How to play the Team Estimation Game
The Team Estimation Game is the best technique we have found to get a scrum team up-and-running with useful estimates. It plays like a game, but it accomplishes valuable work: assigning story point estimates to user stories. Teams using this technique are typically able to estimate 20 to 60 stories in an hour. The game [...]
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Chris Sims is signing copies of The Elements of Scrum at the Atlanta Scrum Gathering on Tuesday
If you are at the 2012 Atlanta Scrum Gathering, you got a copy of The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and yours truly in your conference goody bag, as we are proud sponsors of this year’s event. If you’d like Chris to sign your copy, he’ll be doing so at 12:30 pm on Tuesday [...]
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The best example of teamwork ever recorded?
Seriously, this video (via David Chilcott, via Mitchell Levy) makes me think: I want to do this with people some day. It may be in software, or it may be in publishing, it may be in basket weaving (it certainly won’t be in guitar playing or singing), but I want to be one of these [...]
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Want a smart team? Make sure it gets the recommended daily allowance of estrogen
A team without a woman is like a bicycle with… some fish? So it would seem, according to Grace Nasri, who writes in the HuffPo about the gender gap in tech from an interesting perspective. She got my attention with a 2011 HBR story profiling research by Anita Wooley and Thomas Malone showing that the [...]
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Hello Chase, Goodbye David: A change at Agile Learning Labs
Our friend and colleague David Parker is leaving Agile Learning Labs’ staff. He has received a much better offer–and one we can’t possibly counter–that of stay at home dad to Chase Kamran Parker-Katiraee, who assumed his post of infant-in-chief earlier this week. We predict a fair bit of wrangling over just who is the customer [...]
On Languages: An Excerpt from Jeff McKenna’s Conscious Software Development
Jeff McKenna has some interesting things to say about when it’s important to generalize, and when to specialize as a computer linguist–and how many language problems are actually design problems in disguise. From his forthcoming Dymaxicon book Conscious Software Development: When a young developer says to me, “I know 25 languages!” I don’t believe them, [...]
Meet the Agile Learning Labs sales team!
We’ve had a particularly busy month here at Agile Learning Labs–the phone is ringing off the hook, so to speak, and our sales and biz dev team has been very, um, agile. As in light on their feet. We thought they might need a good laugh, so this is a thank you to Steve and [...]
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No More Bugs: an excerpt from Jeff McKenna’s book Conscious Software Development
I have been spending a fair amount of my time these days editing Jeff McKenna’s new book, Conscious Software Development, coming soon from our publishing venture, Dymaxicon. Jeff’s voice is unique: irrascible, personal, anecdotal, and oddly zen-like. He has a knack for cutting to the quick of any issue. Case in point, this passage about [...]
Posted in Conscious Software Development, Dymaxicon, books, videos 2 Comments
Scrum Master in a Box! innovation fun and games…
Who knew Innovation Games could be a competitive sport? Our own Director of Biz Dev, Laura Powers, is in a class with Deb Colden called “Innovation Games for Customer Understanding” today, and sent us this pic of her winning entry for “best design and product pitch.” She calls it Scrum Master in a Box: We [...]
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Hear Chris Sims on the Agile Weekly Podcast