I recently had the opportunity to attend a webinar “Giving and Taking Design Criticism” with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. The session teaser was: “Have you ever engaged in a design review where people didn’t play fair? Do you have trouble giving design advice that sticks? An effective software developer or designer needs to be skilled at giving, asking for, and reacting appropriately to criticism.”

As someone who has done design/code reviews, I’ve always wondered why the advice didn’t stick and needed to be repeated so often. As a victim of the same reviews, I wondered why the reviewer needed to be so picky and unpleasant Two sides of the same coin?

In this Webinar, Rebecca reminded us what is going on and gave us some tools to do better reviews and be better listeners. She talked about Cognitive Biases (an excellent list >75 biases) and their effect. Key takeaway: Everyone brings a different set of biases to the table, and they cause us to react rather “think and behave logically.”

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Paul Relf is a Scrum Product Owner at Nortel and one of the few people I’ve seen who really understands the role of product owner. In April, he gave a presentation at Agile Ottawa that I missed. Luckily, Fred Dixon recorded the presentation on video, and the results are now up at the Code Factory: The Product Owner.

Twitter is fun, c2.com is almost dead, and blogs have a lot of great ideas, but the best discussions about Agile still occur on the mailing list. Yet, I keep coming across people interested in learning about Agile but who don’t know about the mailing lists.

What follows are the mailing lists I know of (most of which I subscribe to). BTW I don’t recommend subscribing to this many mailing lists, as your mail volume will be insane (mine is about 300–400 messages a day). I can only handle it because gmail collapses long conversations into a single thread.

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