malvasia bianca

A few months ago, I finally started appreciating the Customer role in XP: it made a real difference to us when we stopped doing our iteration planning ourselves (with advice from others, to be sure), and started having somebody else pick the stories for each release. (We still plan the work in our weekly [...]

As a manager who is drawn to XP, one question that reading First, Break All the Rules raises is: how compatible are agile methods with the book’s recommendations? Let’s start by going through the questions.
1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
This is a strength of XP (and other agile [...]

I just finished taking a new manager training class at Sun. (I’ve been managing for a year and a half now; I only recently learned that I was supposed to take this class. Oops.) They gave us a copy of a book called First, Break All the Rules which, despite having a [...]

I had a very pleasant lunch yesterday talking with some other people at Sun about XP. At some point, the conversation turned to “superstar programmers” who do their best not to help other people, giving perfunctory answers to questions, sending various signals that they don’t want to be bothered, and even being actively insulting [...]

I e-mailed the author of the blog I mentioned recently, and he was kind enough to put together a lean manufacturing reading list.

At our weekly meeting today, my team members had some interesting comments on what had gone wrong over the last week. Among other things, we had planned to work on two 2-point cards; we break up cards that are larger than that, and in the past even cards that size have been problematic. [...]

This is great. Ricardo Semler would approve. (Found via the XP mailing list.)
(My volume of posts that link to something else with minimal comment of my own has increased; I guess I’m turning into a more normal blogger. Which is okay; I try to have at least one more substantial post on [...]

I didn’t actually watch or listen to the Alito hearings, but I liked Johanna Rothman’s take on the subject. Compare it to her other post her hiring blog that day.

One of the most interesting entries for me on the Agile Toolkit podcast is the one on promiscuous pairing and the least qualified implementor. What the interviewee proposes is that, when starting on a card, the person who knows the least about it should work on the card, pairing with somebody who knows more [...]

A week ago, we finally finished all the cards that we’d planned for the week. I am hugely embarrassed that it’s taken so long, given that we’ve been trying to do the planning game for about ten months. But we’d been getting it pretty seriously wrong for a long time - reading through [...]

As I said last month, we’ve finally started doing a full planning game; we did it again this month. And I’m really glad we did: for one thing, November’s planning rubbed in our faces some of the things we were doing wrong.
One basic issue, as I see it, was that we were focusing too [...]

For months, I’ve wanted my team to try actual XP/Scrum-style release planning; yesterday and today, we actually did it. I’m glad we did; if nothing else, it was quite interesting, and I think/hope it was productive. This planning is for a “release” at the end of the month that we’ll use for demos [...]

I recently read Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler. Pretty amazing; they give a remarkable amount of control to their workers, have remarkably few layers of management, and are remarkably open, flexible, and responsive.
And, if the book is to be believed, it works extremely well. I [...]

I’ve subscribed to my first podcasts: Agile Toolkit and The Sound of Vision. It really is nice that I can enter the URL for an RSS feed into iTunes and it will go and fetch new shows for me. And the iPod is definitely the right place for this sort of thing: if [...]

I wish that I knew more about certain aspects of modern computer technology, espcially information-management aspects of technology. Examples of things that I wish I knew more about:

Java.
Ant.
Eclipse, especially its automated refactoring tools.
How to write a web page that doesn’t look like it was written a decade ago.
Web pages that accept input.
Web pages that [...]

I was unhappy with the result of our pair programming meeting for various reasons: we were all unhappy with how things were going, I was pretty sure that we were doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. We’d adopted short-term measures to ease some of the pains, but I didn’t see [...]

About three months ago, my team started seriously experimenting with pair programming. It’s been more than long enough since then for us to take stock, so we had a meeting three or so weeks ago to talk about our experiences.
The results were mixed, and really hard for me to get a grip on. [...]

As I mentioned recently, my group has been experimenting with some XP-inspired agile planning. Now that that’s stabilized, the question is: where next? It’s still my plan for the group to end up at full XP, if possible. (Asuming our experiments with it continue to turn out well, of course.) It’s [...]

I’m in the mood to blog about managing, so I thought I should add a “Managing” category. But how to fit it into the hierarchy? I manage programmers, and I expect most or all of my managing posts to be about programming as well. But programming is already the only subcategory I [...]

At the Sun Engineering Conference a couple of months ago, I went to a workshop by Ron Jeffries on agile planning. That inspired me to try out the (XP) technique that he was proposing: the idea is to plan all work in terms of “stories” that you estimate will take between 1 and 3 [...]