This is the first of a few guests posts from Version One.
Staying competitive in today’s economy means companies must deliver the right products to market faster and with higher quality than ever before. Adopting agile development methods is a significant way organizations are doing this. Making the switch to test-first programming and agile testing challenges traditional notions of software engineering best practices. Continue Reading
Continuing my blogging around agile game play, I attended Gabrielle Benefield’s product creation workshop today, one of my key takeaway’s was a pretty simple, yet powerful learning game, Paper planes.
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{“Nothing can drag you down if you’re not holding onto it.
We all have tendency to hang on to things, perhaps it is a way of working, or a behaviour, or a judgement of one of our co-workers… in order to move forward as a team, we may well have to let go of strongly held belief’s…what can you do as a Scrum Master to show the way, what can you let go of ? Continue Reading
{“The Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new“}
There is no getting away from it, nor should we want to, organizations want to be able to measure teams, their output, performance, yield, what ever you want to call it…
What is the goal here ? for me, the goal is not to measure agility, or to become agile, but to become predictable. If we become predictable at delivering quality products, it’s a game changer for the organization. Continue Reading
Just back from the UK Agile Cxoaches Gathering 2011, an Open Space conference, in bletchley park, there were around 30 or 40 passionate men and women who had an interest in discussing coaching teams and organizations, who are working in or towards some form of agile methodology.
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I recently attended a Limited WIP society meetup at Skills matter, where Karl Scotland and John Stevenson ran the Ball flow game as a way to introduce Kanban to people. The game originated as a way to introduce Scrum and I had the opportunity to run such a session this week, however I decided to tweak it a bit to enable various scenarios to be experienced by the participants and to support specific conversations.
Here is the setup: Continue Reading
Last Thursday I was speaking at the Agile Evangelist meet up at skills matter. It is a new group of people focused on all things agile in London. I ran a version of the “35 Game”, (see an earlier post for more details on that)
On the night, the question that we asked was, what are key factors for companies to consider when adopting agile. There was lots of challenges created in writing the question this way, some intentional, some not. Continue Reading
I came across the 35 technique for gathering input from a team on Lyssa Adkins blog, and have been wanting to try it for a while, and I ran it yesterday, with some changes, which worked brilliantly.
Purpose:
Used to quickly gather input or feedback from a team, found it especially useful for team with communication issues
Materials:
Flip Chart(pre-written agenda, and timing) , Markers (ideally the same ones for each person, same color), Cards, Stopwatch
