Kindles for all our CSM and CSPO students this month
We hear that the traditional year-one anniversary gift is paper. Does e-ink count? We think so! The Elements of Scrum is a year old, and to celebrate, Agile Learning Labs is giving a Kindle to every student in our Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes this month. And what a year it has [...]
Elizabeth McClellan: An artist’s interpretation of scrum
Artist, illustrator and graphic facilitator Elizabeth McClellan is one of my favorite people, proving as she always does that the kind of work we do here at Agile Learning Labs–and what our clients do when they develop software–is as much art as it is business. Last June, as Chris blogged recently, Elizabeth recorded everything that [...]
Test Driven Development – Life Beyond the Insanity
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” ~ Albert Einstein Are you a survivor of insane software development? Design-code-integrate-test-deploy. Maybe it’s time for a different approach. Test driven development takes some of the insanity out of the software development process by shifting the emphasis on testing from post-development necessity [...]
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Lyssa Adkins, Agile Pop Star…
I was writing Lyssa Adkins the other day to update her on how briskly the seats in her upcoming class are selling, and I almost called her a “rock star”… But it just didn’t feel right. Lyssa has absolutely nothing in common with Keith Richards (which is a good thing, believe me!). She’s more of [...]
A recap of our weekend CSM
This weekend Agile Learning Labs held a memorable Certified ScrumMaster training. We capped admission at 28, and had a wait list–a first for us. The distinguished student body included people who flew in for the event from Tennessee, Michigan and Dubai, and a good mix of current agile team members, independent consultants, and job seekers–fewer [...]
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The common roots of Agile & Improv: Reading Lee Devin
As a writer and editor, I’m acutely aware of the importance of language and metaphor in framing our experience. It has long been my opinion that our business cultures–and that includes software–have been profoundly affected (dare I say, infected?) by sports and combat metaphorage. We have teams, team players and coaches. We keep score and [...]
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Breakfast of Agile Champions (this Monday!)
Being Agile is hard. Simple, and hard. Simple because, in theory, all we need to do to achieve a yogic level of Agility is to live by the Agile Principles as set forth in the Agile Manifesto. Hard, because the real world impinges on or impedes this effort every %$(^%&! day. In light of this, [...]
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CSM: The reviews are in…
We're blushing. Drew Powers, the new editor of the SF Bay Area Chapter of the Project Management Institute's newsletter, attended our Certified ScrumMaster workshop in September and has written a thoroughly glowing account of the class, concluding that Agile is indeed highly relevant for Project Managers: …while migrating from a traditional PM environment may require [...]
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“Embrace change to add more value!” and other “aha!”s
Every time we run an Agile Project Management class we tweak it slightly, based on what we've learned in the last one. Inspect and adapt, as they say… err, I mean, as we say. One thing we noticed happening over an intensive two days period is that people tended to generate many more insights than [...]
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More fun with internet memes: “What does a scrum product owner do?”