What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
I’ve been coaching and managing agile teams for 7 or 8 years, primarily using Scrum and XP practices. I’ve also created and taught numerous training and workshop sessions for the teams and organizations that I work with. Most of these teams have been new to agile. I’m no longer an active developer although I was for 15 years and grew up through the OO ranks with C++, Smalltalk, Actor, java, and recently a little Ruby. Since I’m no longer programming, I prefer to pair up with a technical coach although I can talk a good game re. the technical practices of pair programming, continuous integration, test-driven development, and refactoring.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I always like to hear how other teams deal with the particular challenges they face when trying out various aspect of agileness. They usually come up with unique and innovative approaches that I can add to my own toolkit. I’ve been able to pick up various useful exercises, games, story wall examples, and experiences with APM tools etc at the conferences I’ve attended.
With the exception of 1 longer-term engagement, I usually move on after the first project is completed. As a consultant, most of my experience has been with teams and organization new to agile. I’d like to hear about teams that having been using agile over a longer period of time (>1 year).
I’d like to learn what alternatives to the synergistic XP practices of incremental development (TDD, CI, story based work, refactoring).that Scrum teams use and find effective.
How do you plan to contribute?
I really enjoy get agile projects off the ground, getting “the business†excited, getting through the analysis paralysis that is common in most organizations , helping IT select team members, leading the team through a short agile “inceptionâ€, running agile workshops, pushing though iteration 0, and getting the first stories completed and demoed at each iteration close.
A technique I’ve found effective for these agile start-ups is something I call opt-in/opt out. The discussion with the team goes something like this…you’ve been invited to work on this project and we’re going to be using agile. We have a set of practices that we’re going to start out with which are based on a combination of Scrum and XP. We’re going to learn a lot and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes. If you chose to join the team, we ask that you agree to try the practices for a while…to question them openly…and to adjust them by consensus. I liken this to joining a country club. We, the members agree to a set of rules and change the rules ourselves along the way. I’d like to discuss this approach and some of the follow-on discussions that have ensued on teams I’ve worked with.
I’d also like to share experiences I’ve had leveraging metrics to track and report project progress including some of the challenges along the way and some of the unique benefits of being transparent on an iteration by iteration basis.
I’ve being working on ways for teams to measure/gauge how agile they are, given a set of self-defined, evolving criteria.
Finally, I’d like to share my experiences trying to balancing enablement (helping team members learn and adopt agile practices) against meeting delivery timeframes.
I’ve been coaching and managing agile teams for 7 or 8 years, primarily using Scrum and XP practices. I’ve also created and taught numerous training and workshop sessions for the teams and organizations that I work with. Most of these teams have been new to agile. I’m no longer an active developer although I was for 15 years and grew up through the OO ranks with C++, Smalltalk, Actor, java, and recently a little Ruby. Since I’m no longer programming, I prefer to pair up with a technical coach although I can talk a good game re. the technical practices of pair programming, continuous integration, test-driven development, and refactoring.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I always like to hear how other teams deal with the particular challenges they face when trying out various aspect of agileness. They usually come up with unique and innovative approaches that I can add to my own toolkit. I’ve been able to pick up various useful exercises, games, story wall examples, and experiences with APM tools etc at the conferences I’ve attended.
With the exception of 1 longer-term engagement, I usually move on after the first project is completed. As a consultant, most of my experience has been with teams and organization new to agile. I’d like to hear about teams that having been using agile over a longer period of time (>1 year).
I’d like to learn what alternatives to the synergistic XP practices of incremental development (TDD, CI, story based work, refactoring).that Scrum teams use and find effective.
How do you plan to contribute?
I really enjoy get agile projects off the ground, getting “the business†excited, getting through the analysis paralysis that is common in most organizations , helping IT select team members, leading the team through a short agile “inceptionâ€, running agile workshops, pushing though iteration 0, and getting the first stories completed and demoed at each iteration close.
A technique I’ve found effective for these agile start-ups is something I call opt-in/opt out. The discussion with the team goes something like this…you’ve been invited to work on this project and we’re going to be using agile. We have a set of practices that we’re going to start out with which are based on a combination of Scrum and XP. We’re going to learn a lot and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes. If you chose to join the team, we ask that you agree to try the practices for a while…to question them openly…and to adjust them by consensus. I liken this to joining a country club. We, the members agree to a set of rules and change the rules ourselves along the way. I’d like to discuss this approach and some of the follow-on discussions that have ensued on teams I’ve worked with.
I’d also like to share experiences I’ve had leveraging metrics to track and report project progress including some of the challenges along the way and some of the unique benefits of being transparent on an iteration by iteration basis.
I’ve being working on ways for teams to measure/gauge how agile they are, given a set of self-defined, evolving criteria.
Finally, I’d like to share my experiences trying to balancing enablement (helping team members learn and adopt agile practices) against meeting delivery timeframes.