I attended the Innovation Games ® Consultants Master Class this week. Innovation Games are an implementation of serious games designed for marketing research. My expectation was that it would broaden my horizons to the world beyond the software project, out in that area where companies decide what products to create. Read more…
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Can Agile work for mainframe projects?
A recent coaching client is a small company that wanted to transition their entire development department to Agile. It was an easy sell to the applications people, harder to the maintenance people (until I told them about Kanban). The ones in the middle were the mainframe programmers. This company is in insurance, an industry that has lots and lots of legacy backend systems.
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I got a valuable gift at Agile Open California during a workshop on Improvisational Comedy. Read more…
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Agile software development is a big change for many organizations. The most typical pattern is to start with one or two small projects and then build on success with more projects. In time, a wider change in organizational process and culture is underway. If your company is about to take this journey into unfamiliar territory or if they have gone part way and are feeling a little uncertain about their current location in the Agile landscape, you should consider hiring an experienced guide. In the Agile world, this guide is called an Agile Coach. Here are some advantages of hiring a Coach to help you find the way. Read more…
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Earlier this year I was in an Open Space workshop about teaching games. We chose the Definition of Done as a game subject and started brainstorming ways to illustrate its importance. It was harder than we anticipated. Ironically, we ran out of time and did not finish our game about being done.
I did get one insight out of this exercise that I find useful in my teaching and coaching now. I average about two original thoughts per year so I am hanging on to this one with both hands. We started with the question “What does it mean to be done?”. This question was surprising difficult to answer. I closed my eyes, made a plea to the Muses, reached back into my life experiences of things completed in jobs, hobbies, school, chores. I gathered up the feeling that was common to them all. And this emerged:
“Done” means that I don’t have to think about it anymore.
This post is done.
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In my early Agile days, we did not have a formal Definition of Done. We went by feel. If we were happy with the implementation from a design standpoint, if the story did what the Product Owner asked for, if it was fast enough for the user and if we did “enough” testing, then it was done. Since then, experience has suggested the need to be more precise about the criteria for “done”. It helps us to get agreement from all interested parties. Read more…
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