Red Hat Agile Day Videos

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.

Impediments Cup For The Win

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…

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

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?

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TriAgile 2016

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…

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The Most Important Part of a User Story

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…

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