Archive for March, 2009

• Vicky Christina Barcelona

  Date: 2009.03.26 | Category: Movies, Personal, Spain, Travel | Response: 1

   

  

  Park Guell

  After sitting around on our coffee table for about two weeks, we finally took the time to watch Vicky Christina Barcelona.  This was a very thoughtful romantic comedy and I enjoyed it for many reasons.  One, it dealt with complex relationships in a mature and honest manner.  Because there was truly no “right answer” on how to live your life, I thought Woody Allen did an excellent job leaving the ending ambiguous and true to the story – one could read the ending two ways depending on what one believed the “right answer” was for the protagonists.  Two, it was fun to watch the various characters play the neurotic, over-analyzing Woody Allen character – mostly Rebecca Hall, but Scarlett Johansson and Kevin Dunn also got in on the fun, too.  Three, I see why Penelope Cruz won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.  Her presence on-screen was mesmerizing and invigorating.

  However, the best part of the movie were the lovely shots of Barcelona.  Barcelona is one of my favorite cities in the world and Woody Allen showed a lot of the great sites – Ramblas, the Gaudi architecture, the beaches, the beautiful Spanish sun.  For anyone who knows and loves Barcelona, this film is friendly reminder of this wonderful corner of Spain.

• Agile in 30 Seconds

  Date: 2009.03.20 | Category: Agile | Response: 0

  If I had to summarize what I think Agile is about right now, this is how I would describe it.

  1. Get work done.
  2. Meet your commitments.
  3. Communicate often.
  4. Produce deliverables you are proud of.
  5. Go home tired.

• Great Podcast on Retrospectives

  Date: 2009.03.16 | Category: Agile, Collaboration, Communication, Retrospectives | Response: 0

  Wow!  Great information from Linda Rising on how to conduct a retrospective, the exercises she uses and the value of the retrospectives.  Check out this podcast; it is about 90 minutes, but completely worth it.

• Brasil Scrum Gathering 2009

  Date: 2009.03.12 | Category: Conferences, Presentations | Response: 0

  The Scrum Alliance is sponsoring a Scrum Gathering in Sao Paulo on May 12th & May 13th.  This is should be an interesting collection of Scrum folks in South America.  I am thinking about submitting a session or two.

  I submitted a session on “Prioritizing the Product Backlog using Pugh” and luckily it was accepted.  Unfortunately, I could not attend due to scheduling conflicts – CEN 04/17/2008

• Prioritization with Pugh

  Date: 2009.03.03 | Category: Collaboration, Design Excellence, Design for Six Sigma, Lean, Product Owner, Pugh Concept Selection | Response: 0

  I came across a recent blog entry where Brandon Carlson was discussing one technique he used to speed up the prioritization of Product Backlog items with Product Owners.  He describes the scene like this:

  “It was late July and I was sitting through yet another agonizing prioritization meeting. The sounds of debating product stakeholders filled the air, each weighing in on his or her pet feature’s relative merit, desperately trying to inch it toward the beginning of the development queue.”

  Reading further along in the article, you learn they solved this problem by scoring each feature (on a scale of 0 to 3) how well each feature met twenty-two key attributes from the perspective of both the business and the system.  The features that scored the highest were moved to the top of the prioritization queue and the ones which scored the lowest moved to the bottom.  What broke the logjam for them was having the ability to talk about the features using data and moving away from advocacy.

  What Brandon described is essentially Pugh Concept Selection – a Design for Six Sigma tool.  Bernie Thompson gives an excellent description on his blog of using a more “pure” application of Pugh to select between different cell phone plans.  Pugh was originally used to rank various design alternatives during Analyze, but again the Lean world has yet another mature tool that the Agile community can apply in our lightweight environments.

• Ways Pair Programming Can Suck

  Date: 2009.03.02 | Category: Pair Programming, Practices | Response: 0

  William Pietri has come up with a list of ways to do pair programming badly.  My favorites – #4 and #8.  Seriously though, these are anti-patterns to avoid, not to emulate.  Pair programming is a very powerful tool, we just need to get eliminate some of the misconceptions out there.