Agile Pain Relief

July 19, 2010 in Agile, Links by Mark Levison

Courtesy of a few hours delay from Ottawa to LaGuardia, I have some unexpected time to write a Quick Links.

I’m always explaining to clients the problems with traditional Test Automation approaches. With Why Test Automation Costs Too Much Elisabeth Hendrickson explains why Test Last will always fail. Now she just leaves the job of explaining what to do instead.

Derek Huether found an awesome Scrum Intro Video (by Hamid Shojaee, Founder and CEO of Axosoft) – its only 8 minutes long.

Odopod is an online sketch pad, I’ve not spent enough time playing yet but it has support for animation. Might be a great tool for users of Dan Roam’s “Unfolding the Napkin” and Dave Gray’s  “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers” (Caveat Emptor I only just discovered Dave’s book today and so haven’t read it yet).

Hiring for a Collaborative Team from Esther Derby has a great set of ideas. I would only add one I recently hear from Pascal Van Cauwenberghe in an email to the agile games list where he describes introducing a potential hire to his company by playing the XP game with them.

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

May 5, 2010 in Agile, Links by Mark Levison

I started this week’s Quick Links last week at home in Canada. This week I’m at a client in the States and seem to have even less time in the evenings to write. How does that happen?

In People, Processes then (Maybe) Technology, Elliot Ross finds another angle one of my favorite thoughts. Tools are just enablers of process. When someone says which Agile tool (i.e. Rally, VersionOne, Danube/CollabNet, ………………) should I use, I reply “wait until you understand how you do agile, then you can decide which if any tool you need”.

Nigel Shaw writes: No Wonder Agile Guys Shun Tools in it he lists some of the many ways that agile tools fail in their attempt to mimic whiteboards. I add to his list: “As good as you make a tool displayed on a screen, it will still suffer from the problem that no one looks at the webpage very often. People walk past a physical story board many times a day, during standup they can touch the stories they worked on. Finally when someone comes up with a bright new idea for the board you implement it minutes with tape, PostIt Notes and white board marker.”

Steven “Doc” List talks about “A Culture of Heroism” and its ill effects on a team.

How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead – the story of Ralph Stayer the CEO of Johnsonville Foods. A great story of he completely changed the way his family Sausage company worked.

February 22, 2010 in Agile, Links by Mark Levison

Thanks for reading the 9th Agile Quick Links.

Shu-Ha-Ri comes from the Japanese Martial Art of Akido. Roughly speaking it equates to:

1. Shu – learning the basics, repeating movements and following commands without questioning.
2. Ha – breaking with tradition, finding exceptions, asking questions.
3. Ri – transcendence – there are no longer individual techniques or practices, instead everything can flow.

This progression has often been used in the Agile Community to remind people not to question or alter the basic practices when they’re still learning to become Agile. (Thanks to Alistair Cockburn for introducing us to the idea in his book: Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game). Rachel Davies has recently come across some harmful uses of the idea and talks about them in: Shu-Ha-Ri Considered Harmful? I don’t entirely agree with Rachel but that will be the subject another blog post.

February 10, 2010 in Agile, Links by Mark Levison

Hopefully, it’s obvious to all and sundry that this blog has been transformed. As you can see, I’m in the middle of launching a new business site: Agile Pain Relief Consulting. The blog will always be called “Notes From A Tool User,” and notesfromatooluser.com will always work, but from now on it will be a 301 redirect to this site. The upshot—please do not adjust your set. It is functioning as intended.

The transformation is far from complete—some structural work and a lot of writing are left to do. Please excuse the mess. In the meantime, I’m going to get this blog back on track.

This week’s Quick Links:

We’re hearing a lot about Toyota’s woes in the news. Hal Macomber thinks the common claim that Toyota lost its focus in attempting to become the world’s largest car manufacturer is wrong—read: What Is Going on with Toyota and Toyota’s Lesson for Project Managers for more.

Dave Nicolete (riffing on some comments by Dave Rooney) suggests a simple way for estimating a team’s initial velocity for its first few iterations. This is the problem that teams new to Agile have. Management wants an initial estimate of how much work will get done before the product is released and the team doesn’t have enough experience to give it.

Sandy Walsh (a former colleague from Andyne Computing) is writing an interesting series on the importance of readable code: A Tale of Two Code Bases and Your Code is the Other Team Member .…

In Goal-Oriented Daily Stand-Ups, Joakim Karlsson offers the idea of setting a daily team goal, which helps to ensure that the individual tasks toward the team’s goals.

In the early ’80s, the department of Computing Science at Queen’s University got its first Vax 11/780. At the time, my father complained that professors no longer talked but just emailed each other even though their offices were only 10 feet apart. Phil Jeffs notices the problem continues: Don’t email me. I’m sat right next to you.

January 18, 2010 in Agile, Links by Mark Levison

Sorry for missing a week. I’ve got serious business site renovations going on. Stay tuned for an announcement in the next week or two (note that 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 is a great little conference in Dearborn, 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—it’s 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 that I rarely get to see clients make it to this level. They usually 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).