Agile Artisans

Planning Poker, Risk, and Congratulations!

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a message I sent to the members of AgileRTP, our local Agile user's group. But I wanted to share it with a wider audience, so I'm reposting it here.

-Jared

This is a quick reminder about the meeting tonight. Dr. Laurie Williams is teaching us about planning poker, and how to use it to effectively to manage security risks. It should be a very informative and educational meeting.

http://agile.meetup.com/29/calendar/9984479/

If you're not familiar with planning poker, you can learn more about it at http://planningpoker.com/.

Also, members Ben Carey and Rick DeNatale noticed the relative size of AgileRTP. We're the 5th biggest Agile meetup (on Meetup.com) in the world!! http://agile.meetup.com/ And we're #3 in the USA!! As of the new members who joined this morning (welcome Justin and Harold!), we're at 374 members. I wonder when we'll

Whisker Goals: Ask for Less. Get More.

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000
The Made to Stick authors (Dan and Chip Heath) have been discussing whisker goals (as opposed to stretch goals) as a way to get a person (or team) moving forward. And it makes a lot of sense.
How often have you decided to "lose weight" and set such a high goal that you never got started? Or asked your team to start using Cobertura for code coverage, and asked for 90%... only today you have 1%?
Setting large goals feels like a smart idea. It's something the team can aspire to. It's a Big Goal that can help motivate us. The idea makes perfect sense on paper,but the reality is different. Most people, when faced with a big goal, give up. They won't even try.
Life is tough. We get "stretch goals" everyday, in every part of our lives. Your To Do list around the house is probably filled with them. Time with your family. Features at work for the next release. Cleaning up old code. Adding automated tests.
So when one more set of stretch goals comes across our desks, we tend to ignore it.

QA, Developers, and Agile

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000
I was recently involved in a discussion about the role of QA, faux-agile, and development. How should they work together? What's the proper role of each?
This was my reply... it felt like a blog entry, so I turned it into one. :)
QA should be heavily investing in automated tests (both unit, package level, and integration) tests that are being moving into your continuous integration (CI) system. At least 1/2 to 3/4s of the QA team should be able to write tests in the framework of choice. (This is assumes you started with an interactive test team.)
Developers should also be adding automated tests... running all these tests in continuous integration puts a huge dent in the amount of QA time that needs to be done.
You never freeze your code during an iteration. I've heavily edited code (and had team members heavily edit code) the day it went to customers. Having a solid automated test suite, running cross platform, enables practices like "ruthless refactoring" and provides developers

Topics from AgileRTP

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000
Last night we had a great meeting at AgileRTP, our local Agile user's group. Jason Tanner of Enthiosys spoke on Agile Transitions. It was more of a facilitated group discussion and went very well.
Some of the topics discussed include:
Barriers to Agile adoption.
- Perceived lack of planning
- Perceived lack of control
- Fear of transparency (from people who like to hide)

How do enable people to try something new? Create an environment of safety.
Most people assumed that "emergent design" was inherent to Agile, but as we discussed it, most people were referring to "just enough" architecture, not "make it up as you go." Just in Time Architecture? (JITA)
Developers who fear a loss of control are really fearing the exposure that Agile brings. There's no where to hide in a two week iteration.
Questions of scalability and emergent design were discussed.
Planning Po

The Case For Continuous Integration: Free Download

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000
I wrote an article for the first NFJS Magazine and it's been released as a free sample of the magazine's content. You can download the PDF from the subscription page. Scroll down and look for the Download Free Sample link.
NFJS, the Magazine
Enjoy!

RubyRX and AgileRX!

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000
I'm just starting to organize speakers and topics, but wanted to give everyone as much advance notice as possible. RubyRX and AgileRX are going to be a joint conference in both Philadelphia and DC this year!
We'll be in Philadelphia on July 30-31 and DC on September 3-4.
Block off the dates now! I'll post again when I have more information. There's no web page or registration page yet.
Also, I apologize for my sparse blogging in recent months... I should be coming out of that now and will post an explanation in the next few days.

Trying Out a New Training Model

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000
Many of my students in recent classes have told us they can only get approval for a single event this year. They want to attend (for instance) our Test Automation Training, and a No Fluff Just Stuff event, but can only get one event approved.
We've heard you, and have an answer. We're now including an NFJS pass with our next few public training events. The price is higher to cover the two events, but you'll only have to get management approval one time.
Will this work? Will it let more people get the training they need to be the very best they can be? We hope so. This is not the time to stop "maintaining the car" and waiting for the engine to fall out. If anything, you need to be sure your "car" (or team) is top shape during this tough time, and as efficient as possible.
Let us help you stay at the top of your game. Our Hibernate training has been popular lately, as well as the test automation. (I'm told I don't do a good enough job telling people it's about complete product testing, not jus

The Blue Angles Model: Attracting and Retaining Top Talent

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000
A few weeks ago in Atlanta a class attendee told me about an idea she'd been considering. A "Blue Angels" style dev group at large companies. The more she talked about it, the more the idea sounded exciting.
You set up an elite team of developers, but, like the famous Blue Angels, you force people out of it after a time. This prevents developers from stratifying, and also gives everyone at the company a shot at making the team next year.
It's an exciting way for a large company to both foster excellence and spread that expertise back to the rest of the company. This is an idea worth pursuing.
Read more about it on Blue Angels for Corporate America? by Laura Moore. I expect to see more good ideas here in the future.
This article is also on NFJS magazine! It's a great way for you keep new development ideas percolating between the long, lonely months when the NFJS tour isn't in your city. ;)
The inaugural issue includes articles from Venkat Subramaniam (So You Want to Be Agile?), Ken Sipe (Introduction to Functional Languages), Mark Richards (Message Driven POJOs), and me (The Case for Continuous Integration).
I think you'll find a great mix of pragmatism and experience in each edition. Just like an NFJS event, use the magazine to broaden your horizons and learn about topics that don't normally cross your path. Bring great ideas to your company and your "sanity hacking" projects as well!
Subscriptions run $50 a year for 10 issues. Bringing articles from this level of technical talent into your house once a month is money well spent. It's an investment into yourself, and your team.

RubyRX: First Event on the Books!

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000
Thursday night, and all day Friday and Saturday, were the first RubyRX event, and we had a great time. Topics ranged from Erlang to Active Record to Sinatra. Speakers ranged from Chad Fowler to Stuart Halloway to Neal Ford.
You can see a sampling of photos on Flickr on my RubyRX flickr set. I especially like Chad Fowler's "new" look.
I used my favorite phone streaming video app, qik.com, to record the lightning talks. You can find Part One and Part Two on their website.
I originally had three tracks scheduled and had to drop to two. A number of attendees weren't happy about that, and told me. However, on Friday, as the sessions unfolded, everyone came back and told me that two sessions was awesome. Every session had one Ruby flavored talk and one non-Ruby talk. (The non-Ruby talks were either another language, like Clojure or Er