Tips for Working Effectively with Distributed Team Members

In a few classes I have taught recently, we have had some interesting conversations around working on distributed agile teams.  I always recommend trying to keep your Scrum team co-located whenever possible but in today’s world, distributed teams are unavoidable.  Here are some suggestions to help keep your distributed team members more involved:
 
1.    If the [...]

Quick, great read on agile testing

This blog post by Simon Baker is excellent and does a great job describing the role of a tester on an agile team.  http://www.think-box.co.uk/blog/2008/05/testers-in-our-agile-team.html

What makes a ScrumMaster a “good” ScrumMaster?

I was recently asked to help form a job description for a new ScrumMaster (SM) position in a company.  So, it got me thinking about what qualities and skills make up a good SM.  I thought back on teams I have been on that had good and some not-so-good SMs.  Most of the skills that [...]

Book Review: Test Driven .Net Development with FitNesse

I just finished Gojko Adzic’s book called Test Driven .Net Development with FitNesse.  I have used FitNesse on .Net projects and I still learned a ton from this book.  I highly recommend it for anyone working with FitNesse on a .Net project, even if you are already comfortable navigating the waters of FitNesse.  If you [...]

Collaboration Explained Class – Day 2 (Last Day)

I can honestly say that I have never been so exhausted after a 2 day class/workshop.  The last 2 days were filled with so much great information that my head is spinning.  Jean and Ronica did an amazing job with this class.  I don’t want to list out too much detail around my key take-aways.  [...]

Collaboration Explained Class – Day 1

I am currently in Boulder taking the Collaboration Explained class at Rally.  We just completed day 1 of 2 and so far, this class has been just awesome!
One of my biggest pet peeves around the Certified Scrum Master class/workshop is that anyone that wants to go and sit in on a 2 day class and [...]

“I am an Agile Tester” article

I have been actively recruiting to find agile testers for over a year now at different companies I have worked for.  This has been a very hard position to fill.  As part of the recruiting process, I had to come up with a job description for an agile tester.  Not a trivial task J  So, [...]

Software Testers: Have we become our own worst enemy?

More and more companies are either switching to agile practices or talking about switching to them.  Agile development highlights high-quality software delivery and yet the testing community seems to be the most resistant to adopting agile.  Have the qualities that make us great software testers become our own worst enemy when it comes to adopting [...]

Taking Ownership of Quality with Outsourcing

I have recently had the opportunity to speak to some QA folks at different companies.  During our conversations, the topic of quality and QA practices came up with regards to outsourcing.  I have never personally worked on a project that involved development from outsourced companies so I have never had to deal with this first hand.  [...]

GreenHopper – great tool!

I haven’t played with a new tool in a long time that I have liked this much out of the gate.  I have been setting up and customizing Jira for an upcoming project.  I downloaded the trial version of GreenHopper last week after seeing it briefly at Agile 2007.  So far, I have been really impressed!  [...]

Mini-Waterfall Smells – How agile are you Really?

More and more companies are adopting agile development practices (or are trying to).  Instead of delivering software once a year, more companies are now able to deliver every quarter.  More projects are working from a product backlog instead of massive requirements documents.  An increased number of developers are practicing TDD.   However, achieving true agility on a [...]

“Shout-out” Shoebox – Boosting Team Morale

I mentioned this idea at the agile conference and have had several emails about it over the last week asking for the details of how this works.  So, I thought it would just be easiest to post it here.
Celebrating accomplishments is something I am pretty passionate about on teams.  On a recent project, we implemented [...]

Why is Self-organizing so hard?

I was talking with a former co-worker last night who is working on a team that is struggling to adopt Scrum.  It appears that one of their biggest road-blocks is the teams’ inability to self-organize.  As soon as the sprint planning meeting is over, the team kinda waits around for someone to tell them what [...]

“Tests” to Determine how Agile you are

I just finished reading “Making Agility Stick:  What’s Working, What’s Not” from the Cutter Consortium(http://www.cutter.com/offers/makingagilitystick.html).  It starts with an article called “On the Stickiness of Agility in Software Development” by Laurie Williams.  There were 3 “tests” from Scott Ambler to determine if a company is truly agile or not:

 Do you have an automated test suite, [...]

Agile 2007 conference review

I spent all of last week in DC at the Agile2007 conference.  All in all, it was a great week and I learned a lot.  There is definitely some room for improvement next year in terms of the schedule, hotel layout, and organization.  However, for the most part, the speakers I listened to were excellent and [...]