The recordings from Red Hat Agile Day are live.

The recorded talks are:

1. Jim Whitehurst – CEO Red Hat
2. Larry Maccherone – What? So What? Now What? – how to use metrics in an agile world
3. David Frink – Overcoming Resistance – How to engage developers in agile adoption
4. Todd Olson – The Data-Driven Product Owner
5. Alexis Monville: How agile and open-source work together in nearly perfect Harmony
6. Adam La Voy – Talent Acquisition Manager Red Hat – closing comments

My notes on talks 1, 2 and 4 are here.

My session was very interactive so there will be parts of the video where you won’t be able to hear the audience, but I did make every effort to repeat the questions or summarize the comments for the sake of the video.

Recently had the opportunity speak with Cory Bryan as a guest on Deliver It Cast.

We had a fun conversation on how Product Owners and Developers can better work together.

We touched on some of my favorite topics:

• Engagement and the Elephant and the Rider
• Airplane Mode for Developers

Lots of fun to be on the cast and Cory is a great host. Hope you enjoy.

Recently had the opportunity to attend Red Hat Agile Day. Great conference. Thanks to all who worked to put it on. My notes from the talks I attended are below.

Continue reading “Red Hat Agile Day 2016”

Action Required: Read this article to understand how to better communicate to large groups using email

Continue reading “Action Required: Read This Article”

The Impediments Cup is an agile retrospective technique for identifying impediments and deciding which one to focus on. (Impediments cup is halfway down the linked page on the left side under “Decide What To Do”)

The really neat thing about this technique is that you can use it effectively:

• With distributed teams
• To draw quiet team members into the discussion
• As a team building exercise
• To improve on the emotional intelligence of your team

Read on for how to do it…

Continue reading “Impediments Cup For The Win”

Have you ever heard a developer say, “Agile has too many meetings!”

In my years as an agile developer, development manager and agile coach, this is the top complaint I hear from developers when their team “goes agile.” This complaint demonstrates a lack of engagement or lack of support for the team’s agile transformation. What techniques do we normally use to address this and why don’t they work?

Continue reading “What do you do when a developer says “Agile has too many meetings””

I had the opportunity to attend and present at TriAgile 2016. It was my third time attending and my second time presenting.

Details of my presentation are here.

As always it was great to be among so many thought-provoking speakers and engaged attendees. I think there were around 650 attendees, which was a new record for the conference.

One of the things I love about this conference (and Southern Fried Agile) is the affordability. Advance tickets are around $100 which makes it easy to self-fund your way to the conference. Or if your company is paying, they can send a lot of people for very little money. These conferences provide an exceptional cost-to-value ratio.

Here are my highlights…

Continue reading “TriAgile 2016”

How a better user story can prevent you from being buried alive (in the way you want)

As told in the excellent book A Whack On The Side Of The Head by Roger von Oech, a few centuries back there was a plague in a small village that caused people to go into a death-like coma. Most of them eventually died, but occasionally someone would be mistaken for dead and accidentally buried alive.

When the villagers discovered this, they started working on a solution…

Continue reading “The Most Important Part of a User Story”

Epilogue

I thought the story was over. The shelves were built and I walked off slowly into the sunset.

However, sometimes you can’t predict the future. There was an unfortunate incident that caused both garage doors to need to be replaced.

One of the garage doors came in contact with a minivan. We may never know who moved first, but suffice it to say, mistakes were made and the garage door paid the ultimate price.

Continue reading “Agile Home Improvement – Epilogue”

Antifragile – Getting Stronger with Stress

I recently had the opportunity to give a lightning talk at a local agile meetup. If you’ve not been to a lightning talk (which I keep wanting to type as ‘lightening’…probably because it resembles ‘enlightening’) these are presentations you give that last 5 minutes or less.

You can use slides or not, but you will have to fit what you have to say in 300 seconds. It is a great opportunity to try out an idea on a friendly crowd. And I find that the time constraint forces you to examine, distill and re-examine your ideas in a healthy way.

For visuals, I had a single slide with 3 images on it. The rough transcript of the talk is below.

Continue reading “Antifragile Lightning Talk”