Carnival of Agilists for June 22/07 - In Progress

People Over Process

In one of his all too infrequent posts Pete Behrens reminds us that is all about the people and not the practices: Scrum is Team-Driven Development. Johanna Rothman reminds us the Standup is about the team and not management in: Whose Standup Is It? In a humourous piece Scott Berkun riffs on all the 'xxx Driven' methods with Asshole driven development.

Flying Solo

Some contrasting ideas: First Chris Sterling on what one colleague did when his pairing partner went on vacation: Individual Pair Programming - there's a lot of discipline involved here. Peter Bell examines how scrum can work for one in Solo Scrums. Finally Jeff Atwood (with an awesome graphic) says:  In Programming, One Is The Loneliest Number.

 

Coding

Without code we don't get products out the door. Ed Gibbs looks at Comment Driven Design and comes to the conclusion it's not for him (I'm with Ed). Chris Sterling gets another one in this week (its a song that we sing with our three year old): Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody, Do Your Share - are you fixing your technical debt? James Shore has a slightly different angle on the same idea:Truth and Beauty (they were always my favorite quarks). Kevin Rutherford reminds us to listen to the code - it is often wiser than we are in an apparent case of specific anosmia. Patrick Cauldwell describes his team's development principles: This I believe... the developer edition - I wish my values were so high.

Tools

What tools do we use to do our jobs? If you have a distributed team I was recently reminded of Mike Cohn's Planning Poker website - I tried it and it works well. Ed Gibbs talks about Sprint Backlog: Task Boards Versus Spreadsheets and concludes he prefers the Task Board. Ed why not use both? I will post about this in a few minutes next week.

Agile in Action

Instead of just talking HL Arledge is building a real product. He has a number of interesting posts here are two: Pigs fly everyday at Decade Software Company and Dev Team burning down Decade Software in June. HL just picked up another subscriber in me.

Training and Conferences

Matthew Heusser is playing with the idea of Adaptive Training for Homebrew Test Automation. He's thinking about a course the attendees tell him what problems they're trying to solve and tell in Advance of the course. Clarke Ching is organising TOC mini-conference - UK and EU - interested?

General Category

Simon Baker reminds us, never stop improving: Improve continuously. Its been a few weeks but Brian Marick wants Stir things up at the Agile Alliance. George Dinwiddie replies with Time flies like an arrow…. Clinton Keith of High Moon Game Development reminds us that there is No Silver Bullet.

Beyond Development

Derek Morrison takes a look at Agile from the point of Product Management with Implementing an Agile Sales Framework. James Duncan Davidson chimes in with Pair Photo Editing. Wrapping it all up is Clarke again with "Doctor who cut waiting times to zero quits - NHS shocker" - apparently the NHS isn't ready to become 'lean' quite yet.

Self promotion warning. My three part series: Why Scrum Works has just started to appear. Part Two: Does Scrum Work? Hell Yes!!! Why? has just been published. Subscribe to read the rest of this story.

Comments

[Ed Gibbs]

Love to see the post on how you use both the taskboard and the spreadsheet. My problem is I'm the only one in the whole organization who maintains the taskboard, all the PM/Scrum Masters use a spreadsheet because that's what they were introduced to by our Agile coach. I believe they stick with the spreadsheet pretty much through inertia.

[Peter Bell]

Thanks for the mention. This is a great resource - I'll definitely mention it!

[David Hoehn]

I just love to see these posts. One day I will make it into the list. Keep up the good work and annouce these to scrumdevelopment and the like!

Thanks