Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
I’ve added a page of slide decks for talks I’ve given over the past couple of years. I've just added a new deck.
Patterns and Practices @ patterns & practices
This is the talk I gave at the p&p Summit in Quebec earlier in 2008 on some of the thinking we did ...
Tags: Agile, News & events, p&p, Quebec
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
I'll be speaking at this year's patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, 3-7 Nov. The provisional lineup is now available.
I'm also writing a white paper on the same topic. If there are things you'd like to see covered in the talk or paper then I'm looking for feedback. Post a ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, News & events, Seattle
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Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Over the past year I've posted quite a few times on the topic of distributed teams and how to work with them. No doubt about it, it's difficult and the teams velocity will be slowed up if they're not co-located. It seems like the stock solution, co-location, just isn't getting ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams
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Friday, August 29th, 2008
During the distributed agile workshop at Agile 2008 there was some discussion of Conway's Law (named after Melvin Conway). Conway's law basically says
Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
So distributing your team not only effects its communication dynamics adds dysfunction, it also may impact the actual ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Large teams, Scrum
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Monday, August 25th, 2008
A final addition to the Scrum Bestiary. Yes, I know I promised that we were done but no sooner had I said that than Bob, one of the p&p developers, said "But what about...". It's the weekend so something a little off the wall is OK. We all know ...
Tags: Agile, Scrum
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Friday, August 15th, 2008
One of the things that really impressed me at the conference was Industrial Logic's Agile eLearning product/project. I went to two good talks by Joshua Kerievsky (refactoring) and Brian Foote (patterns) both of which demo'ed their eLearning stuff. It's arranged in albums and makes lots of use of videos. ...
Tags: Agile, Coding, News & events, Patterns, TDD, Toronto
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
If you've been in software a while a lot of the time your gut starts to tell you that something feels wrong before you figure out exactly why. This year's Agile 2008 conference gave me several insights into why some things I've had deep reservations about are wrong in a ...
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Large teams, News & events, Toronto
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
Corey Ladas of Modus Cooperandi talked about "Starting a Kanban System for Software Engineering with Value Stream Maps and Theory of Constraints" The section of this talk that was about applying Kanban to an existing Scrum process, "Scrum-ban", can be found on Corey's blog. What this does for you is ...
Tags: Agile, News & events, Scrum, Toronto
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Monday, August 11th, 2008
Another addition to the Scrum Bestiary. So we all know about Scrum’s pigs and chickens and a while back I wrote about seagulls and cows. What about foxes? Foxes are bad news, plain and simple. Foxes are usually part of the business but your team will only see them ...
Tags: Agile, Scrum
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Thursday, August 7th, 2008
Bas Vodde's talk on Tuesday "The Trouble With Component Teams And An Alternative". The title is somewhat obtuse, but the talk was great. Essentially he was talking about the problems with scaling very large projects when the teams are focused around the components of the system rather than the features. ...
Tags: Agile, Large teams, Scrum, Toronto
2 Comments »
Welcome to my blog on software development and probably a whole lot more. If you're looking for alpine climbing you'll find it on my 
