4/03/2009
For those who might have missed the chance to write up the details:
Posted in: ALT .NETFriday, 3 April 2009
Israel ALT .NET II was a Blast
Like the first one I had a great time in the second gathering of the Israeli Alt .NET group. No matter how I look at it the "Open Space" format along with the people involved have made this gathering one of the most enjoyable conventions I've been in a long time (actually since the previous one).
For those of you who have missed it
Here is the agenda of the day:
My only regret is that we didn't have more time to put in more sessions.
Posted in: ALT .NETTuesday, 24 March 2009
ScrumBut - No Release Planning
"Were doing Scrum-But ..."
The ScrumBut phenomena has started to appear more and more as scrum has started to take its hold in the industry. I want to add one ScrumBut i was in charge of and it went like this:
We were doing scrum but: We had no release planning.
At the time we were undergoing so many directional shifts that each time we tried to flesh out a release plan, it changed drastically causing any planning effort to fail. Also our acting PO wasn't involved enough, a fact which also contributed to to difficulty of achieving a stable enough release plan. So we went and continued without it.
And actually it wasn't a complete disaster, we achieved a very short sprint length of 1 week, we added to that various engineering practices like TDD, CI and Pair programming and we managed to maintain a constant development rhythm with good quality.
however we were missing several big things, in fact we completely gave up on any attempt to see and track the bigger goals. I wasn't able to predict anything beyond the end of the current sprint and the developers found it difficult to understand the "bigger" picture. Eli has described the problem:
So if the management has a goal: Close Sale with Customer [put huge customer], and to do this the R&D must implement the ABC feature. We might reach the end of the month without that feature being implemented and management won’t know about it.
The thing is, that what we were doing seriously lacking, and due to us changing the process and failing to do it properly we got the what can only be described as the logical result.
When you don't plan on the higher level (release), you cant project beyond the micro level (sprint). You don't measure overall progress, and you lose the ability to manage on that high level. Naturally you cant be sure when things will be done or when things are not going according to plan.
At Typemock the solution for this was to adapt an "integrity" based management approach, and so far it seems to be working for them. However what Eli reports as "The differences between Scrum and integrity" is actually based on a something which is Scrum based but is too lacking to represent actual Scrum done properly.
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Open Houses
So many announcements today.
Anyway next week Ill be giving two open houses:
The first will be at Sela University on the 23/3 and will deal with the trouble of planning and estimation in the software world. (As far as I know most of the places are taken, but if you're interested leave me a comment and I'll se what can be done)
The second one will happen at Haifa on the 25/3 show why Design For testability is not a prerequisite for doing TDD. (the slides for this can be found here.
Posted in: EventsALT.NET Israel - 2nd Gathering
Been some time since our previous encounter so we thought we might enjoy another meeting.
Anyway, we will meet on
April 2nd and 3rd, at Sela University.
Details are on the alt.net israel’s usergroup:
http://groups.google.com/group/altnetisrael/browse_thread/thread/4ab4329c4bdd8253 (hebrew)
I would like to thanks my associates at Sela making this possible.
Signup link will be published shortly.
Posted in: Events
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