Month

Come to XPSD on October 1st where I will share my ideas and experiences gained while in Shanghai.  I am not sure if I will turn my presentation into a post, but I will give away my key point now: you will have much more impact improving the performance of your Scrum teams by...

Obie Fernandez writes a blog post about how pair programming is not for the masses.  I find it interesting that his post addresses many of the items that were not discussed at the Agile 2009 session on how to debug pair programming. Three ideas identified by Obie are common...

I came across a question on a usergroup asking the following (it’s condensed): “In our projects we maintain product backlog and do high level estimates in story points. Then when we actually start the iteration we do estimates in the sprint planning meeting in story...

I was having a really interesting conversation with Susan Elliot Sim at Agile Open SoCal.  I was asking her why is it so difficult to get peer-reviewed articles published on Agile.  She responded by telling me this story, with the instruction to identify the emotions you feel...

Thanks to Lisa Crispin for pointing out this article on pair programming in the Jobs section of the New York Times.  In the article, they do a profile of a company in Florida that uses pair programming.  It’s a very first person description of the practice, the benefits and...

Looking through some old notes from China, I noticed there were a number questions about the roles in Scrum, the importance of each role and how each role balances the other.  As a review, here are the three “offical” roles in Scrum and an additional role I consider...

Just wanted to reiterate the value of TDD – I am working on a programming challenge and was surprised how easy it was to add a hunting and killing algorithm to my program.  Since it was written using TDD, I had a nice suite of fast tests which allowed me to incrementally...

I was having a conversation with a manager the other day about the difficulties she was having filling a position.  Everything seemed like an obstacle that could not be overcome – the distances were too far, candidates were good on paper only, not enough time to review...

I was looking back at some old notes of mine from China and I came across a number of questions from the people I worked with about the Definition of Done.  The Definition of Done (DoD) is a very important concept in Scrum and not spending time to construct a DoD is a common...