We are just a few days after the amazing experience that was ALE 2013. I enjoyed being for three days in a large family of European Agile and Lean practitioners, and I learned a lot from the conference. I’ve seen many enthusiastic blog posts after the event, and I’m glad that it was so much learning happened. But this blog post will not be another one praising the experience. Instead...
I’ve recently commented on a conversation in the Agile Coaching group on LinkedIn. I’m reproducing my comment here because it relates with a misconception that I see often.
The question it started from was, in my words, “Is a training enough to change the way a department works?”. My answer is below.
Back in the 1980s a few developers realized that common patterns appear in the code everybody was writing. They documented them in 1995 a famous book called “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. Today, many software teams have a guideline stating they must use design patterns. In early 1990s, one former US AirForce pilot became Chief Engineer of a software...
Romanians have a class of jokes called “Radio Yerevan” jokes. My favourite one is: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery? A: In principle yes, but: it wasn’t Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; it was not a car but a bicycle; he didn’t win it, but it was stolen from him...
The general rule for prioritizing the backlog is that you do it based on business value. From the business perspective, this makes a lot of sense: you maximize the ROI by doing first the things that create the most value in the context of your product, be it monetary or non-monetary (e.g. number of visitors on the website, number of registered users etc). You define the goals during the release...