Short take, a really good concept, but not that great a documentary. You can find longer reviews here and here. I really appreciate Joel’s attempt at producing a documentary on Fog Creek Software’s internship program. The only problem would be a narrative never really develops beyond time passing over the 12 weeks and the growth [...]
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One of the best things I budgeted for this year was a new projector for my team. For some reason we require anyone who wants a projector to reserve one at least 24 hours in advance for a specific conference room. Maybe I don’t have a lot of patience, but I found I was constantly [...] I’m into the second week of holding half hour one-on-one sessions with all of my folks. Today is my big day on Wednesday afternoon where I actually hold six one-on-ones from 1:00-4:00. At least half of the one-on-ones today began with the statement: “Hmm, I really don’t have anything to talk about this time, so [...] Today I spent pretty much the whole day leading a Sprint Planning Meeting as the ScrumMaster. This is the first time I’ve gotten to involve the customers, which is a really nice change since generally we’ve had to follow the waterfall process and then organize a Scrum under the covers. Customers have a way of [...] “Agile works really well with a team of experts.” – Ken Schwaber (ScrumMaster Training) “I’ve read up on this Agile stuff and it was designed for a team of experts. So we shouldn’t start sprinting until we’ve figured out Websphere. We can just use our usual process until then.” (Our usual process is a [...] Everyone agrees the three letter acronym starts with Test. After that we have: Test Driven Development Test First Development Test First Design Test Driven Design Since development is obviously a broader term hence the need for the other two options centering around the word design. Since developers pretty much uniformly hate testing versus designing and [...] ScrumMaster isn’t exactly the sort of job description someone goes looking for. As I remember Ken Schwaber explained that the term was specifically chosen to be uncomfortable because the process of adopting Scrum sucks. The term reminds me of DungeonMaster from the old D&D days or more recently Webmaster. I actually think my job title [...] Say you have a developer, Brad, on a project. Brad is a pretty senior developer and is fairly sarcastic. On a typical waterfall project with defined phases, no collocation and a long testing phase a lot of frustration develops. Typical miscommunication happens and too much is contained in documentation from emails, to defect tracker comments. [...] “I cringe when I read it now.” (1st edition of Extreme Programming Explained) “You can’t make XP work somewhere.” – Kent Beck Listening to an interview with Kent Beck on Team Agile I got a much better understanding of how his ideas of changed. XP has become more a set of good practices and [...] After procrastinating setting up weekly one-on-ones I’m finally kicking them off. Everyone from the Manager Tools podcast to the authors of Behind Closed Doors suggest that this is a very powerful management technique to really help take your team to the next level. I’ve already done a strange reverse experiment in setting up weekly one-on-ones [...] |
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