If the only metric you use for measuring and forecasting your team’s progress is their iteration velocity, you’re missing out on a great deal of richer information that, for just a few extra minutes per day, you could easily be collecting. This is information that the team can use during the iteration to help spot …
Category Archives: Agile / Lean Software Development
Random Notes from SPA2010
Usage-Centric Design Narrative Journey Maps Duncan Prefers the term Usage-Centred Design to User-Centric Design. There was a book reference here but I missed it. Narrative Journey Maps (NJM) are a way to model and visualise the steps a user has to follow as they try to achieve a goal. Each Step is decorated with: Comments …
Fancy a Game of Robots?
I’m running a session next week at the SPA conference where we’re going to have a battle between rival teams of programmers. I’ve been working on the tournament engine for the past few weeks and really picked up pace on it this week. I hadn’t realised it would be so much work! The thing is, …
Agile North 2010
I’ll be speaking at Agile North this year. The title of my talk is “The Lean Startup”, in which I’ll describe my experiences with an incredible young company I’ve been working with for the last couple of years. Here’s some more details about the conference: Friday 14th May 2010 – UCLan, Preston Price held at …
Agile 2009 Session – Debugging Pair Programming – Part 1
I had the chance to run a 90 minute session at this year’s Agile Conference in Chicago. The conference as a whole was an terrific experience but here I’d like to talk about my session, and what I learned from it. The session focusses on the barriers that prevent people from adopting pair programming. I’ve …
Continue reading “Agile 2009 Session – Debugging Pair Programming – Part 1”
Cuke4Nuke – Cucumber for .NET
One of the main reasons I was drawn to adopt Ruby as my primary development language last year was the RSpec story runner, a fledgeling project to bring developers and users closer together with executable specifications that are easy for both humans and machines to read. I was really attracted to the community around these …
Advantages of Limiting your WIP
As a coach, I like to introduce new practices only when I can offer them as a solution to a problem that the team has identified for themselves. On my current team we’ve been tracking our Work in Progress (WIP) for some time, but we’ve never taken the step of systematically limiting it. At a …
XpDay London 2009 Announced
XtC are pleased to announce the 9th consecutive London XpDay: The Agile community has grown and matured over the years we’ve been running XpDay, so now we want an event that helps practitioners collectively advance the State of the Art. The first day will consist of programmed sessions, the second day will be an Open …
Testing your Code’s Usability
We all like usable software, but what about usable code? How do we test the usability of the code we write? One way is to get another programmer to work with it. If a bug is discovered in some code you’ve recently written, instead of just quickly fixing it yourself, see how easy it is …
CITCON North America
CITON (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) Europe was one of my favourite conferences last year: A chance to hang out with some very thoughtful and experienced people in a close-knit setting. CITCON US has just announced the venue and dates. The conference is amazing value – free! – but the 150 places go fast, so …