More on the ladder of inference November 9, 2013 | John Rusk In my recent conference talk I mentioned the “ladder of inference” as a thinking tool, and described how it can help us understand the views of those who disagree with us. The end result may be that, having understood the basis for their views better, we find those views more persuasive that they first appeared.… Read More
Be Real November 4, 2013 | John Rusk | 1 Comment Ten years ago I had a false start in learning dialogue skills. It was one of several false starts, in fact! In this particular instance, I read a book on technical leadership. Unlike the books I now recommend, this older book was based more on opinion than research. It seemed to be telling me that,… Read More
Skilled Dialogue October 28, 2013 | John Rusk Last week I spoke at a conference on People Skills for IT Professionals. Like some of my older talks on the topic, this one included a semi-autobiographical account of how workplace people skills are learnable. But unlike my talks of a few years ago, this one also included some fairly solid details on what those… Read More
Agile with Fixed Scope March 23, 2013 | John Rusk | 4 Comments 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 March 19, 2013 | John Rusk | 2 Comments 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 March 3, 2013 | John Rusk 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 December 31, 2012 | John Rusk | 2 Comments 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 December 31, 2012 | John Rusk | 1 Comment 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 September 4, 2012 | John Rusk 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? July 15, 2012 | John Rusk | 2 Comments 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