Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
This is a quick brain dump of the day for me – brief summaries and key highlights that stood out. The conference kicked off with an interesting keynote by James Suroweicki, author of Wisdom of the Crowds. Essentiallly this is about how collective intelligence can be better than individual intelligence. For example, we had a live experiment where all attendees …
Following on from some posts that have been shared in the Agile2008 FriendFeed Room, here are my recommendations for what to attend (excluding my sessions!) Tuesday Morning Behaviour Driven Development Using Plain Old JUnit, Elizabeth Keogh & Dan North – should given an interesting insight to how BDD is compared to plain old TDD. Learning Kaizen from Toyota (with Mindmaps), …
Agile 2008 is almost here and I’m looking forward to presenting 3 sessions this year. Managers Introduction to Test Driven Development (with Dave Nicolette) Wednesday 6th, 16:00 – 17:30, Civic Ballroom South, Customers & Business Value Stage The purpose of this session is to help non-technical managers understand the business value of one of the popular agile software development techniques. …
I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about how User Experience work fits into an Agile process. As a result a trying to articulate my position, I’ve come up with the following explanation of the anatomy of an MMF. The following diagrams assume the following key: Lets start by looking at a typical waterfall model: In this case, all …
One of my background areas of interest is the use of musical metaphors to describe agile software development. I’m a classically trained musician, and I’m always surprised by the number of other musicians I meet in the agile community. I can’t help thinking that the training and experience gained by musicians is applied by them in their software careers. I …
One of the regular questions I get asked when I talk to people about KFC Development is about how it is different. As a result I came up with a set of KFC Consequences to try and help articulate this. Kanban Consequence – Eliminate backlogs, timeboxed iterations and estimates. Eliminate might be a slightly strong word, but there is certainly …
Allan Kelly blogged recently about whether kanban systems trade predictability for efficiency. Its an interesting viewpoint, but I’m not entirely sure I agree! Firstly, I don’t believe any agile process gives predictability. One of the reasons for preferring agile methods is that software development just isn’t predictable. Rather, I would say that agile methods can give reliability and that both …
Liz Keogh says “RIP As a… I want… So that…” (via David Anderson). This also ties in with what Chris Matts has being describing as Feature Injection. What I like about this idea is that it provides the link between the MMF and the User Story. Liz proposes a new format: In order to <achieve some value> As a <role> …
The final morning of the conference was faily quiet again. I did go to “The Agile Technique Hour” which was fun and interesting. David Parsons has posted the materials online, but in brief, we were split into teams in order to deliver features, which were drawings on functionality on overhead acetate. The features were integrated by overlaying the acetate sheats. …
An excellent workshop by Mary and Tom Poppendieck today entitled “Stop Thrashing: Pull Schedule Techniques for Level Workflow”. It really left me buzzing, for two reasons. Firstly, Mary talked about her real experiences implementing a kanban system at 3M which was fascinating, and secondly, I ended up being invited up to the front to share my experiences with implementing a …