The Quick Brown Fox

Monday - Meta-cast #100 on the earbuds today. Met briefly with the team I'm supposed to work with as a coach for this next little while. My first challenge is going to be making myself available without feeling like I'm watching them.The office as a whole is quiet. Tuesday - Made more contact with the new team: attended their standup, spoke with several team members, found a place near their area where I can camp out for at least a couple hours a day, and put up a board on which to collect their questions in case I'm not around. I'm curious about the two team members I haven't spoken with individually yet. The team is certainly dealing with an array of problems. I'm trying to just gather those right now, rather than settle too soon on any course of suggestions.  Wednesday - More conversation turning up additional issues the team is facing. I have the beginning of a backlog of items to dive into over the next weeks. Initiated a small change, mostly to see if/h

Posting early because I'm on vacation as of tomorrow -- another week of tools, blog posts, and random items of potential interest. There's a ton of Kanban stuff this week because of my new team project. When to Jump: Walking Away from Big Business Toward Transformation Volunteering is the Best Kept Secret for Mental Health When Does Work Actually Get Done? - found this via J Glei's newsletter. Everyone should listen to "Hurry Slowly." Scrum Master Anti-Patterns - The scrolling on this page is the worst, but a useful read of Things to Avoid.  Product Vision Board Breaking the Cycle of Bad Scrum Myth 8: The Scrum Master is a Junior Agile Coach - I don't have any investment in the thesis (so many arguments in this industry about labeling!), and I suspect that this is one of those things where your mileage will vary depending on your organization, but an interesting read.    TDD for 9 year olds - This sounds like it was really fun to do.   The Kanban

Monday - Spent most of the day on documentation as we come into the end of the sprint. Felt glum (again - Monday blahs?). It seems like my role transfer might actually become reality after all? Tuesday - Went back to the CodeNewbies podcast (S1E2) and Base.cs (E2). There's so much good information out there, so many people doing neat things. Got a request from my mentor to take on a short-time coaching role for a team in a different product area. We have a release coming up at the end of this week, but it looks like after that I'll have some time to spend with this group, and hopefully I'll find a way to be useful to them. Also, we had backlog grooming. I should make one of my goals for next year to be "get this process to suck less." Wednesday - Sprint planning was weird. There was a lot of carry-over from the previous sprint, one team is being reassigned to another product, and most of us are going to be on vacation for at least one week at the end of the yea

New blog feature! I read a lot of cool things, and then they vanish into the Internet aether. I have decided to steal (from many) the habit of collecting these links into a weekly roundup, if only for my own benefit. For this first iteration, here's everything I read this week that was even vaguely interesting: Managing Programmer Productivity - Which always makes me wonder: if it's not that complicated, why is it apparently so damn hard for any place to do?  Stopping the Enterprise Death Spiral with Mob Programming -  Great piece despite the title. In my experience, the difficulty ends up being in convincing people that individual productivity is not the be-all, even to give a different approach a try. As a follow-on, another (short) post about Mob Programming Benefits . Starting a Community of Practice Using the Learning Canvas - We have used elements of this along with Lean Coffee in our Scrum Master community of practice meetings, and I think we should get back to do

I saw a post about doing a personal retrospective , and it seemed like a good time. The year has had some strong successes. If you're into the shu/ha/ri model, I feel like as an organization, we have gotten pretty good at stage 1. After a year+ of doing it, we have solidified the habitual motions of Scrum. People are working together more, there's been a lot of product knowledge shared, we're getting better as a group at estimating (and stressing out a bit less about estimating -- I fear that "no estimates" would be a tough sell here at the moment). The biggest success for me personally was going to the Agile Games back in the spring; I don't think it's overstating to say that it was life-changing. Whole new areas to learn about have opened up for me, and I'm excited to keep moving in this direction. I did some improv, I led some Open Space conversations (for which I was totally unprepared but loved it), I did a kick-ass presentation with a colleag

Monday - No meetings; worked on documentation backlog. It's going to get progressively quieter here as we head into the end of the year. Feeling glum and pessimistic. Tuesday- Reading Driving Fear out of the Workplace and Crucial Conversations , more or less at the same time, because flipping back and forth between them is proving interesting congruence. Everything I read keeps coming back to a very few core concepts. I feel like that is the space that I ought to be moving toward, but I'm not sure how to do that. Cleaned up my Outlook task list and did some desk housekeeping. I have a lot of printouts and sticky notes that have outlived their utility. Wednesday -  Feeling a bit less blue. More reading. Blogs for the "read more" list - fluidworking.com, happymelly.com. There are certainly a lot of people thinking hard about these things out there. Went back to one of my Web services books. 1/3 done with my Codeacademy.com Python intro class. Thursday - Monthly mee

It was a lovely long weekend. I wrote, did some knitting, went on a hike with the family, and ate a great deal, as one does. Monday - Hurry Slowly 04. I'm not about to go for any long ocean swims, er, ever, but it's interesting to think about what kind of risks I may be more likely to take, and how to prepare for them. Last day of the sprint. Three releases this week. *sigh* Studied Python (thanks CodeAcademy), wrote release notes, interviewed a tech writer candidate, plunged back into EDI document format hell. Tuesday -Sprint review went as well as it ever does. As usual, no customers showed, which resulted in some commentary about how we format the meeting and whether it is necessary at all. Given our upcoming reorg, the discussion seemed beside the point. This was probably the penultimate meeting for the current team structure; no one knows when or how the teams might end up being restructured -- let alone how the details will fall out -- but the idea is in the air that i