even all, of the engineers are located offshore. While the situation is becoming more common, the challenges and opportunities are still not widely understood. On the evening of March 6, the Silicon Valley IEEE Technology Management Council is bringing together 4 panelists, with diverse backgrounds and experience, to answer your questions about managing with offshore engineers.
I occasionally still get calls to do software development. Recently, a potential client indicated that they would like a Windows shell extension created in C#. I’ve never built a shell extension, nor done any C#. Before meeting with the client, I decided I should take an hour or two to see how hard it would be for an old-school C++ and COM guy like me to get up to speed.
I downloaded the ‘Express’ version of C# and started playing with it. Pretty quickly, I had a command line app that worked like Eliza, but got the response text from Google searches. Fun!
Mike Cohn has a great article in the Agile Journal in which he describes ‘patterns’ of agile adoption. The basic premise is that there are 3 choices that an organization needs to make about their agile rollout:
Joel has a good post on doing software demos. High points include:
If you really want to get serious about doing a great sales demo, check out Peter Cohan.
I’m sitting in a Starbucks in the ‘Multimedia Gulch’ area of San Francisco, having just shared some fine San Francisco Burritos with Joel Spolsky. It’s been a few years since we last chatted, and much has changed. Joel’s company, Fog Creek Software, has more than doubled in size. They have mostly filled their recently expanded office space and Joel is busy figuring out how much space they should get to accommodate future growth. A new version of FogBugz has just been released and Joel is doing a demo tour. I think he still has space available in a few of his Bay Area demos. If you get a chance, check it out. I’ll be there tomorrow morning in Mountain View.
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.
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.