I settled into the visitor’s chair across the desk from Nate. Looking at Nate I said “So tell me about your project.” RULE II: START WHERE THE SYSTEM IS1 Nate smiled and wistfully said: “Well, I’m the project manager and ScrumMaster. John will be the Product Owner. He works in our North East office. He should be able to represent the user community. He used to work in it. The tech lead and development team work in Europe.” Pausing he continued, “From what I’ve read,

You can tell a lot from how a story starts. If you hear “Once upon a time …” you’ll probably hear a fairy tale like “The Three Little Pigs” or “The Little Red Hen”. Around camp fires, kayakers like to tell stories that begin with “No kidding, there I was …” and a tale of heart thumping excitement and harrowing escapades of misfortune or lucky escape. In software development stories often begin (or end) with “I’m serious. You can’t make up stuff like this.”1 I

Hear me out. It may not be as far fetched as it may first seem. I’m not going to say how long I’ve been around, but I have two copies of The Mythical Man-Month. I have the Anniversary Edition and the 1982 edition of the original 1975 book. I’m not sure why someone on Amazon is trying to sell the 1982 book for $ 129.95. The Anniversary edition contains four chapters not in the original edition including “No Silver Bullet”. Brooks concludes “No Silver Bullet”

The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. Officially author unknown, but I heard it from my mother, more than once. Reading Better People, Better Process may make it seem like I’m one of those touchy-feely “people over process” types. I confess I have a fondness for people but I’m also a big fan of process. Luckily, people and process don’t exist as either/or. People and process exist as both/and. Here’s a process that can both improve your other processes your people,

Words convey meaning. They’re how we take the stuff deep in our brains and share it with others. They also self reinforce. David Levy says “not only do our attitudes and perceptions affect our use of language, but our use of language in turn influences our attitudes and perceptions.”1 I came across some new words reading Joe Little’s blog entry Two Cheer’s for the Nokia Test. In the post Joe says: “Why do I like it? I think it is a simple way to set

I’ve been reading some interesting emails concerning names in an Scrum environment. Backlog in particular seems to generate energy.

We stopped and looked at the first rapid on the first river from the bridge. I distinctly remember saying, “It looks good from here.” And it did. What I didn’t see …

In my experience the developers have the verification mindset, “Does it do the job?” Most everyone who uses the software has the mindset, “Does it allow me to do my job?” And that is the essential difference.

Yes, Virginia, there’s more to testing. I’m a developer, not a tester. I know only a little bit about testing, but I DO know that testing methodologies move just about as fast as development methodologies do.