On Retrospectives: Video Lunch and Learn at Covenant Eyes

by Zachary on February 2, 2010

in videos

I had opportunity to discuss retrospectives in a presentation at work, so I recorded it and published the slides on slideshare.

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Tagged as: Agile, learning, lunch and learn, OODA, retrospectives

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Project Teams? Product Teams? Which One’s Better?

by Zachary January 31, 2010

In agile methodologies there are two generally accepted ways to group teams: project teams and product teams. Project teams are generally focused exclusively on a well defined goal or objective, and have a completion date to meet and/or a budget to run out of. Product teams generally are intended to support and improve an entire [...]

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The REAL Reason We Automate Testing

by Zachary January 15, 2010

We were discussing implementation of an automated regression test suite, and this scenario kind of popped into my head. It’s funny, dagnabit.

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Unscaling Agile: When You Have More Products than People

by Zachary January 6, 2010

In some of the agile discussion groups I follow, people have been discussing how to scale out an agile product over multiple teams. These discussions are generally very informative and seem to lean in the direction of breaking product teams into feature teams for the product.
But what about when we have more products or components [...]

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Agile Development is Like CalvinBall

by Zachary December 21, 2009

I was reading a great article by Jurgen Apello called Managers Are Not Game Designers! I found the article to be amusing and informative, especially considering how at the office we’ve joked around about how we could make a collectible card game for how we do our development.
The most important element of his post is [...]

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The Iteration Social Contract: Knowing When to Change a Teams Direction

by Zachary December 7, 2009

One of the most attractive aspects of agile is its ability to allow you to change a teams direction when a business needs change. However there can be confusion about when it’s appropriate to change a teams direction. In this post I will attempt to discuss the iteration social contract, what threatens it, and how [...]

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Experimenting with Test Driven Development: BEHOLD The GUMBALL machine!

by Zachary December 2, 2009

Last weekend I got the itch to do some development again, so I built myself a gumball machine out of PHP. I haven’t built an actual interface for the machine, but I wanted to see if I could create a system using TDD that didn’t require a user interface at all. I normally build interface [...]

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Metrics are Hard: Rewarding Performance in an Agile Environment

by Zachary November 25, 2009

Recently I was reading a post by Matt Heusser titled Performance Improvement, not Process Improvement.
While I agree with the post I’m concerned with an assumption it appears to be making. It seems to be making the assumption that rewarding performance based upon metrics creates better overall performance. I don’t necessarily think this is true in [...]

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What Fox Entertainment’s Glee Taught Me About Agile and the Power of Team Ownership

by Zachary August 28, 2009

I was watching Fox Entertainment’s new show Glee on Hulu and was struck by an interesting correlation between the plot and a core tenant of effective agile teams. In Glee a teacher discovers that the glee club is about do be disbanded and decides to take responsibility for it’s continued development. This is no small [...]

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Parsing Recurring Time Patterns in Natural Language with Daniel Parker @dcparker at @barcampgr

by Zachary August 24, 2009

This is the second of Daniels talks, at least out of those that I heard. In this one Daniel talks about parsing through natural language to get computer readable time patterns. Basically taking something like “July third from 3 to 5 AM and Aug 12th at 3PM” and translating them into something your computer can [...]

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