The basin of an extinct volcano otherwise known as Edinburgh saw the second public outing of the “Agile: It’s not just about the development team” workshop run with Kevin Rutherford, this time at XP2016. The format was the same as the run at Agile Manchester 2015 but the time allowed was slightly longer so it would be […]
A few weeks ago, Kevin Rutherford and I ran a session at the Agile Manchester conference called “Agile: it’s not just about the development team“. In many businesses the perception is often that the development team is the bottleneck and that if only they could go faster then more customer value would be delivered and […]
A couple of years ago as I was wandering into work one morning I read a tweet from Ron Jeffries which seemed to sum up my feeling about agile software development after years of working as a developer, team leader, coach, etc. in the space: In many places I had seen (and in some cases […]
Over the past few months I’ve very much been a fan-boy of the work done by @racheldavies around building learning in team life. The teams at Unruly seem to have evolved a great combination of learning practices that support different types of learning: team and individual, practical and conceptual, practice and technology, etc. It’s not only […]
We had a good debate on Thursday at XP Manchester about #noestimates. I volunteered to defend the need for estimates, so below is a transcript of my opening rant in defence of estimates… Have we earned the right to say #noestimates? Imagine I wanted a garage built and I found a builder. I show […]
…aka experiments in refactoring A couple of weeks ago I attended a session at the SPA 2014 Conference run by Sandi Metz (@sandimetz) and Matt Wynne (@mattwynne). I was looking to maintain my balance of coding sessions versus discussion or activity-based workshops so it was a toss-up between two that morning. I must admit that the session title of Replacing […]
At the end of June, Chris Cooper-Bland and I will be running a session at the SPA2014 conference called “When will we ever learn“. The main objective of this session is to identify blockers to making learning part of business-as-usual in a software development environment and to come up with some approaches that people can […]
A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of heat and noise on Twitter and the blogs about Bob Martin’s foreman articles [1][2]. I think the powers of the foreman as described are somewhat draconian and excessive but when I think of some of the situations I have found myself in over the years […]
A couple of weeks ago I attended a really good workshop on How To Stop Being Amoral and Unethical (And Like Yourself Again) at SPA2013 led by John Nolan. The session explored the individual morality of software developers and the ethics of the organizations for which they developed software or of the wider community. The motivating examples […]
I was watching Simon Brown’s Frustrated Architect presentation and I found it an interesting trip through design approaches and artefacts. Although slightly irritated that some of the agile approaches seemed to be exaggerated for effect (although I admit that there are some really bad software development teams out there calling themselves agile), his conclusion was what […]
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