What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
I have years and years of experience as a contractor and consultant, with an obsessive interest in improving my practice, and the state of the art. My agile experience started with arguing with RonJeffries and adopting agile (XP) software development practices in my personal practices, and has grown through encouraging the teams I assist to adopt agile practices, to leading teams with aggressively agile (almost XP) practices.
I recently lead a "green field" project (with nasty legacy database) to develop a web-based sales marketing discount application in Java, purely Test Driven Development (TDD) with custom Dependency Injection. We were given a traditional project plan starting with about six months of complex infrastructure development, which I pitched in favor of incremental development, delivering the first few screens (just the most important ones ;-) ready for production use, in just three weeks. Our software development was similarly successful for the rest of the project.
I'm currently leading, coaching and doing software development in a team with three to five junior developers, and facing issues of...
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I wish to learn how I, and the other technical leads and coaches in my organization, can be leaders and not loaners — how we can lead our teams, and also collaborate, help and learn from our peers who are also leading teams.
How do you plan to contribute?
I will bring years of experience, both good and bad, with lots of questions, answers and highly subjective opinions ;-> on topics of all kinds.
I will bring a willingness to learn, share and teach, and an openness to talk about just about anything with anyone who remains more-or-less civil.
Potential Topic
"What's the most effective way for a senior developer to lead a team of junior developers?"
This is what's on my mind. I don't have all the answers. (And I don't even have all the questions! ;-) But I'd like to talk about it, to share ideas and suggestions with others of similar interests.
-- JeffGrigg
I have years and years of experience as a contractor and consultant, with an obsessive interest in improving my practice, and the state of the art. My agile experience started with arguing with RonJeffries and adopting agile (XP) software development practices in my personal practices, and has grown through encouraging the teams I assist to adopt agile practices, to leading teams with aggressively agile (almost XP) practices.
I recently lead a "green field" project (with nasty legacy database) to develop a web-based sales marketing discount application in Java, purely Test Driven Development (TDD) with custom Dependency Injection. We were given a traditional project plan starting with about six months of complex infrastructure development, which I pitched in favor of incremental development, delivering the first few screens (just the most important ones ;-) ready for production use, in just three weeks. Our software development was similarly successful for the rest of the project.
I'm currently leading, coaching and doing software development in a team with three to five junior developers, and facing issues of...
- How to remain fresh and innovative and effective, when I'm part of the "weekly grind," embedded right in there with the other coders.
- Distributed software development with multiple geographically separated teams.
- Issues of motivating and improving the skills and practices of junior software developers.
- Dealing with the issues you would expect from being managed by a remote I.T. department with "traditional" values.
- Spreading and leveraging skills, knowledge and abilities across teams within our small business.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I wish to learn how I, and the other technical leads and coaches in my organization, can be leaders and not loaners — how we can lead our teams, and also collaborate, help and learn from our peers who are also leading teams.
How do you plan to contribute?
I will bring years of experience, both good and bad, with lots of questions, answers and highly subjective opinions ;-> on topics of all kinds.
I will bring a willingness to learn, share and teach, and an openness to talk about just about anything with anyone who remains more-or-less civil.
Potential Topic
"What's the most effective way for a senior developer to lead a team of junior developers?"
This is what's on my mind. I don't have all the answers. (And I don't even have all the questions! ;-) But I'd like to talk about it, to share ideas and suggestions with others of similar interests.
-- JeffGrigg