Friday 29 January 2010

Weekly agile links 1-5 Feb 2010

Another week of too many links to go through and pick the ones that look most interesting. This week my link of the week is Sara Ford's (Microsoft) blog post:
How I Learned to Program Manage an Agile Team after 6 years of Waterfall

What does a ScrumMaster do? Nice, short list and a great reminder by Dr. German Sakaryan

10 questions to choose candidates - A useful guide on how to Choose Quality Candidates/Consultants for Your Large Company Agile Initiative

Splitting user stories by David Draper - always worth reading Dave's posts!

Yanking the value chain Ade McCormack thinks there are some worrying omissions that could threaten the success of the IT function

EPIC goals of coaching Useful summary on coaching types by David Harvey

The Cost of 2nd Time Quality
To be honest this is far too long to read but it looks promising and has lots of data and pretty pictures ;)

Adopting Agile Development - The role of the CIO Isaac Sacolick on how the CIO changes during agile adoption

Why Work should be fun A post (or perhaps a rant) by Felicity Goodey

They’re not User Stories To find out what "they are" check Liz Keogh's blog

Mockups with Balsamiq I have heard about balsamiq several months ago and since then I see more and more people using it for UI mock-ups. Great summary by David Draper

Building a Requirements Foundation with Customer Interviews by Esther Derby and from the The AYE Conference

What Really Motivates Workers by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer and from the HBR (with the usual quality)

Pragmatic Personas: Putting the User back in User Stories Jeff Patton reviews the different ways that software is currently built.

Can Scrum Support Six Sigma? An attempt to combine these two by Heitor Roriz Filho

[link of the week]
How I Learned to Program Manage an Agile Team after 6 years of Waterfall Some good insights that could help traditional PMs to transition to agile by Sara Ford (and also some shocking news about the dev tools we use on the MS platform)

Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy.

Thursday 21 January 2010

Weekly agile links 25-29 Jan 2010

This week I will begin with my quote of the week. And it comes from Alvin Toffler who says that: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn". Feels about right, doesn't it?

My link of the week this week goes to Unlearn Your MBA Podcast with David Heinemeier Hansson (of 37 signals)

Here are all my agile links this week:

Sum Up Your Leadership in Six Words This one sounded interesting and in fact the entire blog of John Baldoni is worth reading!


Agile Toolkit podcast Plenty of interesting topics there!


John D.C. Little and Stephen C. Graves - Little's Law about metrics.

Are We Agile Yet? Bob Maksimchuk on big boss attitude towards becoming agile.

Version One;s Agile Salary Results Time to look at the job boards or to keep quiet? ;)


How to Foster A Culture of Innovation - Moving Beyond Pull Systems Requires a Culture of Innovation says Ryan Martens

[link of the week]
Unlearn Your MBA Podcast with David Heinemeier Hansson (of 37 signals)

New to Agile? Want to know which tool to use? Blog post by Alan Kelly that recommend avoiding tools

Go-Givers Sell More: Free Introduction and Chapter 1 from Bob Burg and John David Mann's book. Very interesting read by the looks of it!

The Necessary Conditions for Behavior Change - Ken Nowack on Change


Interview on Daily Stand-ups - Henrik Larsson interviewing Jason Yip (Thoughtworks)

Non-Functional Requirements: do user stories really help? A video with Rachel Davis

The heart of Lean - "Thinking for yourself in your context" - extremely good read spreading lean wisdom and coming directly from Toyota and the TPS.

The ScrumMaster Diaries: #3 – Becoming a CSM great post highlighting important issues about by "Agile Bob"

Friday 15 January 2010

My weekly agile links 18-22 Jan 2010

Wow! What a week in terms of links flying around (I'm sure it is because it was my birthday during this week :) ). Out of these I could easily choose a few favourites but in the end it has to be one so this week's #my link of the week is Bill Wake's Scrum Development on a Page. Enjoy!

And here are all my links this week:

A post by Andrew Carey, caught my eye because it mentions John Seddon and I've been impressed with his talk from last week. The title is "Tick Box Britain"

Sometimes, Agile Alone Isn't Enough - Mike Cottmeyer on agile and the organization although to be honest is mainly about some/his book (apart from the diagram - I like that one)

Michael James's article in Better Software on Scrum and organization bariers to implementing it.

Henrik Kniberg advises us to stop comparing Scrum & Kanban to find out which is better. they both can be useful .. just like a fork and a knife - Kanban's Not Better than Scrum, It's Just Smaller

Roman Pichler's blog on Product Ownership (It was about time someone clarifies it - Thanks Roman!)

Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises - Presented by Dean Leffingwell

Selforganisation and Type of heat - this one's said to be inspired by Jo Pelrine's talk about head which I attended last May during #acg so I thought it must be interesting.

Lifehacking: Applying a Geek Concept to Advance Your Personal Growth I actually read this and it sounds very geeky + all the ideas about self improvement in different form.

Why Prioritizing Your Product Backlog for ROI Doesn’t Work - blimey read this one as well.. some good ideas but to me very similar to a prioritization excel spreadsheet I've been using over the last 2-3 years.

Scrum Development on a Page A good summary of Scrum on a single page (by Bill Wake)

Improving Software Economics - 10 Principles for Achieving Agile Software Delivery This is very interesting - IBM starting to talk sense. Well almost - I still sense a fair bit of overhead in these principles. Overall though a few interesting points that show these guys are beginning to listen.

Ability to manage change ‘marks out successful organisations A study that says client needs and not costs should drive change.

Scrum Anti-pattern : Prioritizing Stories Within Sprints Some call the Scrum Smells.. in any case things you should not do and if you have a few of those you might need to reconsider how productive you are?!

Wednesday 13 January 2010

My weekly agile links 11-15 Jan 2010

Wow.. A very active week as you can see by the number of links. This prompted me to start doing #my link of the week. So here's my first ever link of the week:

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
3 mins and 31 seconds worth sparing for this video. (WARNING: You may spend the rest of the day rethinking your life)

All weekly links:

Simple Scrum - another good article by Tobias Mayer describing the basic Scrum excluding any software development specific terminology

The extended family of Agile A survey, the results of which we have seen in many presentations, so good to look at the actual data.

Agile Coaching Tips by Rachel Davis - a very very good bunch of techniques and advices

The Agile Coach Manifesto - Jason Little's proposal for Agile coach manifesto

Five Disconnects of Organizational Intelligence Demanding Change - RICHARD VERYAR's blog

Defending Leadership an article by by Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

Creating Useful Measures David Joyce on measures for continuous improvement

Mind your business - Marketing your business (very similar values)

Re-thinking Lean Service Inspirational speech full of truths about services by John Seddon

Mike Cottmeyer on Agile Project Management, Building Effective Teams

BDD & DDD - Dan North presents Behaviour Driven Development and Domain Driven Design

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
[Link of The Week]

“Why Lean and Agile Go Together” on Forbes.com

Theory of constraints for beginners David Draper's blog

Friday 8 January 2010

Weekly agile links 4-8 Jan 2010

Now that is a hell of a promise ;) I find out that the list of links that I open rarely stays for more than a week so it made sense to me and I am fairly sure in the near future I will have to dump these links somewhere. So here goes:

Mike Cohn's The Role of Leaders on a Self-Organizing Team

A reminder of what retrospectives should be like - A Retrospective Agenda

Scott Berkun's blog - Why do big companies suck?

The F# Survival Guide (I know not really an agile link but still of interest)

A book I am buying - The Beermat Entrepreneur: What You Really Need to Know to Turn a Good Idea into a Great Business

Two simple questions (very much retro style)

That's all I have this week, have a good weekend ;)

Tuesday 5 January 2010

Agile links #4

This set I am afraid will be shorter than expected although it comes 2 weeks later than the last one but it was the holiday's period after all ;)

Tobias Mayer's blog - It starts with belief

David Joyce's talk - A Journey to Systemic Improvement

EMC blogs - 100 job search tips

Evolving Excellence Flexibility: A License to Accept Waste

Bruce Eckel - Wrong Correctness

The Content Economy - Did you ever hear anyone shout "culture failure!"?

Fast forward blog - Employee Engagement – a Core Goal of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?