By Ben | Published:
April 28, 2009
It’s interesting to me how much people rely on formal tools for modeling. I frequently talk to individuals that tend to assert that just because a model is made in some modeling tool (like Visio) that it is *right* or at least superior to whiteboard sketches.
The Visio fan-boys and fan-girls seem to snicker and generally [...]
By Ben | Published:
April 9, 2009
I’ve always found it interesting how a simple change in semantics can make a huge difference for a team. One area that I’ve been thinking about for a while is the structure of user stories.
In it’s basic structure, a user story follows the format of:
Most teams (at least in my experience), use the format:
An interesting [...]
By Ben | Published:
March 18, 2009
If you are working with a distributed team, especially if that team is offshore, you should implement an “exchange program” to bring remote people together. The phone, email, instant messenger, and other similar tools can help with collaboration but they don’t have a fraction of the power of face-to-face communication.
Do you work with people in [...]
Also posted in teams, tib |
By Ben | Published:
October 26, 2008
As part of my job, I travel around to lots of new companies helping get teams started with Agile methods. It’s something that I’ve done for a long time in a lot of different companies. I’ve coached a lot of Agile teams and I’ve worked as a delivery team member on a lot of teams [...]
Also posted in learning |
By Ben | Published:
August 5, 2008
I often hear people use the words effective and efficient interchangeably. While the two definitions are close, they are not exactly the same and they have different contexts where each is appropriate.
Here are the two definitions from the New Oxford American Dictionary…
The way I usually differentiate between these two terms and their accompanying mindsets can [...]
Also posted in software |
By Ben | Published:
October 24, 2007
I’ve been spending roughly 4 – 8 hours a day doing remote pair-programming lately. Although there are always connectivity issues (usually once or twice per day), it’s still only a minor nuisance. Overall, I’m really enjoying the experience and it’s starting to feel pretty close to side-by-side pairing.
The tools that I use on a daily [...]
Also posted in devtools, work |
By Ben | Published:
August 24, 2007
In developing and envisioning software, it’s easy to forget about prioritizing value. Even with agile development teams, it’s common to see “sets” of functionality prioritized instead of rank-ordered. One idea that I’ve been pushing hard on lately is to not let anything into the backlog that’s not prioritized (as in rank-ordered).
Why? Well, one place we [...]
By Ben | Published:
August 21, 2007
An interesting facilitation technique that I’ve learned to frequently rely on is silence. The first time I ran across the technique was in a CSM course taught by Hubert Smits and Tamara Sulaiman. One of the exercises that we explored was Silent Grouping. The exercise was great and worked very well in the context of [...]
By Ben | Published:
August 20, 2007
A couple of years ago I put together some collateral to use when “selling” agile to potential clients. As part of the effort to educate our sales team about agile methods I wanted to provide some strong evidence for our sales team to use.
The only numbers that I had seen at this point were the [...]
Also posted in business, work |
