Is Twitter an Approximation of Team Room Osmotic Chatter?

At the wonderful Agile Coach Camp in Ann Arbor this weekend, I was introduced to Twitter. I have previously dismissed it as an idle pursuit for people with nothing else to do and therefore an infinite regression of banality. Several people claimed otherwise and encouraged us all to try it as a way to keep in touch en-masse. An example cited was one young woman who had a number of useful interactions with a famous person who would otherwise have been inaccessible to her, simply because she was “following” him.

When I am not at a customer site, I work at home. I have cats for office mates. I don’t get that osmotic communication that happens in team rooms and is one of the benefits of co-location. I am wondering if Twitter can get me part way there. I am going to give it a try.

My Twitter name is rwbrown. Send me a tweet.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Agile Coach Competencies

Last year I participated in a working group to develop the first version of the Certified Scrum Coach program at the Scrum Alliance. Early on, we wanted to identify the characteristics of a successful agile coach. Note that we purposely widened the scope beyond just Scrum and team coaching since no one on the group can practically limit their work in that way. While we all Scrum practioners, our coaching extends into other areas including engineering practices and organizational development.

(more…)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Black Holes and the Buddy System

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.

(more…)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Test Driven Development and Flow

Last week I was doing a training session in Melbourne, Australia. I had an especially energetic and interested group of people to work with. In basic agile training, a 1.5 day workshop, I introduced Test Driven Development very briefly, cutting it short because we were going to spend the whole next day doing a TDD lab. I mainly gave a sales pitch including the statement that, after decades of writing software, learning TDD made me a better programmer by at least a factor of four. That is a pretty fuzzy claim, but I made it for effect.

(more…)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Agile Coach Camp

I just got accepted to the Agile Coach Camp, to be held in Ann Arbor, MI, USA from May 30, 2008 to June 1, 2008. It was pretty easy. I just had to answer 3 questions. Here are my answers.

This event is an open space, meaning that the topics are not announced ahead of time and no one has to prepare presentations. We will decide the topics and discuss to our heart’s content once we get there. I have attended a couple of open spaces held by the Scrum Alliance and I enjoyed them for the most part. I enjoy a good presentation once in a while, too. But this is one is mostly about networking so I am looking forward to it. I have met a few other coaches at Scrum Gatherings and through my work on the Certified Scrum Coach project. I am looking forward to meeting people from outside that community.

If you are an agile coach and have this weekend free, take a look and see if it would be worth the trip. There is no attendance fee, which suits my budget just right. Registration is limited to 100. It looks like there are plenty of slots still open.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Emergent Buddha

This has nothing to do with agile software development other than being an example of how interesting things can happen unintentionally. The image at the top of this page is my Emergent Buddha. I took the original picture in the early winter of 2006 while walking my dog in the back field. It was a fern leaf, heavily frosted in the cold New Hampshire morning. Some months later I cropped it down to make a banner for my website. It was too short for the space I had in mind, so I made it wider by flipping a copy horizontally and prepending it to itself. That resulted in the bilaterally symmetrical pattern. At the bottom, in the middle, a small Buddha appeared. He sits there still.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email