I’ve had the pleasure of working with the group organizing Cincinnati Day of Agile. About a week ago we confirm our facility and date: March 26th, 2011 at the Savanna Center in West Chester, Ohio. We expect quite a jump this year, going over 300 attendees. We are currently accepting topics for both the Beginner [...]
Craftmanship was the software development phrase d’jour in 2010 (or maybe REST, it was a close race). To start 2011 Dan North very abruptly stated that Programming is not a craft. I happened to read this a few days before Codemash which was keynoted by Chad Fowler where he very conveniently discussed the Passionate Programmer. [...]
The Purpose of Katas
Jan 14
Codemash 2011 has had a Coding Dojo dedicated to Katas. I don’t recall that last year, but I love it. While I was there, they were well coordinated also. Nimble Pros seemed to be organizing things and they kept suggesting people pair up as they walked in and finally coordinated a discussion, swapping out the [...]
2010 was a busy, exciting and important professional year. I was asked to and did speak more than any previous year by far. I was involved in the absolutely awesome Southwest Ohio Give Camp event which has convinced me to be involved in other events. I had the chance to formally teach a course (Professional [...]
Meetings are hard. They can easily suck the life out of your day, week, or *gasp* job. Let pain be your guide. (Thanks @coreyhaines) I recently had to work through a mountain of feedback data provided by a limited product release. User Experience experts, random individuals, and customers known for their willingness to provide quality [...]
[Correction: This is the first for the new year. This certainly is not the first ever.] I’m happy to announce that our first Professional Scrum Developer course of 2011 is scheduled for February 21st. This is a course which practices 5 days of craftsmanship, collaboration, and sustainable pace via the Scrum framework. Practice is the [...]
In a getting back to basics moment of mine, I started through the TDD Problems. I found myself on the Console Interaction problem and decided to take a step back from after refactoring. This is what I saw: var shape = _console.AskForShape(); var rectange = GetRectange(); _console.PrintArea(rectange.ComputeArea()); _console.PrintCircumference(rectange.ComputeCircumference()); ReSharper was hinting at it, but it [...]
"Your team may be dysfunctional … but at least you can see the impediments. Now you have the ability to do something about it!" – Kane Mar – Scrumology, Scrum Coach This fantastic statement about Scrum highlights the most important aspect of Scrum that is invariably lost in most Scrum implementations in which an experienced [...]
A team I’m working with has come a long way in cutting through the crap of the Daily Scrum. Your time is valuable don’t fill it with empty words. During our most recent retrospective, two comments, among others, came up: Daily Scrums are faster and more direct. (Good) We are bad at gardening the backlog [...]
I think I can speak for all involved with the 2010 Southwest Ohio GiveCamp event this weekend when I say it was a smashing success. Let’s take it by the numbers: 12 Organizers 10 Charities 65 Volunteers 36 hours –> 1440 hours individually $144,000 in value delivered +200 repository commits Add to that the [...]