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UPDATE: This excercise is ideal for large projects with many SME's in the room. In this case I was building a Loan Orgination System for a bank with 10+ SME's in the room that were all arguing with each other about the Persona's and thier behaviors this took two days to do but the outcome...
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I was recently asked the following question, “How do you best manage changes in scope and direction in an agile project?” Embracing change is the quintessential backbone of Agile. How to manage it is a whole other story. ;) The difficult aspect of this paradox is to understand the context of the change...
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Technical Debt is not simply an Agile buzzword more than it is a fact of software development. Just like any other debt it imposes negative ramifications on the software and significant loss is revenue. I hate to get touchy feely but I think what I am about to say holds the most weight when presented...
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I couldn't resist the title. By this point in most of your careers you have been exposed to the grapevine exercise. This exercise is geared to show you how one thought through many control points gets distorted and misrepresented. I believe this is true for the majority of conversations out side...
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I have been having an ongoing discussion lately concerning matrix management styles and how they conflict with Agile Project Management. If you look at the traditional "Iron Triangle", resources are estimated, in that change is expected in the resource allocation depending upon task and assignment...
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I was speaking with Marcus Bratton the other day about code reviews. We both agreed that they are very valuable but finding the time is probably the most difficult aspect of any code review. Paired Programming helps to eliminate the need for code reviews but paired programming caries waste of its own...
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Out browsing some mailing list today and came across this really nice Agile Project Management tool, Acunote . What is Acunote... Acunote is an Agile project management tool. It is built on the innovative lightweight Scrum process and is focused on the day-to-day steps needed to achieve the goal. They...
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Over the last couple of weeks I have had time to observe many aspects of myself and of the development community. One of the epiphanies I had was that I am passionate about people more than coding. I love to mentor other developers. I love to mentor future development managers. I love to coach others...
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It's important to know how your "working" software is being received out in the field. Immediate customer feedback is one thing during a release but what about after the code actually gets out into the field. How are those users feeling! Enter the Customer(field) Perception Model: As you...
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Some if you wanted to see what our lab looks like so I found some pics and thought I would share them with you. I took these pics late in the day and most of developers had left at this point. They are camera shy. :-) And for those who want the layout. We are very proud of our lab and have received several...
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A couple of people emailed me and asked me what the story cards looked like on our information radiator . It is important to note that these story cards are only drafted after extensive modeling and feedback sessions during our modeling week. We don't use them in the traditional XP fashion and caution...
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A couple of people have asked me how we track our work for our iterations. We basically use a somewhat simple information radiator . Information radiators serve to quickly give everyone on the project team a quick indication on what needs to be done, what is being worked on, and what has been done. Information...
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From Wikipedia Passion is the emotion of feeling very strongly about a subject. Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization, thought to be authoritative and not to be disputed or doubted. Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals...
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I was really excited to read about Microsoft's recent exploration into the MDA arena! This is something I have been wanting for quite sometime but I am very hesitant to get too excited. Microsoft has a tendency to create bloat ware and this may kill the tool from being adopted (Think Rational Rose...
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I just finished reading Dean Wamplers post on Why you have time for TDD (but may not know it yet...) . He brings up excellent's points that Agilist struggle with when trying to convey to a client on why they need TDD and how they can justify spending the time to do it. A must read.