Agile Pain Relief

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).

November 23, 2009 in Agile, Links by Mark Levison

Following from last week, I’m doing a weekly series of posts on interesting Agile Links I’ve seen in the past week.

Steven “Doc” List, has a pair of posts on blame: A Culture of Blame and With Blame Goes Guilt—a healthy reminder about where we should place our focus.

Mike Dwyer: Lessons Learned with Distributed Scrums—his experience mirrors my own working with a distributed/dispersed Agile team. Distributed is still painful, but tools like this go a little way to minimizing the pain.