Agile with Fixed Scope

It’s a common misconception that agile processes can’t be used with fixed scope.  A number of the founders of the agile movement invented their forms of agile on fixed-scope projects. As I write this, I’m working myself on an 18-month project with about 20 people and a fixed(ish) scope (see below).  So it can be done. … Read More

QBS and Novopay

Here in New Zealand we’ve had a lot of press recently a Novopay, which is a system to pay school teachers that has suffered from significant, embarrassing (and very widely-publicised) problems. I was recently asked to write an article on the subject for the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP), explaining how I believe the emphasis… Read More

Faith, doubt and evidence – agile as religion versus agile as social science

My first exposure to Agile was in the early 2000’s, when a friend leant me the Schwaber and Beedle Scrum book.  It kept talking about mysterious  “emergent properties”, which were apparently good things that would inevitably happen when you followed the process.  But it never really explained why those properties would emerge and, to my… Read More

Challenges for 2013

Reflecting on the end of another year, I feel that the interesting challenges in Agile are not about process, but instead about people. Promoting and Enhancing People Skills This has been a theme of this blog for sometime. The challenge for 2013, to myself and to anyone else who’s interested in the Agile community, is,… Read More

In-house development vs Outsourcing

I spent over 16 years working for IT consultancies.  Organisations who needed software would come to us, generally negotiate an up-front price, and we’d write the software for them.  This kind of work, outsourced software development, was the focus of my working life… until 9 months ago.  That was when I moved to an internal… Read More

Become practiced in making changes

Agile has always embraced change.  But businesses are still be tempted to minimise those changes, by trying to get things “right” first time.  On my current project, we’re realised that minimising change is not necessarily a good thing. Why? After the system goes live, we must be able to change it.  (In our opinion, an… Read More

Are you pair-programming in New Zealand?

I’ve just been engaged in very interesting discussion of pair programming with Arlo Belshee.  Unlike me, Arlo has lots of successful experience with pairing.  If you’ve been following my recent posts on pairing, I definitely recommend that you check out Arlo’s new comments on them, and also his own post and its comments here. He… Read More

Advocacy and Inquiry

Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to achieve real change in organisations?  Have you ever wondered why organisations don’t really seem to learn?  Have you ever feared that, in spite of all the talk about change, it will really amount to nothing in the long run? There’s little-known answer to these questions,… Read More

Pair Programming Wrap-Up

I previously blogged about the nature of expertise, and resulting questions about the efficiency of expert-expert pairings.  Here I’d like to tidy up some loose ends with regard to the relationship between expertise and pair programming. How does expertise develop? Kahneman’s book points out that expertise develops, virtually inevitably, when a practitioner has long experience… Read More