Recently, a friend and I were sharing our love for the movie Groundhog Day. In this movie Phil, a disgruntled, cynical weather reporter (played by Bill Murray) visits a town to report on the emergence of the groundhog and whether this indicated 6 more weeks of winter. Of course, Phil has a terrible day and everything lives up to his cynicism. When he awakens the next morning… it is...

Does your software team feel like it is on a hamster wheel? Maybe delivery pressure has been high for a long while, or there is a constant stream of support work to be done… so it’s just “heads down and keep going”. This way of working can be seductive… after all, we are getting things done and responding to “what’s wanted from us”. After a while, it becomes habit, our familiar...

When I first learned* about Scrum, the trainer provided us with some "rules of thumb" for planning our time during a sprint. As we started putting Scrum into practice, we applied these rules of thumb… but also encountered shock and horror from outside the team about how much "overhead" was involved. The arrival of Ken Rubin's recent blog post, How Much Time Should Each Scrum Practice...

On June 30th, 2017, ISE Fleet Services registered a certified compliant ELD (Electronic Logging Device) with the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration). Our journey to reach this milestone was long and arduous… and was also a series of lessons in applying an Agile mindset. In this blog post, I share what I see as some of the key lessons from our journey… The Context In...

"Think Globally, Act Locally." I recall first hearing this phrase in my youth, applied to connecting our personal choices to environmental impact. I'm thinking about it today in the context of Agile teams: having the bigger picture in mind is an important piece of our overall success. I've seen this recently with several team interactions…  Cleaning the code I was recently working with...

At what level should you automate tests? Unit test only? GUI-driven tests? Something else? In this blog post, I reflect on a recent experience with both pain and value, and how I am coming to imagine a portfolio approach to test automation.  Consider an example application or system (such as a web application or a mobile application). When viewed in layers, it might look like this: When I...

Are our retrospectives valuable? Are our teams improving? These are two questions that come to mind when I think about comments or articles I've seen about resistance to retrospectives or the time spent in them. I think we can learn a lot by conducting a retrospective… on our retrospectives. Through such a retrospective we seek learning by exploring the following questions: What...

This past week, Dennis Corpman and I gave a presentation at IEEE ProCon, a long-standing annual Professional Development conference held by the Cedar Rapids section of the IEEE. Our presentation focused on lessons learned along the agile path. As a way of framing our exploration, we used Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team to examine team interactions in a daily...

The week of November 14th, I spent 3 days with fellow developers, leaders, and Agilists at the Techwell-organized   AgileDev / Better Software/ DevOps East Conference and the Agile Leadership Summit. The keynotes and sessions were well attended, as well as the "hallway breakouts." As a compulsive note taker, I came back with 53 pages of notes,...

I like to tinker. It's part of how I got started in this business… as a 10th grader I remember eagerly awaiting each edition of the electronics hobby magazine I subscribed to, and often buying and assembling projects from kits or components. (There was also the time I ruined my mother's electric frypan - but that's another story…) Recently I've been tinkering with a Raspberry Pi 3, Windows...