We decided to move the Notes from a Tool User blog out from Typepad to a Wordpress platform. From now on, you will be able to find the blog here – at agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser.
You was probably redirected here from the old www.notesfromatooluser.com address which we will no longer use.
Don’t worry, you all the content from the original site is here and you old links will keep working.
This site isn’t quite up and running yet and as such is in a massive state of flux. If you’re looking for Mark Levison – Agile Pain Relief Consultant – send an email to
Thanks for your patience
Mark
![PeterDrucker002_jpg[1]](/images/old/6a00d8341cc2cf53ef012876ebb621970c-pi.jpg "PeterDrucker002_jpg[1]")
Sorry for the missing a week – I’ve got serious business site renovations going on stay tuned for an announcement in the next week or two (Note this is an estimate and not a commitment).
Jonathan Rasmusson offers the Drucker Exercise a simple way to get a team to gel at the start of a project. I think I might use this with the next team I coach to help break down those initial barriers.
The Mostly Free Detroit Agile Conference a great little conference in Dearbon Michigan (a bit far from Ottawa). Which leads to Matt Heusser: Conferences on the cheap – Matt offers ways of doing conferences for much less than the expected rate.
I keep on hearing about Continuous Deployment and while I think that most teams are not ready for this by a long shot – its one hell of a goal. Eric Reis introduced me to a great case study from Ash Mauyra. The downside of being an outside coach is I rarely get to see clients make it to this level. Usually they let go of their outside consultants long before they get to this stage. Way to got Ash.
Over at Cutter Jim Highsmith has some good reminders around Self-discipline and Self-organization. Short, simple and sweet.
A very large list of on line collaboration tools. Might be useful assuming that you feel you really need distributed teams (see Self Inflicted Agile Injuries).
In December Liz Keogh, Eric Willeke and Jean Tabaka finding themselves in Boulder at the same time got together at the Rally offices. In only a day they managed to draft a statement of the beliefs and respect. If we all agree to follow them and respect each other many of the rifts that have appear in the Agile community in the past year will start to heal (see the comments under Jean’s post: “Escalation” for examples of those rifts. Also see the Cutter 2010 predictions).
I’m back in the saddle after having taking a couple of weeks off the internet.
This week we open with a pair of posts around TDD. First up Scott Miller of Atomic Objects ran a simple experiment: Faster, better, cheaper! TDD wins in a simple experiment and then earlier this year Mike (GeePaw) Hill wrote: How TDD and Pairing Increase Production a good explanation as to why it works.
Xavier Quesada Allue aka Mr Visual offers: Build a taskboard in 10 steps.
Not a blog post but a useful tool: Sonar from Codehaus may give a way of measuring some (but not all) of your technical debt.
Dean Leffingwell uses Little’s Law, Queuing Theory and Starbucks to show us why large backlogs are not Agile: An Agile Illusion: How That Nice Backlog is Actually Decreasing Your Team’s Agility
Anyone who has taken Agile Training from has heard my remarks about team size. Johanna Rothman gives us: “Ideal” Team Size and Ratios – I’m with her more 9-10 people on a team and you will get separate sub teams forming. On the subject of how many testers/writers does a team need? I like to start with one of each and add developers until they’re at capacity.
Richard Lawrence is chugging away and creating new versions of Cuke4Nuke – a version of cucumber that allows you write your step definitions in .NET: Screencast: Testing Web Applications in .NET with Cuke4Nuke and WatiN
Michael Dubkaov shows us why its a good idea for developers to have some slack time: Kanban Psychology. Can You Say No?
Offshoring is frequently promoted as a way to produce great products for far less money. So many software development companies boast about sending large amounts of their work to India or China to reduce costs. Unfortunately in doing so they’re often reluctant to pay the price to create and maintain high performance distributed teams.
Agile works on the basis of a few simple principles:
Thinking back on every project that I’ve ever worked on (Agile or not) the quality of communications was a good predictor of the success. So when we run distributed teams there has to be a focus on making the communications work.
At best the typical approach to this problem is to buy web cams, fancy video conferencing software and conduct our meetings sitting in front of them. But that misses the point – these devices improve the quality of communications but not enough. They don’t build trust. To really build trust you have to meet face to face for at least a week. Unfortunately trust is weakened through the course of the year, so it has to be renewed. At a minimum team members need to visit each other twice a year.
So if you really want to get a high performing team – don’t underestimate the real costs, budget for travel – a minimum of twice a year to build and maintain trust. Don’t short change your distributed teams.
This edition of the Agile Quick Links is being brought to you from a hotel room in Santa Clara.
Matt Heusser takes on one of my favorite recent peeves with: The Fishing Maturity Model.
Gojko Adzic writes about a recent XPDay 09 session: Shock therapy agile adoption at 7Digital. The good news with this shock therapy is that no humans appear to have been harmed in the process.
High Performance teams (see: "The Wisdom of Teams" by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith) is important background for Agile teams. In “What makes a true team” The Financial Post has effectively done a good job of summarizing Katzenbach and Smith.
Looking for good Lean games, I was reminded of the Theory of Constraints dice game: What is the Dice Game or Match-Bowl Experiment? (quick description) and The Dice Game(s) – better explanation and a chance to fire people if the dice don’t their way 
Like clock work every 2-3 months someone on the Scrum Development mailing lists asks: “Can the Product Owner and the Scrum Master the same Person?”. Thanks to Boris Gloger we now have 10 reasons to say no.
We’ve all seen the results of individual rewards – pay someone to fix bugs – you will breed bug writers. Reward Firefighters (on a team) and you will get firefighters. Laszlo Szalvay wrote: Personal Heroics vs. Team Success.
Almost exactly three years ago I was trying to use David Allen’s "Getting Things Done"
Today my system is a little closer to a hybrid of Mark Forester’s AutoFocus and Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique. I still use MLO as my task manager but on a more granular level than I used to. Instead of slaving over MLO constantly now I use to help generate my list for the day. I use MLO to keep track of a large list of tasks. Mostly I just use the outline to remind of thinks I want to tackle. Daily I glance at the TODO view to make sure that there isn’t anything that is date sensitive that I’ve lost track of. Once it comes to committing to tasks for a day I often use Index cards using MLO, email and anything else as inputs. At the end of a day (sometimes two) I take anything that remains in the card and put into MLO. Then I tear up the card that’s probably the most fun part.
Other habits
I use the Pomodoro Technique for:
Also on a two monitor setup under Win7 I dock MLO on the far left and leave it in outline mode where I can always see other things I want to do.
Other tools I use: ClipMate Clipboard Extender – because it allows me handle more than one item in the clipboard and to clean (i.e. remove html etc).
I’m working with a client who runs a documentation team, so I was delighted to discover: HeraTech a new blog dedicated to applying Agile to Techinical Writing.
Preparing for TEDxOttawa this past I saw a couple of great talks: Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation (hint individual rewards don’t work) and Dan Gilbert on Our Mistaken Expectations (he demonstrates that we’re really bad judges of value).
Henrik Mintzberg revisits Dan’s point to say: No More Executive Bonuses!
I love seeing Agile applied in interesting places and seeing how it adapts – so I offer you the Agile Lawyers Association – it seems like a great idea but the website needs a bit of work.
Michael Sahota visits one of favorite topics – Joseph Pelrine and “Coaching Self-Organizing Teams”. I wrote about this last year: Coaching Self Organizing Teams and Part II.
Finally Ilja Preuss gives a some great tips on keeping time in a meeting (Agile or otherwise).
This week I’m leading off with a pair of items on the Brain and recovering from challenging Cognitive tasks: Cognitive Recovery Time and A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain (NY Times – login required). The first suggests that your brain needs some recovery time after doing something “challenged” your brain. The second reinforces the importance of sleep and dreams in integrating ideas and information. What this says for TEDx attendees next week – I’m not sure expect that we presenters will have to work hard to make our ideas stick. I also think its a bad sign for the typical two-three day Agile training course.
Joe Little shares his: Agile Principles – examples: all WIP is bad, bad news doesn’t get better with age, You learn the fastest by small mistakes.
Ilja Preuss says something that’s been on my mind for a while: Index Cards are Tools, too!
Johanna Rothmann tells “How Not to Win Friends and Influence People” – I’m only disappointed that she didn’t name names.
Finally Abby Fichtner reminds us: Agile Leadership: Methodology Ain't Enough
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If you want to bring Mark into your organization for Training, Coaching or Consulting please visit the corporate site: The Agile Consortium.
