(If you’d like to see the video, click here) Earlier this year I was invited to be a speaker at SCNA 2012. At the time I was thinking a lot about quality and about the learning and growth process of developers. Back in March I helped launch the Florida arm of 8th Light, and now…
JQuery Datepicker – Selecting just Month or Year
Quick code post – We’re working with a client who needs to be able to select imprecise dates – either an exact date, the month and year, or just the year. Most date pickers aren’t set to handle this case, and I didn’t really want to write one from scratch. We were already using the…
On Community and Conferences
Technology Community – let’s chat for a second. Over the past…well, since you were created, you’ve been a male-dominated field. Unlike some other fields, you are well known for your cutesy “lack of social interaction”. Of course, now you are getting popular – it’s cool to be a “brogrammer” and code and hang out at…
Pareto and Minimal Viable Products/Hypothesis
In a recent post, Jim Shore blogs about a “Minimum Viable Hypothesis.” With MVH, the first step after figuring out the problem to solve isn’t to create a minimum viable product. Instead, the first step is to brainstorm market hypotheses. Which groups have the desire and funds for a solution? What Jim is blogging about…
Simple Design with Design Patterns
Over the past couple of months I’ve been working with several clients struggling with doing incremental architecture and design. As an organization moves away from a typical waterfall method – with lots of time for analysis and design – they have to find ways to still build scalable, sustainable systems in an incremental fashion. I…
Recreating Scrum using Kanban and Explicit Policies
This afternoon I was teaching a public class on Lean-Agile principles and practices, and a question came up about the differences between Scrum and Kanban. As a fun exercise, I recreated Scrum using Kanban coupled with a set of Explicit Policies. To briefly summarize the differences, Scrum is a methodology which consists at its core…
Utilization and the Myth of Shared Resources
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…
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…