Someone probably told you that you must have user stories to be Agile, right? But really, you don’t need user stories to be agile! I would have you consider what kinds of stakeholders and requirements you have and are trying to meet. Continue reading
Asides
Are You Agile?
Source: Owned by the authorThe Agile Karlskrona Test
Are you Agile? Are you doing the “so called” 12 key agile practices? Have you taken the Agile Karlskrona Test? I am going to try it out on a customer today.
Criticism… Not All That Easy
Criticism is not all that easy. If you have been through any kind of management training you will probably have done a number of sessions on giving “constructive feedback” or something like that. The trick to remember is that we want to achieve an effect. We want to change the person we are giving the feedback to. Does criticizing make that happen for you? No, there is no such thing as constructive criticism.
What can you do instead? Try giving yourself, your colleagues, your customers and whom ever else you meet professionally positive feedback. No one is so bad that there is nothing you can appreciate about them. Tell them about it. Most people don’t so your opinion will be all the more welcome.
The World Quality Report
The World Quality Report is the result of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini, Sogeti and HP Software. The report is based on a global survey of more than 1,200 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, IT directors/managers and quality assurance directors/managers from around the world.
My employer publishes a lot of reports on the state of the world as experienced by our customers. One of those are the World Quality Report. Today I had a really interesting and rewarding lunch with one of the experts behind the report!
Reverse use of GIT bisect
Here is an interesting post on how to make reverse use of GIT bisect to find fix-introducing commits instead of fault-introducing commits. (The link is broken, but the original post can be found at archive.org.) What it boils down to is this:
Since git bisect was designed to find regressions, we need to flip the meanings of “bad†and “good†in order to use it to find a fix.
It seems to me that using this would be helpful for anyone wanting to use the regression test selection (RTS) method we introduced a few years back.
Check my publications page for more details.
Update 2014-01-01: this reverse use of GIT bisect has recently been covered on stackoverflow.
About the Senior Member Meeting
A few days ago, I went to the senior member grade elevation meeting held by the IEEE Sweden Section. The meeting was quite interesting and a good opportunity to meet fellow engineers and hear about their careers.
We were divided in two groups of 12 persons each. In my group everyone either worked or had worked at Ericsson Research!
In time, the status of my application will be posted on the IEEE senior member site.
So why?
So what are the benefits of senior membership? (Thanks to Peter Parnes for asking.) IEEE lists them as:
- Recognition
- Leadership eligibility
Update 2014-11-16: Yes, everything went well. I am currently a Senior Member of the IEEE.
Senior Membership in the IEEE
I am about to apply for Senior Membership in the IEEE. To that end, I will go to the event held in Lund tomorrow. I spent some time on putting together an adapted CV and thought it might be of interest for readers of this blog – IEEE SM CV – Greger Wikstrand – 2011-03-29
Where does the information go?
In traditional non-agile project a lot of effort is spent in generating documents in order to achieve coordination, collaboration and communication. In agile software development the main artefacts beside the code are the storyboards. So what happens with all that other stuff? Open university research might have the answer in “
Three ‘c’s of agile practice: collaboration, coordination and communication“. I have requested a copy and will give more detail when and if I receive it.
Comments
We all love to get comments on our blogs, don’t we. Especially when they are nice polite comments like “great post”, “keep it coming” and so on. The problem is that so many of these comments are just an excuse for some spammer to get a link back to their own site. That is not why I am here blogging! Today I have taken two steps to enhance the signal to noise ratio in my comments.
First of all, I have activated ComLuv. According to some review I have read it will make my site more attractive for other bloggers to comment on as it will create a link back to their own latest blog post.
Secondly, I have installed “WordPress Hashcash“. It will force the commenters computer to perform some calculations in JavaScript to make it harder for spammers to post comments. This is not a CAPTCHA solution.
So, on one hand I have added a feature which should bring more human comments to the site. On the other hand I have added a feature which should reduce the number of non-human comments to the site. I hope the combination will work as intended.
Agile Meetings and Motivation
There are three key, recurrent meetings in Agile practice:
Do these meetings contribute to team motivation or de-motivation? According to a recent study “Motivating Agile Teams: A Case Study of Teams in Ireland and Sweden” it depends.
Sorry, but I am not going to pay to read any further than the abstract but if someone will donate a copy to me I promise to write about any other sensational findings in the paper.
References
[bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20101119?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]
The Featured Image is taken from Klean Denmark on Flickr and is used under a CC BY SA 2.0 license. It has been slightly cropped.
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Top Posts & Pages
Are You Agile?
Source: Owned by the authorThe Agile Karlskrona Test
Criticism… Not All That Easy
Criticism is not all that easy. If you have been through any kind of management training you will probably have done a number of sessions on giving “constructive feedback” or something like that. The trick to remember is that we want to achieve an effect. We want to change the person we are giving the feedback to. Does criticizing make that happen for you? No, there is no such thing as constructive criticism.
What can you do instead? Try giving yourself, your colleagues, your customers and whom ever else you meet professionally positive feedback. No one is so bad that there is nothing you can appreciate about them. Tell them about it. Most people don’t so your opinion will be all the more welcome.
The World Quality Report
The World Quality Report is the result of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini, Sogeti and HP Software. The report is based on a global survey of more than 1,200 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, IT directors/managers and quality assurance directors/managers from around the world.
My employer publishes a lot of reports on the state of the world as experienced by our customers. One of those are the World Quality Report. Today I had a really interesting and rewarding lunch with one of the experts behind the report!
Reverse use of GIT bisect
Here is an interesting post on how to make reverse use of GIT bisect to find fix-introducing commits instead of fault-introducing commits. (The link is broken, but the original post can be found at archive.org.) What it boils down to is this:
Since git bisect was designed to find regressions, we need to flip the meanings of “bad†and “good†in order to use it to find a fix.
It seems to me that using this would be helpful for anyone wanting to use the regression test selection (RTS) method we introduced a few years back.
Check my publications page for more details.
Update 2014-01-01: this reverse use of GIT bisect has recently been covered on stackoverflow.
About the Senior Member Meeting
A few days ago, I went to the senior member grade elevation meeting held by the IEEE Sweden Section. The meeting was quite interesting and a good opportunity to meet fellow engineers and hear about their careers.
We were divided in two groups of 12 persons each. In my group everyone either worked or had worked at Ericsson Research!
In time, the status of my application will be posted on the IEEE senior member site.
So why?
So what are the benefits of senior membership? (Thanks to Peter Parnes for asking.) IEEE lists them as:
- Recognition
- Leadership eligibility
Update 2014-11-16: Yes, everything went well. I am currently a Senior Member of the IEEE.
Senior Membership in the IEEE
I am about to apply for Senior Membership in the IEEE. To that end, I will go to the event held in Lund tomorrow. I spent some time on putting together an adapted CV and thought it might be of interest for readers of this blog – IEEE SM CV – Greger Wikstrand – 2011-03-29
Where does the information go?
In traditional non-agile project a lot of effort is spent in generating documents in order to achieve coordination, collaboration and communication. In agile software development the main artefacts beside the code are the storyboards. So what happens with all that other stuff? Open university research might have the answer in “
Three ‘c’s of agile practice: collaboration, coordination and communication“. I have requested a copy and will give more detail when and if I receive it.
Comments
We all love to get comments on our blogs, don’t we. Especially when they are nice polite comments like “great post”, “keep it coming” and so on. The problem is that so many of these comments are just an excuse for some spammer to get a link back to their own site. That is not why I am here blogging! Today I have taken two steps to enhance the signal to noise ratio in my comments.
First of all, I have activated ComLuv. According to some review I have read it will make my site more attractive for other bloggers to comment on as it will create a link back to their own latest blog post.
Secondly, I have installed “WordPress Hashcash“. It will force the commenters computer to perform some calculations in JavaScript to make it harder for spammers to post comments. This is not a CAPTCHA solution.
So, on one hand I have added a feature which should bring more human comments to the site. On the other hand I have added a feature which should reduce the number of non-human comments to the site. I hope the combination will work as intended.
Agile Meetings and Motivation
There are three key, recurrent meetings in Agile practice:
Do these meetings contribute to team motivation or de-motivation? According to a recent study “Motivating Agile Teams: A Case Study of Teams in Ireland and Sweden” it depends.
Sorry, but I am not going to pay to read any further than the abstract but if someone will donate a copy to me I promise to write about any other sensational findings in the paper.
References
[bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20101119?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]
The Featured Image is taken from Klean Denmark on Flickr and is used under a CC BY SA 2.0 license. It has been slightly cropped.
-
Top Posts & Pages