Valtech now have a blog that aggregates from my own blog and those of a number of colleagues.
There are some smart guys on there and more have promised to contribute so I suggest you take a look and stay in touch as more consultants are added.
As the closing date for proposals approaches I’d be delighted to receive any comments on my submission.
Real agile adoption – lessons learnt
Comments should be posted on the Agile 2009 conference site.
I’ve been trying to get organised this week. In particular I’m trying to manage my network of contacts.
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I am pleased to be able to announce the creation of a consulting organisation called Principle7. This small group of consultants including myself will be specialising in training and coaching in agile processes and engineering practices.
In naming the company we have tried to draw attention to the 7 driving principles of lean software development. These provide a backdrop on which we can build agile processes such as SCRUM and practices such as test driven development and refactoring.
For more information about the new company please check out www.principle7.co.uk although I must emphasise that at present the site is under constant change.
Run by Kevin Rutherford this session was based on the question, is it appropriate to transfer the concept of jidoka from the assembly line to software development?
Question like this come up fairly regularly in discussions about lean software development. Lean manufacturing is a set of principles pioneered by Toyota; this includes the minimising of waste, pull rather than push manufacturing and time boxing of when to make decisions. While lean has worked extremely well in manufacturing there is always someone willing to point out the differences between manufacturing and product development.
This session, delivered by myself & Mark Fish, was based on training courses we have both delivered for a variety of clients. We have both seen use cases applied inappropriately or poorly. Also we have identified areas that cause difficulties in many situations. We hoped to highlight these areas and encourage a pragmatic approach to use-case development.
My congratulations to the organisers of the 2006 Software Practice Advancement conference. This was my first SPA / OT and was both well organised and extremely enjoyable.
The conference sessions I attended were universally interesting and of a high standard. However, of even greater value to me was the attitude of a free sharing of thoughts and experiences shown by all.
Over the next few days I will be posting comments on all of the sessions I attended. I hop someone will find them of interest.
In a little over a week myself and a colleague (Mark Fish) will be delivering a workshop at SPA 2006.
In the workshop we will show how we approach eliciting use cases by discovering the stakeholders of a system. From here we cover techniques for authoring use cases in a robust yet readable style.
This first part of the workshop will be followed by an open, led discussion regarding the appropriate uses of use-cases in a agile software development environment. While use-cases are a little out of fashion in the “user story” led world I intend to show when and where the investment in robust use cases is appropriate.
Welcome, this is my second attempt at kicking off a blog. The first died a slow and painful death due to a lack of content.
I’ve started again now as quite alot is going on that I would like to share. You can look forward to comments from scrum master certification training and SPA 2006 followed by more agile stuff from the agile north group.
In July I was lucky enough to get to an agile event arranged by exoftware. The event hosted in London was my first opportunity to hear two very significant players in the agile movement speak.
The first speaker was Kent Beck talking about test driven development and a concept that he termed software health. As a software engineer first and formost I am particularly interest in any approach that claims to improve quality. Kent was claiming more that this.
The term software health covered, in addition to quality, attributes such as flexibility to change, resiliance against regression and maintainability.
The second speaker was Mary Poppendiek. This was my first exposure to “Lean” thinking. Lean seems to me to underpin agile. Lean is a set of guiding principles that originated in the late 1970’s in the development of the Toyota Production System. Since then the same ideas have been rolled into many manufacturing businesses and also other areas such as logistics. Mary has taken these ideals and applied a software spin. After hearing what Mary had to say I went and bought her book and would recommend it to anyone interested in agile.
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Managing the design factory – A product developers toolkit by Donald G Reinertsen
