Archive for the ‘Agile development’ Category
Posted by James King on April 3, 2012
Just a quick update on a one day course I will be running in July (actually Saturday 21 july 2012).
It is designed for experienced project managers and other project leaders who understand the fundamentals of project management and I am running it as part of the ongoing education program that the Sydney chapter of the Project Management Institue (PMI) run.
As well as my great presentation you will find they have a lot of good courses and workshops for project managers who are part of the PMI group in Sydney.
The course covers the fundamental principles that I see as underpinning agile approaches and is NOT a certification course nor an introduction to being a project manager if you have not done the role before. But it will be a full-on day covering
- A brief context around where agile came from and what it is
- The concepts of value creation and waste in projects
- Adaptive planning and how it compares to traditional project planning
- The concept that success or failure really comes down to the people in the team and how they interact with each other
Here is a link if you want more information:
http://www.pmisydney.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=280%3Ashort-course-agile-principles-for-project-managers
Let me know if you are coming.
Posted in Agile development, Courses, Events | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on March 26, 2012
Every retrospective I do on every project seems to include the conclusion that “we need less meetings, less emails and more communication”.
In fact SCRUM and agile approaches even try to define the bare minimum number of meetings that are needed and only have them (Actually one of my friends claims that they have removed all the meetings – “In agile we don’t have meetings, we only have workshops. Meetings are discussions and Workshops produce something tangible each time”).
Yet the reality seems to remain that meetings (or workshops, or gatherings, or war councils) often end up getting in the way of doing the real work:
So what would you do if you had to look at the return on investment of each meeting? Would they actually stack up from the point of view of making money for shareholders, making life easier for the crew or improving the experience for our customers?
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Posted in Agile development, Implementation | Tagged: agile, effective meetings, waste on IT projects | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on March 11, 2012
I don’t normally publish links on this blog since I prefer to add my own views or approaches.
But there is not much I can add to this one.
People sometimes ask me for links to some of the material they see, either in course material or when I go wild and draw random things on the whiteboard/wall. So here is a link to a new initiative set up by the agile alliance. It appears they are finding and listing the wide range of techniques that people describe as “agile”.
It will no doubt be a good place to go if you are trying to understand the different “agile” practices and potentially how they link together.
http://guide.agilealliance.org/
Posted in Agile development, Techniques | Tagged: agile alliance, agile practices | Leave a Comment »
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 27, 2012
When I started to learn agile approaches to projects, OODA was all the rage, but it seems to have disappeared from view as modern agilistas move from Scrum to lean to Kanban to ultra-velocitus development.
I guess I am still a bit old school, because I still think the OODA loop is the essence of the agile approach.
So what is an OODA loop?
OODA loops began as an approach for fighter pilots to avoid dying. It is a way to train fighter pilots and also a way to design fighter aircraft, develop tactics for air combat and win wars in the air. It turns out that it is also really useful for agile projects, production support teams and anyone rolling out a product in a competitive market.
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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Investigation | Tagged: agile, OODA, success | 1 Comment »
Posted by James King on February 14, 2012
A long time ago I used to do production support as part of my role (I was a Unix administrator/DBA/system analyst).
In those days requirements were really easy for me: people would come to my desk and ask for something, or they would email me or maybe even leave a scribbled note on my desk. There were no standard formats, no formality and (usually) no problems.
But even back then I had to work with vendors and sometimes that was when the trouble started. Some were happy with my “give me a call” approach to requirements, while others required a ticket and some even required a complicated work request form.
Now days, some production support teams are more professional that I was and they actually have real requirements or (if they are agile) stories. And most of them seem to be flooded with vendors.
So, do stories work with vendors? The obvious answer is YES. For example, if you receive a story in the following format then it should work for you and also for your vendor:
- As a coffee club member I want to be able to see a list of future coffee appreciation classes so that I can enrol in those that look interesting.
But what about complaints and bugs?
- As a coffee club member I don’t want to have my name spelled incorrectly because it is really annoying me.
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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: pieces of the puzzle, system analyst, work request | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 14, 2012
I have encountered Use Cases on several occasions, sometimes they seem like a simple tool that can be used to better understand how a system behaves from a users perspective, while at other times people describe them as terrifying monsters that have murdered people and led to the destruction of entire projects. So I am going to recommend only using the good kind.
But what is a use case? It is simply an example of how a system (or business service) could be used by someone.
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Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: agile, regression test, scenario test, use case | 2 Comments »
Posted by James King on February 12, 2012
This article probably makes more sense if you have read regression testing day 1. The aim is to give you a possible way of building good regression testing on a project one day at a time, while testing as you go.
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Posted in Agile development, Implementation | Tagged: manual testing, Regression testing. agile | 1 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.
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Posted in Agile development, Capability growth, Leading change | Tagged: succession planning. people leadership | 2 Comments »
