Agile Roots Presentations Online Presentations from the Agile Roots conference are now online. My full presentation is here, although sometime I hope to isolate the middle section (on workplace interpersonal skill) so it can be viewed as a stand-alone 15-min presentation. [Done] As it stands, the presentation is 30 minutes on these topics, with 5 mins of questions at… Read More
References from my Agile Roots presentation At Agile Roots, I promised to post references for my talk “Better Agile Through Stealing”. Here are my favourite references on the topics I talked about. For each of the books, the main link is to a “dead tree” version of the book, with a secondary link to an e-Book version (if available).… Read More
Speaking at Agile Roots The Agile Roots conference is on, next month in Salt Lake City. If you haven’t checked out the conference web site, hurry over there now! If you like this blog (and presumably you do, since you’re reading it 😉 I think you’ll love the conference. It’s a new and different kind of agile conference, focussing… Read More
Agile Charts Part II – The EVM Perspective I was recently invited to write an article on agile-style EVM charts for Software Tech News, a publication of the US Department of Defense. The audience was the traditional EVM community within the DoD, so I wrote the article from a traditional EVM perspective. By way of background, EVM is governed by the ANSI/EIA-748 standard… Read More
Fallible estimates + Competition = Winner’s Curse Some time ago Steve McConnell and I had an interesting debate, via his blog. I suggested that when we combine estimates such as those we have in software (which have high uncertainty early in the project) with a competitive market containing price-sensitive customers; then market forces conspire to bias customers’ choices towards those supliers who… Read More
Target Cost Contracts This page outlines one way to formulate Target Cost Contracts for agile software development. The goals of this approach are to: Share risk fairly between Customer and Supplier Give the Supplier the peace of mind of being protected from significant cost overruns Offer enough flexibility to get the best out of an agile development process… Read More
Opinions The right attitude for learning and creativity is to "argue as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong" "The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence." [sounds a… Read More
People Over Process: the Importance of Social Capital I recently enjoyed reading In Good Company. The book is addressed to a general business audience, but I found it very relevant to agile software development (particularly agile’s emphasis on people and their interactions). I recommend it to anyone interested in that side of agile. From the back of the book: “In Good Company is… Read More
Great Video From James Bach I’ve just watched this on YouTube. For those who don’t know, James Bach specializes in testing, but most of what he says is applicable to agile in general. He covers the “people over tools” point very well. As I’ve written before, the importance of people over tools is incredibly important, but seems to have been… Read More
Individuals and Interactions Something’s bugging me. I think we’ve lost sight of our priorities in the agile software movement. We are spending too much time talking about processes and tools, and too little time talking about people and their interactions. Think back to the Agile Manifesto. At the moment, we seem to have:… Read More