Posted by Christophe on February 26, 2009
Just a few more days left for agile 2009 submissions…
I just got mine in:
Posted in Agile 2009, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Jean Tabaka | Tagged: Agile 2009, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Jean Tabaka | 1 Comment »
Posted by Christophe on February 21, 2009
Who hasn’t heard that agile testers are different?
They work upfront, hand in hand with the developers, are information radiator to the business, create automated testing frameworks, do exploratory testing, help getting stories done-done, are change agents etc. Right?
But how do you get there? And where is “there” anyway?
That’s what Lisa Cripsin and Janet Gregory are answering in their newly released book “Agile Testing – A practical guide for testers and agile teams“.
In this book, Crispin and Gregory define agile testing and illustrate the tester’s role with examples from real agile teams (collected from over 40 interviews with agile personalities). They teach you how to use the agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors
of agile testing.
Readers will come away from this book understanding
This book is a must for agile testers, agile teams, their managers, and their customers.
Posted in Books, Quality | Tagged: agile testing, book, janet gregory, lisa crispin, QA, Quality | 1 Comment »
Posted by Christophe on February 15, 2009
The CIO Forum is specifically designed to provide senior level IT executives from mid-to-large enterprises the opportunity to take a step back from the day to day to network and learn from their peers, as well as investigate new ways to meet their current projects and demands with senior representatives from a select group of forward thinking vendors and service providers.
The venue of the Norwegian Dawn Ocean Liner provides a unique focused environment to promote maximum time-efficiency for two days and three nights.
Through small workshops and round tables attendees are able to share best practices, successful case studies, and receive opinions and suggestions from your peers. The entire conference is built around helping everyone become a more effective executive and opening doors to new perspectives and points of view.
I’ll be speaking at agile workshop on the role of leadership in transitioning the whole enterprise to agile, and the common pitfalls of management in the endeavor.
Conference program
|
April 27
6:00 pm 7:30 pm
8:30 pm 10:00 pm April 28/29
7:45 am
9:00 am 1:15 pm 2:45 pm 6:30 pm
8:30 pm
10.00 pm
April 30
7:00 am |
-
Opening Keynote Address
Speed Meetings & Welcome Reception Dinner
Networking in onboard bars & casino
-
Breakfast
Conference Sessions / Business Meetings
Lunch
Conference Sessions / Business Meetings
Free time / activities / networking
Dinner Entertainment & Networking in onboard bars & casino
-
Breakfast & Disembarkation
|
Posted in Event, Leadership | Tagged: cio, Event, Leadership, new york, Norwegian Dawn | 1 Comment »
Posted by Christophe on February 14, 2009
Sloppy developers create sloppy code; no matter how “Agile” , without strong engineering practices, they just pile up junk code.
In this talk on infoQ Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don’ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen.
Posted in Bob Martin, Quality, Videos | Tagged: Bob Martin, Quality, Video | 1 Comment »
Posted by Christophe on February 10, 2009
Close to 100 people showed up to the scrum club event sponsored by rallydev tonight, including a bunch of CSTs/CSCs. Feed them, and they will come (thank you Amanda, Mine and Kris from rallydev for the fantastic organization).
The theme of the evening was “Boostrapping and agile team”.
George Schlitz, coach from BigVisible Solutions, talked about the need to put agile projects in the context of the organization – defining clear stakeholders roles, involvement and communication.
Scott Downey, coach at myspace, presented reasons for scrum implementations ot fail and provided the base for what he calls “the shock therapy” – the scrum coach sets the one by deciding on iteration length, usage of story points, meeting agendas etc… until the team earns the right to change these initial decisions.
I challenged everyone with the idea that initiating a transformation to agile without executive engagement, strong engineers and experienced agile coaches is very likely a waste of effort, i.e. not going to materially change the success of the business.
A video should show up sometime soon.
Posted in Event | Tagged: Event, Gorilla Nation, los angeles, scrum club | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christophe on February 9, 2009
The agile 2009 committee has extended the deadline for submission from February 13th to March 3rd. I assume they felt that the volume of submission wasn’t high enough. There was 1,000+ submissions / edits this week end, compared to over 3,000 last year.
A sign that agile steam is going down, or that, with the economy, people will not travel to the conference?
Posted in Agile 2009, Conferences | Tagged: Agile 2009 | 1 Comment »
Posted by Christophe on February 7, 2009
Dr David A. Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell University studies accuracy and illusion in human judgment.
His findings are clear and to be considered seriously: incompetent people just don’t know how bad they are. Worse, they think very strong about themselves, more than people who are actually good . Why? Simply because people who are awful at something lack the judgment skill or knowledge to recognize their incompetence or evaluate someone else qualities.
This has a lot of implications for you:
Now think about the above in the context of yearly performance appraisals, interviews of candidates, promotion requests, and day to day when people disagree on how to fix a problem…
What can you do if you can’t judge? Simply don’t!
Don’t get angry at poor performers that just don’t see it. Train them if you can, replace them if you can’t. Don’t take it personally and more on.
There are many reasons not to do performance appraisals. Instead, engage them in personal introspection, and provide them with a clear vision and frequent feedback.
During interviews, don’t ask candidates how good they are at specific tasks (“what are your strengths / weaknesses?”). Instead, question them about how they specifically handled a given situation, what they would do different today about it.
I think this is a great blog post. So now I wonder…
Posted in Communication, Management, Recruiting, Team Performance | Tagged: appraisals, incompetence, interviewing, judgment | 2 Comments »
