August « 2006 « Musings of a Software Development Manager

Passing A Rugby Ball In Standups

After picking up a rugby ball over the weekend to use as a prop or talking stick I sprung it on two Scrum projects today. I just explained that the ball when you held the ball you talked and when you were done you passed it on to the next person.

On the [...]

Self Organization with Kinkless GTD

I’ve been a Getting Things Done (GTD) practitioner for more than two years now. For a simple overview it’s an organization system based around dumping every todo onto lists, organizing them into contexts and projects, and then reviewing on a regular basis to decide on the most logical think to work on right now.

Anyway [...]

Leaderless Standups

I like the idea of leaderless standup meetings, but so far I haven’t found a way to pull one off. Pretty much everyone waits for the Scrum Master to start the standup and then keep the conversation passing around the room. Dave Nicolette mentioned on this in a recent comment:

Your choice of words caught [...]

Horizontal Security

In a talk tonight at the SACJUG meeting Roman Hustad of Foundstone talked about a number of issues in writing more secure code. Luckily he comes from a coding background so much of the advice was a lot more relevant than the typical network security perspectives.

Foundstone has developed a couple of example applications to [...]

Signaling the End of a Standup

Funny story when I got back from vacation. In my stead the tech lead was holding the standup meetings. He went around the room one of the days and finished up with everyone reporting in under fifteen minutes. At that point there was just silence in the room for about two solid minutes. Turns out [...]

Talking Strategy With the Business

Just before going on vacation last week I managed to meet with a few middle managers on the business side that I should have met with formally years ago. Building my team and their capabilities always trumped meeting with the business to discuss higher level strategy. I’m just as guilty as the next IT manager [...]

Sprint Theme in a Sprint Goal

A recent Sprint goal on an intranet project went something like this:

To migrate most of the intranet content and train at least one content author from each division.

On this Sprint there were probably 8 or 9 actual product backlog items, but the main theme was apparent–moving content. The word most was used because [...]

Musings of a Software Development Manager