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
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Wednesday, July 30th, 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. What about cows?
The big difference is that cows give milk, they will contribute to the team if asked. Chickens and seagulls never contribute they just get in ...
Tags: Agile, Scrum
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
I'm actually starting work on a couple of white papers around how p&p runs its software development teams and some of the best practices we've harvested from looking at other Microsoft teams. Currently I'm thinking of two main topics; large scale projects and distributed teams. Some of this will appear ...
Tags: Agile, Best practices, Microsoft, p&p, Scrum
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Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
I finished reading "Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams", Sutherland, Viktorov & Blount last night. The authors describe an Integrated Scrums model which deliberately splits Scrum teams across different geographical locations, rather than co-locating teams and using the scrum-of-scrums approach.
Tags: Agile, Distributed teams, Scrum
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Sunday, October 7th, 2007
It's Sunday so how about something somewhat humorous...
So we all know about Scrum's pigs and chickens but what about seagulls? Seagulls, like chickens, are birds. But unlike a chicken seagulls are noisier and tend to crap all over the place. Seagulls like lots of other large birds don't live in ...
Tags: Agile, Scrum
7 Comments »
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
This post got me thinking "ABUSING AGILE". Ring any bells? How about Scrumerfall or ScrumBut? Know any practicing Scrumerfall or ScrumBut teams? The fact that people are coming up with words for this stuff is worrying. You don't create a word for a one off. If there's a word for something, ...
Tags: Agile, Scrum
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Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
I thought I understood the whole “agile thing”. I’d read Test Driven Development by Jim Newkirk and thought I understood it. Turns out when I attended a seminar on TDD I really only got about a two thirds off the stuff I’d read in the book. Since then I’ve done ...
Tags: Agile, Scrum
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Sunday, November 6th, 2005
So we finished our first sprint and spent a couple of hours reviewing the results, the Sprint Review. We certainly didn't finish everything we originally planned at the start of the sprint, far from it. But we were able to demo the most important product backlog items, although they weren't "done". ...
Tags: Scrum
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Friday, October 14th, 2005
We had an additional chicken at the VSTO Frameworks Team Daily Scrum on Wednesday. Bernie, one of the Microsoft Engineering Excellence guys came over to see how we were doing. He's been using Scrum for a while and had some great feedback. I thought I'd share it here...
Don't use the ...
Tags: Scrum
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Thursday, October 13th, 2005
I'm Certified!
The VSTO team has been working at ways to improve our agility for quite a while. During the second half of the Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) ship cycle we've been slowly ramping up some supporting agile practices; continuous integration and some unit testing.
Recently we've taken the plunge and started using Scrum ...
Tags: Scrum
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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 
