Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the chance to work with several organizations who equate “efficiency” with “utilization.” This morning, I tweeted that if your organization is assigning people 10% to a project, no agile method is going to help you. Renae Ramirez asked for data or evidence supporting the point that this…
Category: General
Story Points Are Dead! (Long Live Story Points?)
(Alternate Subtitle: How the heck do you do estimation and forecasting in Kanban?) One of the biggest changes for many team who are adopting agile is in the way they slice, track and measure their work. They learn about “User Stories” which are sized using “Story Points”. The team adds up the number of Story…
Breaking Down Features to User Stories
In my recent post on root cause analysis and the 5-Why’s Lisa Crispin wondered if they could be used in breaking down user stories, too: Are the 5 whys only for root cause analysis? Can they be used to find out the purpose of a new user story or theme? There are many ways to…
Root Cause and “5 Why’s”
This week, we’re working with a team in Atlanta, and we did an exercise today where the students went through problems they were having, and then the issues which underlie those problems. One of the interesting things was how often the underlying "issues" weren’t issues at all because they weren’t going deep enough. As an…
Losing an iPad
Saturday night, my wife and I got a “date night” – we dropped the kids off, and headed to a “gourmet mexican restaurant” with plans on walking to the local bookstore afterwards. I had brought along my iPad. We finished up dinner, paid, and walked out. It only took me about 7 minutes to realize…
Slides and Video up from Fostering Software Craftsmanship at Øredev 2010
My slides and video are now up from my Fostering Software Craftsmanship session I held at Øredev 2010 here in Malmö, Sweden. Fostering Software Craftsmanship from Øredev 2010 from Cory Foy on Vimeo. Fostering Software Craftsmanship View more presentations from Cory Foy.
Slides and Video for Delivering What’s Right at Øredev 2010
I had an absolute blast this morning presenting my Delivering What’s Right talk here at Øredev 2010. While I know the conference will be putting a better quality video online, I wanted to go ahead and put up the video I shot from my Flip camera and the slides from the talk. Thanks to Michael…
Koans and Katas, Oh My! Slides and Links From My Øredev 2010 Session
This morning at Øredev 2010 here in Malmö, Sweden I gave a workshop entitled “Koans and Katas, Oh My!”. I covered various learning models, and we did a lot of hands on exercises showing the power of regular practice in the software profession. As one attendee said, “I fell in love with TDD again!”. I…
HOW TO: 10 Tips on Presenting at Conferences
One of my favorite events to attend is BarCamp. They have them all over the world, but I really enjoy the two closest to me – BarCamp Tampa Bay and BarCamp Orlando. They are considered “unconferences†– basically, you register for the event, and the speaking slots are first-come first-served the morning of. If you…
The Keys to the Kingdom
Oh the joys of not being in the grind. From this position I get to see all sorts of stuff about doing “Agile†right. Primarily from a Project Management perspective. But, I’ve got a secret. It’s one of them there plain-sight secrets that turns out to be how successful teams get things done. To us…