Archive for the ‘Capability growth’ Category
Posted by James King on March 9, 2012
This article is part of a series on making regression testing useful rather than painful. The most recent article was (as you would guess from the title to this one) about day 2 of our regression testing adventure.
So far we have been looking at how to do some testing, and then do some basic scripting and mapping as we do more testing. In doing so we have (hopefully) been learning more about the system we are building but our main focus is on making sure it is still performing the way we want to.
Now we are going to evolve our testing onto a proper OODA loop. I have created another article to explain what an OODA loop is, but for our purposes it means this:
How fast and how well can the team move between the following 4 tasks?
- Observe the world around them – the way users are operating, the way the system is performing and the way things are coming together.
- Orient themselves or make sense of all that data (interpreting, analysing, integrating and assessing).
- Decide what to do next with all that information.
- Act on their decisions as a cohesive group.
To do this we need a little lesson in OODA regression testing theory
Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: agile testing, OODA, regression testing, testing knowledge capture | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 28, 2012
I was just reading an article on performance appraisals by Shane Hastie. It is a good summary of some of the issues that traditional performance appraisals cause on agile projects.
But it leaves two questions unanswered:
- Where would you start if you actually had to do a performance agreement; and
- How would you actually know what was expected of you if you didn’t?
The situation is made worse, according to the links in Shane’s article, when you want the team to be jointly accountable for shared success rather than individual success. This is important if you want to work out how to evaluate testers or BA’s for example, because their purpose is to make the team successful rather than to stand out on their own.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: agile projects, OODA, performance agreement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 10, 2012
Life used to be easy for managers. We had good people who delivered lots of stuff and bad people who stuffed up lots of deliverables. It was easy to tell who the good guys and the bad guys were.
But then something significant happened. We discovered that work was not just about performing a set of predictable tasks. We started to realise that:
- Work was about adding value rather than destroying value rather than just delivering stuff; and
- We started to see value as something delivered through the interaction of entire teams and not through individual achievement.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: leadership, matrix structure, performance agreement, tester | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 9, 2012
Everywhere I go I am starting to notice consistent problems or patterns of behaviour that hold back some of the best people in the teams I work with. I think they are starting to rank right up their with the Peter Principle as ways to stop good people from reaching their true potential and really contributing value to the teams they work with.
And they are all related to the managers in the team not having enough time to talk about succession planning.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: succession planning. people leadership | 2 Comments »
Posted by James King on October 27, 2011
I run agile training courses and I often preach the benefit of a daily standup. The idea is that it is 15 minutes a day where everyone in the team lists
- What they have done since last time
- What they will do today
- What obstacle or issue is in their way
It works really well in my slides but now I am trapped in the real world temporarilly working on a real project. Do I really want a daily meeting?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Measurement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on October 3, 2011
I sometimes encounter people with the role of “producer”.
Generally I think of them as “project managers for creative people and artists” but I did once ask a producer what they really do and they succinctly described all the roles of business analyst, Scrum Master/iteration manager, project manager and product owner.
Maybe a shorter description is that they make sure everything comes together on a brief before time, creativity and money run out.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Agile development, Capability growth | Tagged: agile, web producer | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on June 26, 2011
I recently posted an article about motivating people on projects and as a result we had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues.
We discussed several approaches that are sometimes successful and sometimes detrimental.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: motivation, projects | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on April 5, 2011
I spend a lot of time training teams in new approaches like agile development, but most of this training is about new techniques themselves rather than the process of managing the adoption and acceptance of those techniques.
I also spend a lot of time coaching project managers in how to run more effective projects, but I find that a lot of my time is spent on helping them to deal with internal politics, resistance to their projects and communication issues – which do not form part of most project management courses.
As a result I believe there is a need for good training in the area of managing change.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Capability growth, Courses, Idea management, Products | Tagged: agile, change management, communication plan | 1 Comment »
Posted by James King on November 26, 2010
Someone emailed me today to ask what trends I thought were emerging that us trainer/consultant/wanderers should be taking notice of.
Two trends I have been noticing that are both scary and exciting to me are
- People are making knowledge and ideas available for free. This blog includes some of my trade secrets in the hope that they will be useful to others. But that is nothing compared to MIT publishing entire course curricula online or the sheer volume of free information you can get in wikipedia, youtube and other places;
- People are increasingly interacting, doing business and learning online. I did my entire masters degree online and yet even that experience was pretty mundane compared to the emerging opportunities that are emerging – youtube based videos, ebooks, Secondlife (yes – I still think we can do a lot of training in 3d worlds) and even mentoring by Skype and twitter.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Capability growth | 1 Comment »
Posted by James King on August 29, 2010
According to management theory, we all do a better job if we have a clear understanding of our role and what value it is adding to the team and the organisation. We also find work more satisfying when this is the case.
But quite often the role profile, position description and annual performance agreement become more of a burden than a source of job satisfaction.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Capability growth, Observations | Leave a Comment »
