Gathering worthwhile feedback

Tobias Mayer has got me (and I guess several other) thinking about the common feedback process used by trainers. While I think that there's much to learn from the general purpose form handed out at the end of a training, clearly doing it only at the end of a training session means you cant use it for improving during a lengthy course. Therefore I use two different techniques for gathering feedback during a course Course Retrospect this is actually quite simple and effective technique, towards the end of the second day. usually after I cover the sprint retrospect meeting. I conduct a short "retrospect" meeting with the aim of improving the actual course. My current favorite way is borrowed from Alistair Cockburn and we try to list out (together in an open discussion) the things which are:...

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Posted in: Agile practices,Course,Feedback,tips,tools

What have we learnt today (last day)

At the end of the last day of the course I've asked two different questions: What will be the easiest thing to implement at your company? What is probably the hardest thing to implement at your company? Here are the answers I've got (as is): The easiest thing Pair Programming usage of Task Board (General purpose) Stand up meetings Creation of product backlog Agile estimation Techniques using Pair Programming to help bring a new team member up to speed The Hardest thing Automated unit tests/TDD Division into Sprints (especially short sprints) Locating people for scrum roles and creating a self contained team XP Building a true self contained team. Pair Programming Again almost no overlap of the answers (other then a few saying TDD /AUT is...

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Posted in: Course,Feedback,Scrum

What have we learnt today/ (day 2)

On the second day I’ve added two more questions to the list: What will be the be the most valuable thing to you? What is the most useless thing you have heard so far? Here are the answers I've got (again not edited): The Most Surprising A typical programmer manages 4-5 hours of ideal work per day. The actual Scrum Master role in a Scrum process. No hard delivery target (just an estimation), we commit Priority Poker. using Agile has brought companies to a defect rate of 1 per quarter. that sprints can be 1 week long including planning. that people can be involved/do tasks which are not in their main expertise area. (a QA helping a developer to estimate). The most controversial the SM doesn’t need to be a team leader. The option for terminating...

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Posted in: Course,Feedback,Scrum

Is Scrum good for me?

The second question i get form most people (after "Does it actually work?") is does the Scrum process good for me? Mike Cohn has showed a great technique for evaluation which of the processes out there is most suitable for your project. you can find the details he...

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Posted in: Scrum,tips

What have we learnt today?

I've started today another round of the Practical Scrum Course. At the end of the first day I search for some feedback in the form of two questions I ask: 1) What was the most surprising thing you have heard today? 2) What is the most controversial thing you have heard today? here are the answers I've got (not edited): The Most Surprising No true need for comprehensive documentation. Estimations are done in units which does not represent time. "Done" should be defined, sounds trivial but when one think of it ... Agile can works for large groups. Waterfall was presented as an example for a flawed process. Scrum can be an appropriate process for most projects (90%) Agile and Scrum, are established and well defined methodologies. No Clear definition of who is the...

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Posted in: Course,Feedback,Scrum

More Information about C.R.A.P

More details about the usage of C.R.A.P and what C.R.A.P is all about can be found in the following links: Metrics of Moment Clean Code and Battle Scarred Architecture Alberto Savoia talks shop about C.R.A.P....

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Posted in: Crap4Net,tools

Crap4Net

Measuring code quality is a tricky business at best. More then a few attempts has been made over the years however still a single solution has yet to emerge. The C.R.A.P metric has been born a few years ago and tries to combine code complexity along with Code coverage to indicate (to some extent) the quality of a given piece of code. There’s much more to say about the C.R.A.P metric which ill leave for the experts . I will say however that more information can be gathered in the Crap4J website. Over the last weeks I have been working on creating the Crap$Net project. The Idea is to bring the C.R.a.P metric into the world of .NET development by supporting the various tools used in this world. I am happy to say I managed to wrap this effort into an open source project which was published...

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Posted in: Crap4Net,Metrics,Quality,tools,Unit Tests

Iteration Zero – using Testify

One approach when starting out a new project is to dedicate the first sprint/iteration in order to build in the framework for the development process. that is building in all the stuff which will be required during the time life of the product. things life setting up the build server, preparing the installer establishing the framework for unit and acceptance testing. in short all the technical details an agile development environment expect to just be there. Today I managed to go into Mike Scott session in which he demonstrated his very nice tool called “Testify”. I don't want to go into all the details since it appears that just today Mike has finished to ‘open source’ the tool. (can be found here). I would however say that during the short time in the session (about an hour), Mike has...

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Posted in: Agile practices,Conferences,TDD,tools

Agile Testing Days - ATDD

I went to Berlin for the Agile Testing Days Conference. I’ve join Elisabteth Hendrikson tutorial about ATDD, while is full day tutorial about the basic concepts and technique of doing ATDD. fro me this is a great opportunity to augment my knowledge about best practices tools and idea of how to improve my ATDD skills. In the first part what really stood out for me is the time we spent about the various silos existing in a typical development environment. Specifically what i liked best is the emphasis Elisabeth puts about the need to break up those silos focusing on only establishing a clear separation between the role of deciding the “What” and the role of building the “How”. she quoted Tobias Mayer which defines in this post these roles as “The What voice” and “The How Tribe”...

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Posted in: ATDD,Conferences