Articles

Dealing With Rutsey, Bartman or Omarosa On Your Team

,

Like anything with longevity attached to it, the more time you spend doing something, the more time you encounter outlying situations that can be lesson learning opportunities. For this article, I am going to talk about three distinct and unique personalities I have encountered over the years.

The John Rutsey

Back in the 1960’s, there was a Canadian by the name of John Rutsey. He loved hockey and music. Based upon his geographical location he became close friends with a classmate named Alex Lifeson. Eventually, their love of music spawned them to begin learning music themselves to the point where they joined forces with a guy named Geddy Lee and released a self-titled album for their band "Rush." John Rutsey was the first drummer of the band that consisted of guitar, bass and drums. Facing musical differences and health concerns, Rutsey left the band and was replaced with Neil Peart — which was the game changer for the band that continued to release albums and tour effectively for the next 41 years.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

4 Things I Include in My Agile Estimations

,


Estimation is one of the most difficult aspects of the Agile process. The natural tendency of team members is to include only the time it will take to complete the actual work for the item they are estimating. I have a process where I break each work item down into 4 parts to help me get a more accurate estimate. This is a process I use all the time in my current role as CTO of CUE Marketplace and I hope it helps you in your Agile estimations.

Understanding the Big Picture Estimate

I want to know every aspect of the work item that I’ll be completing, so I add any time it would take for me to fully understand it. It’s a huge time saver if my Product Owner has written the work items as user stories. That format helps with the “who,” “what,” and “why.” Other items that could take time include understanding any UI designs/clickable demos, reviewing usability tests and getting to know the “who” part of the story by researching the customer or persona.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Fix the Switch!

,

While attending an all-day session with a client, I noticed the following switch located on the wall:

If you can’t figure out what is going on, the switch is taped into the upright position and the attached label reads: "Please leave on at all times."

Source de l’article sur DZONE

/0 Commentaires/par

Agile Leadership Is a Continuous Journey

,

A company’s leaders must prepare for the selection, achievement, and continuous improvements of Agile delivery. Only the leadership can evolve and continuously grow the environments in which their people function. Moreover, only these mentors can design the atmosphere that promotes high-performing Agile teams to thrive and deliver excellence. Agile leaders, therefore, must show smarter ways of working so that their people will discover from their personal and professional standards, mentorship and intrinsic motivation. The quest to become an Agilest does not need to be hard. Many leaders have to attempt a new method of management. The process will need to prepare, enable, and challenge their people to attain the highest potential through Agile teachings and practices.

What is not so apparent to leaders is that their people’s knowledge of the processes alone won’t be enough. Agile leaders must take an actual role to guide the new way of working. How many times have I heard from leadership that, "You have my support and contact me if you have any questions"? That way of thinking is a recipe for disaster with Agile. Agile leaders need to involve themselves directly on a daily basis. Get out and walk around, attend daily stand-ups, pop in on Sprint Planning sessions and come to the Sprint Reviews. You want your people to see you are involved with and care about the success of the implementation.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment [Webinar]

,

Is Agile maturity a fad or a trend? How can an organization make an informed decision on what level of agility might become achievable before starting a transition? 

Our second webinar addressed the question of Agile maturity and detailed the survey results what indicates an Agile organization. Moreover, we introduced the ‘Agility Assessment Framework," an open source project which aims to provide Agile practitioners with the tools needed to answer these questions:

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

5 Keys to Hiring Coding Boot Camp Grads

,

Hiring technical talent has always been one of my most difficult tasks as a startup CTO. Development talent is in short supply for all company sizes, and we’ll see an estimated 30% increase in the number of development positions by 2026. Salaries have increased 15% in the last five years with a 2017 median salary of just over $103K, and salaries will continue to rise at a faster pace as the number of positions increases.

For these reasons, we had to look outside our established hiring channels when building our development team at CUE Marketplace. We needed reasonably-priced talent that could grow as we grew. Our company started in Boulder in a co-working space/coding school called Galvanize. We were lucky to have good candidates right outside our door. It’s been two years since our start, and now we have a solid development team full of boot camp grads. Here are five keys to our success in building that team.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Retro #2 – 200 Articles in the Zone

,

For the last seven years of my career, I have been living the Agile methodology.  Needless to say, participating in the periodic ceremonies have become commonplace for me.  

Following the example I created when my 100th article on DZone was published on April 5, 2017, my 200th article for DZone will be a retrospective of my last 99 articles – spanning from April 13, 2017 through August 24, 2017.  I plan to cover what fared well with DZone readers and what failed to connect to the same audience. 

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Avoiding a Super Mario Bros. Approach to Building Features

,

Have you ever played the video game Super Mario Bros.?

There is a good chance a majority of the DZone audience have played or watched someone play the flagship game from Nintendo, that was originally released in 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

Introducing an Agile Environment For Your Business Intelligence Team

,

Agile is like Big Data – a buzzword that has been around for a couple of years already, but for which, in the end many people don’t actually know precisely what it is or how it works. Let’s start by putting everyone on the same level and go over the basics of the Agile method.

Agile consists in an iterative approach to software development, that builds the software incrementally – meaning that from the start of the project, step by step, a little bit of it is delivered at different stages, instead of delivering it all at once. It is like filling one glass of water after another, instead of giving away a full tank. Agile breaks down the project into little glasses of water, these bits of user functionality called user stories, ranks them according to their priority, and delivers them continuously in short cycles of two weeks: the iterations.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par

The Free Dog is Never Free

,

I was having a discussion with fellow technologist Timothy and he ended up telling me a story from his college days.

In this story, his roommate arrived back at their apartment with a dog. The roommate was excited, but Timothy did not match his level of enthusiasm over the newest member of their household.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

/0 Commentaires/par