http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1wKO3rID9g

There isn’t a team lead in Agile who hasn’t thought atleast half of this

Along with 2 colleagues we will be presenting 3 different attemps at adopting and using Agile techniques in the same company

“Your software development projects can benefit from Agile – assuming it’s really what’s used. Learn about the sins that have been committed in the name of “Agile.” With input from two of the Agile manifesto signatories.”

However he does go on to show in the article how Agile can be used in enhance user experience by not approaching agile in a narrow fashion, but open it up to embrace usability testing and end user involvement in design.

This follows on from my previous post that too many people are being churned out of CSM courses with effectively 2 days Agile training and then trying to apply this skill on major projects. Therefore anything not taught on the course is not applied because it was not on the course, unfortunately good development leads are not created then are forged out of years and years working on successful and not so successful projects. Just as their software grows, as does their understanding of what it takes to build great software.

I know so many good agile dev leads that either don’t have CSM or have because their company paid for it, but never needed to go on it in the first place. They are good because they have always been good and will continue to be pragmatic and agile in their adoption of all that is good in agile itself

I’ve always been trouble by the value of CSM certification, not because of the course per say, but the fact everyone who turns up for the course is awarded it, and the the certification is being used by people to suggest that are experienced at running Scrum projects.

However the big players in Scrum are starting to take notice and are discussing the need for a test at the end which would ensure that every candidate has the required level of understanding of Scrum before they can use the CSM certification

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While a brief article it does touch on one or two of the really key problems facing agile scaling; how to size and split teams into management units. As Ambler says “The architecture should be a system of subsystems.” and therefore according to Ambler “the structure of the teams should be aligned with the architecture, and ideally the sub-team members should be co-located.”

I have to admit that I always saw greater perceived value in creating teams that attack vertical slices through the architecture, ultimately these teams deliver end to end stories, and this worked extremely well on a major project I did for AOL. However at one of my current clients, this is just not feasible at this stage, the political makeup of the organisation and the inherent compartmentalization of existing teams, mean that its has been a major ( and ultimately impossible ) struggle to get a manager ( who once controlled his whole team ) to seed various functional teams with one or 2 of his assigned developers. We have therefore grown into a suite of teams split by architecture. Time will tell if this will actually work

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If you grew up with computer companies in the 80′s, and remember MS-DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase, Ashton Tate, or just want to know why Microsoft got big and Borland suck then this is the book for you.

The author’s personal experience on WordStar is used to dissect many other of the software industries great marketing fowl-ups. If you are involved in writing or producing software products you have to read this book and make sure you don’t make the mistakes he describe, such as Wordstar trying to sell 2 competing products, yes thats right, 2 word processors, both different, both word processors. You laugh now, but they really did try and do it, and thats why Wordstar doesn’t exist and we have to use Word

I was on the OS/2 team in the late 80s and it was light a trip back to memory lane as I watched IBM become totally shafted by Microsoft, and do nothing about it because it thought it was better than Microsoft. lol, how we laugh now…….