The Quick Brown Fox

Short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Monday - Mostly spend doing technical writing work, as we prepared for (yet another) release that was supposed to go out on Monday (ended up being Tuesday due to issues with the test environments -- more environment problems! It frustrates me no end the amount of time we spend on those.)  Tuesday - Spent the day at the Give Thanks for Scrum event in Boston. It was... interesting. I have a lot of thoughts and some criticisms, as one does. Wednesday - Listened to episode 3 of "Hurry Slowly." Much food for thought (one of those thoughts being that a 10 day meditation retreat would probably drive me insane). Wrote my blog post on yesterday's event. The office usually closes early on the day before a holiday weekend, and everyone having one eye on a clock makes it a bit harder to get things accomplished. I signed up for a webinar on Clean Language today, purely out of curiosity and figuring that my schedule would be largely clear

This was my first time at this event, and my second time at an Agile Boston event (I recognized a couple of people from the last one I attended). I went with one of my coworkers, which turned out to be a good thing, as one of my criticisms of the event is that it wasn't well set up for meeting people. There was a sort of ice-breaker thing halfway through the morning -- everyone got a piece of a playing card and was supposed to find the person with the other piece -- but with two hundred-some people in a single very loud room, I don't think it was a success. During most of the breaks, the two of us went for a walk; fresh air and a change of view becomes very important in such an environment. The programming was interesting. The overall theme was around using Scrum in non-software environments. There was also a lot of talk about scaling. When it comes to scaling agile methods, I am an interested skeptic, partly because I have a strong bias against pretty much an

Monday - The day did not start well, and it continued to be pretty blah.  I shall blame the weather. I should have been a plumber. Tuesday - Listened to the first episode of the new Base.cs podcast on the way to work. Great start! Also the first episode of the Hurry Slowly podcast, at which I found myself nodding enthusiastically a lot. Today we had sprint review and retrospectives; had to skip the all-team retro meeting due to a shortage of meeting space (which is a constraint that drives me crazy). My goal for the team retrospective was to try a new technique; I started with sailboat and did a brief post about that experience. Wedesday - More podcasts! Meta-cast 122 today, a really fun and interesting rapid-fire stream of questions. Lots to think about, and I should probably listen to it again. Also, it was sprint planning day.We had the following challenges: A late-breaking change of time from when we usually have this meeting, to accommodate an all-hands meeting at the other c

So I was reading this post on Medium, " The Trouble with Scrum ". As these things do, it started a bit of a mental chain reaction, leading to this tweet from me: I feel like Scrum is hard because communication is hard, and most of us have been, at best, not well trained. Just a quick look at the Manifesto (never mind the Scrum Guide for now) highlights this. Have a sloppy able because blogspot doesn't seem to have an easy way to make them: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Well, how do you know you've satisfied the customer? You have to talk to them, and get them to talk to you. Shouldn't we leave that to the experts in marketing and such? Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. That means not just communication, but constant, close communication. With CUSTOMERS. How do we even DO that?

One of my development goals for the next six months is to try out a variety of retrospective games with my team. I floated this idea a few sprints back and made sure that they were all okay with it, but the three members who made it to today's retrospective still seemed taken aback. One mentioned that we've never really gotten the hang of the basic three questions version, while another countered that it was really just another way of getting the same information (the third was late, never added anything to the drawing, and joined the conversation in progress). Now, I picked this technique for the first exercise in part because it was a day when I thought the whole team was going to be in the office -- that turned out to not be the case, one member was working from home, and we had a brief discussion about why I am not on the team's Exchange email group. My other reason for starting with sailboat is that it's a pretty non-threatening exercise. I offered to abort the e

This is a brand new podcast from (some of?) the people who developed CodeNewbie. I really enjoyed it! It was short and focused, and I thought it did a great job explaining how binary numbers work. That's one of those concepts where I've always been kinda-sorta sure I understood it, but could probably not have explained it to someone else. Now, I probably could. Great start, and I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

Had a bit more energy this week, thank goodness. Monday - Agile for Humans #078. It's amazing how quickly one can fall behind even with a few podcasts in rotation. This was a short one. I always enjoy Ripley's perspective on the business, and it's good to hear someone articulate the extent to which this really is a lifelong journey. One of last week's meetings appears to be bearing fruit.  Tuesday -  Code Newbies Ep 1, because I always like seeing how podcasts get their start. These episodes are really long, which makes it something of a challenge to figure out how and when to listen. I only have a half hour or so commute, and I can't listen to a podcast and do much else at the same time if I want to actually retain anything I've heard. So any given podcast is either a multi-day affair, or I need a quiet space during the work day I can devote to listening and somehow not feel like I should be doing something else. (One of the joys of having two jobs is that w

Monday - Spent a large part of the day glued to the news feeds while finishing the documentation needed for this sprint's release. Got some bad news about my hoped-for shift at work. Tuesday - End of sprint, sans any sense of accomplishment or celebration. The mood is grim. We skipped some retrospectives in favor of getting a release out the door, and had an "emergency" backlog grooming session for late-breaking stories. We are perpetuating a lot of unhappy patterns, and I'm not sure how to go about helping the logjam break. Everything seems to start far upstream of the team's ability to impact anything.  Wednesday - Sprint planning. Velocity has steadied after last sprint's dip, so we have at least achieved a stable flow. Now to reduce that flow enough that we can spend some energy making things better. Release schedule is unfortunately also steady; since the teams were promised repeatedly that things would change come November, this is not being well rec