Chris talks about his work on applying real options on agile projects http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=121123. He also talks about our work on Business Value.
I was explaining the ideas behind burndown charts today. Tim Mackinnon et al wrote a great paper for the Agile Development Conference that I wanted to show them. I really like their simple approach. Sadly the conference’s web site is not longer around.
Fortunately Tim has a copy on his web site
http://www.macta.f2s.com/Thoughts/planning.html
A more indepth look at burn down charts can be found on Alistair Cockburn’s site:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Earned-value_and_burn_charts
I will have to see if I can recover the other great papers from this conference. It would be a real shame to loose them.
Alistair Cockburn’s blog is back. Yippie. It’s not a traditional blog, it’s actually using a wiki that he’s using as a blog! Still, it has lots of strange and interesting stuff.
I spotted this on information aesthetics. It’s a disk drive that changes shape to show how insync a data backup is with it’s source. What a great idea.
Here is a nice podcast from Jason Fried from 37Signals.com
He had an interesting spin on co-location. I always thought distance hurts, and having everyone working together in the same location was critical. Jason argues that if you can’t explain a design or a business strategy using IM or Skipe then it’s too complicated and you should choose something simpler. This made me re-think my views on this.
It’s a really interesting point of view. I have been mulling this over in my mind for a few days now. I wonder what impact people’s learning style has on this? I’m very visual, I really like being able to jump up and draw pictures with collegues around a white board. I wonder if Jason is more of a words person?
Write the test so it reads like a requirement specification and not a test
I was trying to explain a FIT test to a new colleage. It soon became clear that it had been written as a test. It didn’t convey the intent of what was required. Nor did it communicate why it did what it did. There was a lot of tacit knowlege in my explanation of what was going on. It obvioulsy failed to communicate the requirements. It did, however, test that a particular feature of the system worked! So, what is the purpose of a FIT test?
Brian Marick makes the distinction between Business Facing tests and Technology Facing tests.
A business-facing test is one you could describe to a business expert in terms that would (or should) interest her. If you were talking on the phone and wanted to describe what questions the test answers, you would use words drawn from the business domain: “If you withdraw more money than you have in your account, does the system automatically extend you a loan for the difference?”
A technology-facing test is one you describe with words drawn from the domain of the programmers: “Different browsers implement Javascript differently, so we test whether our product works with the most important ones.” Or: “
PersistentUser#deleteshould not complain if the user record doesn’t exist.”
The FIT tests should be business facing, they are a communication tool with the added benefit being executable. FIT tests should explain the requirements so that people know what the system does. The collection of FIT tests forms an executable requirement specification. They should not really be called tests at all!
Our FIT test was clearly written from a developer’s point of view. It was technology facing. Fit is probably the wrong tool for technology facing tests. I would much rather write these in a more developer friendly tool such as Java or ruby.
Norm Kerth gave a great talk on retrospectives at SPA2006.
I’ve been a fan of retrospectives for a long time. The interesting thing for me was Norm’s description of Kick-Off Retrospectives.
I typically do this when teams are formed for a specific project (and don’t stay together once it has been completed). They basically run a retrospective to set the scene for how the team wants to operate.
The subtlety I had missed is that you can use the future perfect tense when asking the questions. You can ask people to imagine that this is the retrospective at the end of the project and ask them “What was so good about this project that you would like to repeat on future projects?” This sets the scene for how the team want to operate.
While on the subject of retrospectives, here is an interesting article by Ester Derby on keeping retrospectives fresh
Steve Freeman and I are thinking of using this video clip to introduce the ProductBox innovation game at SPA2006
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298&q=microsoft+ipod
We’re running our Getting to know your customer session on wednesday morning (29th March).
This is a nice story of a team using agile development techniques. They even have pictures of the work environment…
http://www.gamesfromwithin.com/articles/0602/000104.html
Very nice.
