Converting to WordPress May 22, 2010 | John Rusk | 2 Comments Regular visitors may notice the site looks a bit different. I am transitioning to WordPress. Initially, all the old pages will be available both as WordPress posts and at their old URLs. I will eventually redirect requests for the old ones to the new URLs instead. By the way, this means commenting finally works properly… Read More
Sorry about old comments May 21, 2010 | John Rusk Most old comments, from before the conversion to WordPress, have unfortunately been lost. (Very sorry!!) I lost them when Haloscan (who I was using for comments) shut down their service. As it happens, there weren’t a large number of comments on any of the pages that used Halscan commenting, possibly because it was somewhat less… Read More
Does our intuition fail us? January 22, 2010 | John Rusk | 4 Comments Why do so many projects seem to be OK, but, when you get near the end, they turn out not to be OK after all? Everyone thought you were going to make the target date, but at the last minute… well, no you couldn’t. I’d like to suggest an answer. Let’s illustrate it with an… Read More
Agile Roots Presentations Online July 14, 2009 | John Rusk 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 June 27, 2009 | John Rusk 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 May 22, 2009 | John Rusk 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 May 16, 2009 | John Rusk | 1 Comment 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 March 30, 2009 | John Rusk 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 March 1, 2009 | John Rusk | 14 Comments 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 February 1, 2009 | John Rusk | 1 Comment 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