Pols Consulting » Training

Luke Hohmann Is Playing Innovation Games at XTC

andy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:30:17 +0000

Luke Hohmann is in London and has agreed to come along to XTC on the 17th November to describe and play some of his Innovation Games.

I became hooked on Innovation Games when I read an early draft of Luke’s book. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. I’ve found using Innovation Games really helps with situations like this. Luke has lots of practical ideas for Agile Teams.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 17th Nov at Zuhlke Engineering‘s offices (43 Whitfield Street, London W1T 4HD).

It’s free, but please signup on the XTC website so we get an idea of numbers.

Many thanks to Luke for doing this and Keith Braithwaite for kindly offerring the use of the Zulke offices to run this session (knowing Luke, there will be lots of noisy audience participation so our usual pub venue wouldn’t work too well).

The bad sell

andy — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:18:57 +0000

I have always been a fan of teams sharing experience and knowledge within a company. It’s a great way to learn new techniques, find our how people have solved similar problems and discover who’s doing cool things in your organisation.

Today I witnessed a session on agile software testing that made be rethink this.

The key problem was that the person had been told to do it – it was not something he volunteered to do. He had no passion about the subject.

He started berating the audience for producing “crap”. Not the best technique for wining people over to your point of view!

It also appeared that he didn’t have much experience in using test driven development techniques (as he had some rather strange viewpoints).

Perhaps this is an indication of the corporate culture?

Slides and photos from SPA2006

andy — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:36:42 +0000

Here are the slides and some photos of the session Steve Freeman and I ran at SPA about Innovation Games and sense making.

Agile Summer School: 8-12 August, London, UK

andy — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:20:59 +0000

Rachel Davies, Steve Freeman, Duncan Pierce and I are running an Agile Summer school on the 18-12 august.

Day 1: Intro to programming with XP version 2

Day 2: Incremental Design with Mock Objects

Day 3: Putting XP into practice with RoboCode

Day 4: Acceptance Testing with Fit and Fit Library

Day 5: Automation of Builds and Deployment

Each day is run using XP cycles with Planning Games, Stand-ups and Pair Programming. Workshops are followed by a clinic session that you can bring your coding problems along to for advice on resolving them.

More information can be found at http://www.AgileAcademy.net/summer/