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 claim to be doing it right. It is as if something conspires to make Scrum ineffective. Let me be frank. Scrum is designed to expose […]
Save Our Scrum
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 respect. The winners from each continent advance to the Global Competition, held in Potsdam Germany in November 2014 at Agile Testing Days. Those six teams(*), […]
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 by Mr. Steve Poling and myself, and will be facilitated by Mike Kelly, president of the Association for Software Testing. We will hold a social […]
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 we should have thirty cans of peas. How many cans of peas do we have? Thirty? Good! Check. Greenbar.” In addition to counting them, a […]
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 more studied and considered introduction – here. Although he is coming from a different starting place, I think he’s got some very good stuff there. […]
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 just polish the general ideas here, it might actually be the start of something … Will be interested to know more how testing skills are […]
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 how to apply UCDish methods agilly to help with>the “Buiding the Right Thing” part. Heh. I know what you mean. It seems to be that […]
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 what they mean. Each team draws back, clearly defines themselves and what services they offer.Here’s one example of what that might look like: … So, […]
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 twice, it might be tightened once, but one thing is certain: The variation in the tightening will slow the line down. So one of the […]
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 … it’s an assembly line. At each step, someone produces a work product which is handed off to the next person in the line. Only the […]
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 that you separate the work into independent roles, then each person owns one single step of the process. It is the role of management to […]
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 community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers—bottom of the org chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next […]
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 certification. To which Alistair Cockburn replied: Back in message 416 or thereabouts I wrote: “In both cases, the market is so hungry for an agile […]
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, someone asked for sample software metrics, and, short on time, I quipped off a quick three or four sentence reply. And, of course, I wrote […]
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 for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at […]
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 likely to be interpreted as indicating that the certificate holder is qualified, surely more qualified than her colleagues around her who do not hold the […]
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 reply and thought I would share it here .. Ron “The Don” Jeffries Wrote:>But rightly so. My lack of comments on the topic should be […]