Notes from a Tool User

Miscellany

I promise that won't turn Notes into a link blog but there are a few interesting topics that I've stumbled across recently.

Mishkin Berteig (friend and mentor) has a pair of interesting posts:

• The Best Agile Practices to Implement Now (Highest Return on Investment) - he should called it biggest bang for your buck. His recommendations:  "A Proper Team Room", "Short Iterations" and "Test Driven Development". Read the post for the reasoning.
• Measuring Process Improvements - Cycle Time? - a long article that examines how to measure the effect of process changes. Along the way Mishkin also highlights some of the pitfalls that dog Agile implementations.

Deborah Hartmann and Michael K. Spayd have organized Agile Coach Training I would be attending but its in conflict with family obligations.

Finally via Alistair Cockburn I found Wordle.net. What a cool way to waste time. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. Some examples:

Agile/Scrum Smells

In 2003 Mike Cohn started this project with a paper entitled: Toward a Catalog of Scrum Smells (pdf - in the spirit of Code Smells) and last year Rowan Bunning did a presentation Sharing More than > Deodorant for Scrum Smells (pdf). Rowan encouraged to create a wiki with all of these of smells. So I've spent some time in the past few days fleshing out this Catalog.  These are a series of simple patterns that describe a problem and then offer some potential solutions.

Minimally Agile

Recently I had a conversation with a long time friend that made me realize that in my writing and conversation I often come across as a fanatic. Oppppsssss. Time for me to hit the big red reset button. I'm opinionated and passionate but I also believe that you can do good work even if your not push agile limits. There are two things that I'm dogmatic about:

1. Quality - I can't stand shit, especially shit code.
2. Accuracy - I hate mis-information and will pounce on it even when I should know better.

In any case I thought it might help put my core beliefs on the table. If you are working in small achievable chunks and are continuously improving you are Agile. On the other hand you be doing all of the Scrum Practices (Short Iterations, Planning Meeting, Daily Standup, etc.) but are not making any ongoing changes, then you're not Agile.

 

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