Archives
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Screaming Yellow Duc
Yes another motorcycle post.
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Evolution of a Kanban board
In No More Iterations I showed our 1st attempt at a kanban board. Now that we have a little more experience I'd like to show you where we are now and where we stopped on the way.
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Throughput vs. Velocity
Throughput and velocity are ways of measuring how fast a team can do work. Knowing how fast a team is going allows the team and their stakeholders to know when something is going to be done.
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Corey Ladas explains Scrum-ban
Cory has a great post titled: Scrum-ban | Lean Software Engineering. In it he describes how a team can take advantage of kanban within a Scrum environment.
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Another New Bike
Previously I posted about my new V-Strom which is a nice bike. However, after taking it on something more difficult than gravel roads and compared to my wife's Honda CRF150 I knew I needed something much lighter, more dirt oriented, but could still be ridden on the street.
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The “Why To” Manual
Hank Wallace turned me on to a post by Allison Shapira where she summarizes a key point from Rob Walker's writeup of the Blue Man Group - the "Why To" manual.
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Miško Hevery on Writing Testable Code
Miško Hevery has written a great summary of some basic coding rules for testability in his post Writing Testable Code.
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New Bike!
My new bike is a 2005 Suzuki DL1000 otherwise known at the V-strom. I'm looking forward to getting to know it a lot better. The previous owner put a lot of aftermarket farkles on it including heated grips (incredibility useful as it was 40F on the way home) and a custom seat which seems great so far.
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12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO
Jason Goldberg has a great post on some of the things he learned while CEO of Jobster.com.
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Ten Reasons High-Tech Companies Fail
Planning on starting your own company? Here are some good points to consider from High Tech Strategies - Ten Reasons High-Tech Companies Fail
- Lack of Market Focus
- Excessive Pace of Product Improvement
- Incomplete Products
- Undifferentiated Products
- Channel Mismanagement
- Failure to Establish the Right Competitive Barriers
- Using Price Alone To Drive Market Transformation
- Improper Use of Advertising
- Misinterpretation of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Model
- Irrelevant Market Research
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Production vs. Attendance on Teams
Jeffrey Phillips wrote a nice post on Accountable for production not attendance. In it he argues that most knowledge workers should be treated like virtual workers – they should be held accountable for their production, not their attendance. The implication is that the results of the work is far more important than when or where they work. This is something I have given a great deal of thought to and agree with in principle. However, the focus here is on the individual. What if the individual works on a team?
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Agile Open Northwest 2008 - Mar. 18-19 in Seattle, WA
Here is a flyer for your office
I attended AONW last year and had a fabulous time. It was great to reconnect with some of the local practitioners and have some really interesting conversations and be introduced to new idea. If you can make it I would highly recommend attending this year. Remember, attendance is limited to the first 100 people, so sign up soon! Look me up and I'll buy you a frosty beverage of your choice. -
Expedited Stories
I mentioned in my No More Iterations post that we didn't really know how support requests were going to affect the overall system. As is often the case I didn't have to wait long to find out.
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It's Not OK To Skip The Standup
Travis has a great post on why It's Not OK To Skip The Standup.
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Do You Twitter?
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$1,000 of Free Consulting Advice
One of my staff (Aaron) found this great post from David Bock called the 7 Question Project Health Check.
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30 Second Estimating
After reading posts by David Anderson and Amit Rathore I started to examine why we were estimating, how much time we were spending at it, the psychic cost, and the results. The results were not encouraging.
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Agile PM Tools (self-Hosted)
Update: I've created a site to compare and review agile tools.
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Added Wrike to the list of Agile PM tools
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It's okay to THINK for Yourself
I can't really add anything to Geoff's post. Go read it and apply it.
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Agile PM Tools (Hosted)
Update: I've created a site to compare and review agile tools.
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Continuous Production - Production-ready software…any time
The guys from Stelligent have another great post. This time on Continuous Production, the next step after Continuous Integration.
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No More Iterations
We've committed to iteration-less pull based software development starting on Monday for one of my teams. A number of factors led up to this decision, not to mention the vast amount of discussion I had with my project managers.
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Quick Sortable HTML Tables
Thanks to John A Fotheringham of JafSoft who created AscToTab and Joost de Valk of SEO Blog who created an elegant table sorting JavaScript snippet I can now quickly create interactive tables for my blog without all the nasty conversion of Excel to HTML.
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How do we know what to work on and what not to work on?
As my team becomes more responsive to the business needs placed upon it I realize that I haven't clearly communicated the guidelines I'd like to see in place and why I believe the guidelines are helpful. Here is a recent clarification I sent out (modified for a more general audience).