Before I joined it-agile in 2010, I was exercising up to six times per week. When I joined it-agile, I knew I would be traveling more. It took me a bit more than four months until I noticed that I lacked some exercise. So, in January 2011 I started to go running, as this seems to be the only exercise compatible with a travel-rich job. Last year, I completed a 31,1 km run close to my hometown. While learning to to run, I noticed lots of parallels to Exploratory Testing. Here are the things that stuck.
Continue reading What running taught me about Exploratory TestingTag Archives: it-agile-blog-planet
To project or not to project
Over the years, I became more and more suspicious about the concept of a project. I have worked in several companies, at times working with products, at times working with projects. I have seen more waterfall projects, I have seen waterfall products, and I have seen both agile projects and products. What strikes me most is the amount of ignorance most companies have with regards to the effect that projects have in the longer run. Let’s see some stories.
Continue reading To project or not to projectGetting external help
Over the course of the past week, I realized the importance of external help – and some of my cultural biases for admitting that I might need it. Here is my story, hoping that it might help others seeking out for help.
Continue reading Getting external helpWhat’s wrong with Software Development?
So far, I think I have undervalued the importance of some practices when it comes to working in a large-scale development shop with lots of teams. One of the major problems with software development in the large is that we as an industry of software developers are terrible. We have bad development practices in place, and it’s strikingly easy to hide your bad software development skills in larger corporations. I also think that the Craftsmanship movement could come up just because we have badly educated software developers since decades.
Continue reading What’s wrong with Software Development?The blueprint fallacy
When it comes to consulting, I notice three kinds of solutions out in the field: the blueprinters, and the emergenters, and the ones that float between these two worlds). Dealing with blueprint solutions is a fallacy in my point of view. Let’s take a closer look on each of these three patterns I saw, and see what’s going on.
Continue reading The blueprint fallacyOn being helpful
I am guilty. Over time I have served in several online communities. I have tried to provide some of my limited knowledge to help people overcome some of the struggles they were facing. I have a confession to make: I am addicted. I am addicted at offering help. I am addicted to help others. I am addicted to keep them in a symbiotic relationship. Over the years, here is what I learned by trying to be more helpful.
Continue reading On being helpfulShallow Disagreements
Stick long enough in context-driven testing, and you will hear the term “shallow agreement” one time or another. A shallow agreement happens when we forget to confirm our understanding regarding a user story before starting to work on it, and find out during the Sprint Review – or worse: later – that the functionality did not meet the expectations of our ProductOwner or end-user. Shallow agreement happens when we find out too late that we seemed to agree on something, but really weren’t. We didn’t check our assumptions, and usually both parties end up being disappointed by each other.
Last year, I realized there is also something like shallow disagreements – and I am not sure whether these are worse than shallow agreements.
Continue reading Shallow DisagreementsScaling Agile – A Meta Framework
Scaling Agile appears to be a theme. At times, I am wondering how many organizations there actually are that would adopt large scale Agile to start with. Currently, I have the impression there are as many scaling frameworks out there as participants that joined a casting show. But I am exaggerating at bit here. With all these frameworks out there, how do you pick the right one for you? Or should it be a mixture of all of the frameworks available? While diving deeper into scaling frameworks, I found some considerations at picking the right one fruitful. Here they are.
Continue reading Scaling Agile – A Meta FrameworkContinuous Acceptance
Over the past year I ran a couple of Scrum trainings. At first I found it sort of funny to notice that amount of misconceptions that seem to appear in these various classes. Recently I figured that it would be more helpful to clarify some of them. Among one of the larger, and probably more manifested misconceptions regarding Scrum lies in the Sprint Review meeting. Let’s examine that one today. I am quite sure that someone has written about this before. I found that it would be worth to throw in my point of view as well.
Continue reading Continuous AcceptancePrinciples of Scaled Agility: Global Optimization
Since the last global Scrum Gathering I worked together with a couple of Scrum trainers on principles to scale Agility in the enterprise (German, we are working on an English translation). We reached a point where we want to share our current results. In this blog entry I am going to take a closer look at our thoughts on global optimization. Stefan Roock already discussed Enlightened Customers (German). Andreas Schliep discussed the part on satisfied employees (German).
One piece of caution: I translated the original German text on the fly without consulting back with the others. It’s likely that we will work on the English translation and continue the word-smithing.
Continue reading Principles of Scaled Agility: Global Optimization