I used to be Superman. I could do anything I wanted, and no one would tell me I’m wrong. For good reason: I usually wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t born Superman. I worked hard at it. I learned a lot. I was leading by example. And when I was the smartest guy around, who actually accomplished
Let’s say we’ve “conquered agile”, and the prophecy came true: we have a self-organizing team. How does leadership fit into this? What does a leader do in a self-organizing team? Influence. Leadership comes in many shapes and colors. There’ll be the technical leaders. The experts about technology and or process. There’ll be social-political leaders. We’ll
My natural habitat is an agile software development company. I usually meet with people who are already agile, or aspiring to become agile. And then there are other times, where the “real world” hits me on the head, saying I should leave my little pond for a while, and see what’s really out there. For
If you’ve read any basic agile stuff, you know that agile teams deliver value in a consistent frequency. The team works on what’s important first, giving the best value for money. When working in a consistent velocity, you can estimate very accurately when features are going to be delivered. Prepare yourself for a shock. It
A funny thing happened to me last week. As I was driving to work, I was listening to another brilliant podcast from Manager-Tools on Assumptive Goal Settings. The curious name (for me, at least) is actually something we’ve done before. AGS is about reaching a goal, when you don’t have a clue how to get
Let’s take a look at the agile manifesto. It starts with: “We are uncovering better ways of developingsoftware” Next are the values. I’m not going to bother with the “right” side, which is of course the “dark side”. On the left we have: Individuals and interactions Working software Customer collaboration Responding to change All this
Yesterday I went to Agile Tour Israel. At the end of the day I was surprised, I didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much. Once again, being pessimistic saved the day! The event organizers did all they could to push agile and show it as mainstream. Cynical as I am, I was surprised to see
After my last post, I got some feedback, that I didn’t really answer the question in the title. So I’m going to fix that. Roughly speaking, 10% of developers are doing unit testing today (Let’s call them group A). Some 15% have heard or tried (B), and the rest don’t even know it exists (C).
I’ve been following the “war on certifications” for a while. It’s not new, since scrum had certifications for many years now, and Microsoft adds fuel to the fire with the newly created “Certified scrum developer”.The latest from Uncle Bob’s R.E.A.L.I.T.Y show made me smile. And yes, if you thought I was going to oppose the
Is man destined to choose the quick and dirty road, throwing away long term benefits? While the answer is probably yes (we’re all lazy like that), two dissimilar events in the last week made me think – maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe we need to check how long term are we talking about.