Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft Updated

Friday, August 14th, 2009

A while back I wrote a white paper on Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices based on the experiences of the distributed teams at Microsoft patterns & practices. There were a couple of things that didn't make it into the paper which should have and in the year ...

A Field Guide to Team Distribution

Monday, August 10th, 2009

This is a bit like the Scrum Bestiary minus the continual references to farmyard animals. Instead I’ll be using diagrams as a visual aid. Not as amusing but trust me I tried. This is a work in progress and incomplete. I’m working on it as part of ...

Tooling is a Third Order Effect

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

A lot of the time the first question a lot of people ask about agile and distributed agile in particular is: “Which tool or product should I buy for me and my team?” This isn’t a bad question provided everyone involved understands that tools ...

Agile 2009

Monday, July 20th, 2009

In a somewhat unusual turn of events I’ve actually found the time to write my decks for Agile 2009 early this year. This never happens! I invariably arrive at the venue with a 90% complete deck and fill in the blanks as I talk to attendees. However, this ...

Agile in 500 words… and An Updated p&p Agile Showcase

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

About nine months ago we launched the patterns & practices Agile Showcase. Since then we’ve been slowly adding content. Yesterday we launched a new layout with additional content. A recommended books list, video browser and links to some useful tools. I was also asked to add an introduction. Which ...

Agile is NOT a Religion

Friday, June 19th, 2009

I was having dinner with some people at a conference and one of them turned to me and said “If you weren’t doing agile what would you be doing?” I remember looking very blank and giving a somewhat vague answer. In retrospect this was because the question ...

Book Review of Scaling Lean & Agile Development

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

While supposedly on vacation and sitting on a beach in Jamaica I finally got around to reading a couple of books that haven’t quite made it to the top of the stack. This is largely thanks to the lack of slack and impending annual performance reviews. More on that later… ...

The Agile Talk on Agility

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

So this is something that’s been doing the rounds at p&p for a while, Peter Provost and I have given this talk at Microsoft and Peter has taken it to TechEd and the p&p Summit. Peter says he got the idea from Brian Button and it evolved from there. In ...

Elegant Code Cast on Distributed Agile Development

Monday, May 18th, 2009

I spent an hour or so a week or so back talking to David Starr, of Elegant Code fame, about distributed agile development and some of the things we’ve discovered while running distributed team at p&p. If you’re running or working on a distributed team then you might find ...

Of Plans and Planning

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

In the beginning there was The Plan. The Planner looked upon The Plan and saw that it was good. A prioritized Product Backlog and accompanying Release Plan for the whole of the next release of BigApp 3.0. Enough work to keep hundreds of people busy for the next eighteen ...