Linda Rising: Prejudices Can Alter Team Work

In this interview filmed during Agile 2008, following the presentation “Who Do You Trust?”, Linda Rising shows how prejudices can affect the relationships between team members. According to Linda, we all have a tendency to categorize others based on characteristics like race, religion, sex, but also based on more trivial characteristics, and many times we are not even aware we are doing it.

Jeff Sutherland: Reaching Hyper-Productivity with Outsourced Development Teams

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, and Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, present an actual case of reaching hyper-productivity with a large distributed team using XP and Scrum.

Quote - Darwin

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change

-Darwin

Pressure and Performance – The CTO’s Dilemma

I participated to a panel at Agile 2008, with Diana Larsen, Chair of the Agile Alliance board of directors, and Jim Shore. In this interview made by Deborah Hartmann during the conference, Diana and Jim talk about patterns observed in CTOs’ activity. CTOs emerge as real people caring for other people in their organization, and are put under a lot of pressure and constraints.

Scott Dillman on “Fostering Software Craftsmanship in a Corporate Setting”

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Dillman talks about transforming developers into software craftsmen, people responsible for their work, continuously learning, taking pride in doing qualitative work, sharing knowledge and respecting professional standards.

Scott Ambler on Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Ambler talks about actual data resulting from surveys made during 2006-2008, showing how Agile is perceived and implemented within organizations. Some of the topics surveyed are: the adoption rate of Agile, the effectiveness of Agile approaches, the effectiveness of various techniques.

Mike Cohn on Prioritizing Your Product Backlog

Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented ‘Prioritizing your Project Backlog (here)’ at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.

David Anderson on “Future Directions for Agile”

David Anderson (now president of Modus Cooperandi) is definitively one of the fresh minds in what some would call the “aging narrow minded agile movement”. He has been an active practitioner for years (sprint PCS/microsoft/corbis) and is talking the language of people that actually have to deliver value for their company.

In his presentation “Future Directions for Agile” at Agile 2008 he showed how kanban can serve to unify the agile and lean principles. He also called for stopping the Agile arrogance and offered to join forces with the CMMI folks to measure enterprise success.

Henrik Kniberg on “10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP”

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Henrik Kniberg talks about 10 possible reasons to fail while doing Scrum and XP. Maybe the team does not have a definition of what Done means to them, or they don’t know what their velocity is, or they don’t hold retrospectives.

David Douglas and Robin Dymond on “We Suck Less!” Is Not Enough

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, David Douglas and Robin Dymond discuss about companies which try to adopt Agile, but don’t go all the way, resulting in failure and rejection of it, and predictably having a negative impact on Agile’s future.