Agile Coach Journal

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…

Popularity: 46% [?]

I spent this week at Agile 2009 in Chicago. On the third night, after dinner with friends, I wandered over to the Music stage. There was a fellow playing one of the community guitars. I picked up another and we tried a little jam. Two other people came by. One picked up another guitar (Michael Bolton). The other grabbed the bongos. We tried out a couple of songs, adding vocals. They were just songs we knew in common or were simple enough that the others could follow along. Another fellow showed up with his own guitar (Paul Roub). Another fellow (George Platts?) conjured up a one-string washtub base from somewhere . Not kidding.

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Popularity: 69% [?]

I detect a pattern of group behavior. No doubt it is already described elsewhere and has a fancy name. Self-organization, perhaps. The pattern first revealed itself to me at Agile2008 in a workshop on release planning. It came at that closing moment when everyone is invited to offer a lesson learned. Somehow I felt a need to state something aloud as if that was a necessary element of getting my money’s worth. So I thought about it, trying to find something that no one else had already said. The pattern emerged.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

Collaboration is fundamental to successful agile projects. A team of people working together toward a shared goal will create a different product than a group of individuals working alone on parallel assignments to be integrated later. Collaboration supplies automatic load balancing, constant discussion and generation of new ideas and communication on the status of the work. A goal for successful agile practice is to foster collaboration in the team. There is much in the literature about how to do this, nicely summed up in Jean Tabaka’s great book,Collaboration Explained.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

I recently fell into a black hole. I was creating a demonstration for Cruise Control. When I got to the part about running FitNesse tests via ant, I got all wrapped around the axle with java classpaths. I don’t know about you, but classpaths are my nemesis. It took me a long time to get it right, way too long. That is a black hole - a time sink that you didn’t anticipate and, once you fall into it, it has no obvious end point. The solution seems right around the corner, just one more experiment away. Experiment because that always seems like the most expeditious route to success - because taking the time to actually study the situation will obviously take more time than the next little experiment. It is a common pitfall for software developers. Black holes can quickly nullify your estimates.

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Popularity: 11% [?]