If you attended the outstanding Agile 2014 conference in Orlando over the last week, and you are even remotely like me, then you’ll have returned home with a mind bursting with new ideas and techniques gleaned from your time away. You may well have drawn great inspiration from your time in that hermetically-sealed agilist bubble... Continue Reading →
In a typical agile software development process, sprint retrospectives are meetings run at the end a development iteration. In those sessions the team looks back on what they have done and how they have done it, and decides what they can do to improve. More succinctly, the team inspect and adapt. In my... Continue Reading →
Last year I gave a talk about retrospective meetings at Agile Cambridge 2013 - a conference for Agile and Lean practitioners in the East of England. My session was called "The Art of the Retrospective" and was focused squarely on sprint retrospective meetings. The 90-minute presentation (!) tried to answer why these regular meetings are... Continue Reading →
As leaders of experienced, skilled and knowledgeable staff, we want team members to be able to speak up and disagree with something they don’t think is right. We want people to highlight the problem that no-one else has thought of. However, a dissenting voice can be very disruptive when it goes against the goals, direction... Continue Reading →
Back in August last year my team and decided to release our product on Wednesdays. In fact, I said we were going to release every Wednesday. At the time, our deployment processes were already automated, we were breaking our work down into small valuable chunks and our automated test suite was comprehensive, trustworthy and performant.... Continue Reading →
I’m a project manager, so unsurprisingly I can find myself in animated conversations with other project managers regarding how best to manage the work that our team members are doing. We all have our favourite techniques and methods, but the process generally starts with making the work each member of the team is planning to... Continue Reading →
The group of talented engineers I currently lead have formed into a great team over the last year. Recently, I've been considering what I thought that was down to (as it would be quite useful to know!). Was it simply the somewhat fortunate mix of personalities who were allocated to the project? Was it blind... Continue Reading →
I’ve heard people say that the decision regarding whether to automate software deployments is a 'no-brainer'; "Every software development team should have a fully automated deployment process". It’s not even a debate. It’s a declaration. It's all well and good making that bold statement, but in actual fact there are only a relatively small percentage... Continue Reading →
In my view, the drive to inspect and adapt is the most important concept to have been popularized by the agile software development movement. It's an idea that got me hugely excited and engaged in the subject when I first came across it in 2005. This essence of this is that 'we will always know... Continue Reading →
In my previous post, I explained how leaving an extended period between releases of your software is just as risky an approach as forgoing regular dental check-ups. So if you bought that argument, it seems sensible to deploy pretty often, right? The problem is, and where the dental metaphor decays (sorry), is that software development... Continue Reading →
Leading Agile Teams 