Ken Schwaber, a co-creator of scrum, says that roughly 25% of teams trying the method realize the gains they had hope. More teams call themselves “Scrumbut”, “Scrumerfall”, or “Scrumish” than […]
The Software Testing World Cup
Imagine a world test competition, held over the internet, on your continent, in a time zone that is reasonable for you, on a Saturday, with local judges you know and […]
Technical Debt – Workshop
I am pleased to announce the first Workshop On Technical Debt (WOTD) will be held August 14/15 on the Campus of Calvin College in West Michigan. The event is organized […]
Where have all the sapient processes gone?
Most agile test automation is, well, clerical. To borrow an analogy from James Bach, it views testing as something like an inventory clerk at a Grocery Store. “It says here […]
Software Testing Skills – II
My last post was the quick, fast, off-the-cuff sort of answer I give to a mailing list on my lunch hour. Paul Carvalho has actually taken time to do a […]
Recent post on the agile testing list
I just posted this on the Agile-Testing list; it is rough, uncouth, and just a start, but it was fun to write and I wanted to share. If I could […]
Post to the XP Discussion List
I just posted this to the ExtremeProgramming List; I thought it was worth sharing … >Fortunately I think this is changing rapidly, and there is a growing>body of experience on […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – IV
Yesterday I suggested that a lot of process improvement is trying to eliminate the overlap between roles. For example, when people talk about making job descriptions “better”, that is often […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – III
If software development is an assembly line, then unclear roles is a real problem (see illustration.) You don’t know who is supposed to tightnen the nut. It might be tightend […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – II
This is image 2 from Winston Royce’s Paper – “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems“ Let’s look at each stage for the process – requirements, design, coding, testing … […]
Rethinking Process Improvement – I
Most of our ideas about process improvement come from a factory analogy – which was Invented by Frederick W. Taylor at the beginning of the 20th century. His idea was […]
HP Culture, Circa 1976
Wozniak:”No, I’m never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It’s my job for life. It’s the best company because it’s so good to engineers.” It really treated us like we were a […]
Certifiable – III
I am drafting a reply to the agile-leadership group, but posting it here first. Several people (including me), asked what problem certification solves, or who the “customer” is for the […]
Measuring Project Health
I’ve been known to say that explaining a single idea so well that it can’t be misunderstood takes me about 1,000 words. Well, yesterday, on the context-driven testing yahoo group, […]
Craft Appreciation
An article on Art Appreciation that is really about Craft Appreciation and skill building – from From Paul Graham: What counts as a trick? Roughly, it’s something done with contempt […]
Certifiable – II
Another post, this one to the agile-management list … Ron Jeffries Wrote:A leadership certification, one would imagine, would perforce be far less specific and far more general, but just as […]
Certifiable?
The Agile Project Leadership Network is working on a certificate program in Agile Leadership. This has been discussed a bit on the Agile Leadership Yahoo group. I just emailed a […]