To finalize the series on stress and agile, let’s talk about what we can do to lower distress. But who are “we”? Leaders and managers are responsible and accountable for creating a safe work environment, that allows individuals to feel respected and motivated. We should make it safe to discuss the messy stuff. It maybe
Last time we talked about eustress (the good kind of stress) and distress (the bad kind). How does one turn into another? And what can we do to stay on the light side, rather than turn to the dark side? The stress we feel is in our head. We translate how we see the environment around
“Me, and everyone I know who started doing agile, are stressed”. If you ask around, people are feeling a bit more stressed than before the big agile arrived. Why is that, and is good, bad or ugly? Now, where is this stress coming from in agile teams? In the good ol’ days of waterfall,
Recently, I’ve done a management workshop on TDD. The audience was developmenet managers and team leads. Most of them did not know TDD. (Actually, most thought they knew what TDD was. But that’s a completely unrelated story.) During my session, I’ve walked them through an example (from Star Wars) and showed the thinking behind it,
As a developer/tester I want to understand the user story So I can build/test it correctly. Mind you, this is a terrible user story. What does “understand” mean? And what is the acceptance criteria for “build it correctly”? Life is messy, and the “As a…” template doesn’t always help. You can over-cram it to make
WHAT A RUSH! Still thinking about the awesome conference. But that’s for a separate post. For now, here are the slides for my BDD/TDD Star Wars talk.
This is the 2nd part in the Rebooting ALM series. Check out the first part “Evolution“, to see how we got here. (See what I did?). The first tool, I think, that started the ALM tool chain, was source control. There were compilers, and some IDEs, but source control systems were solutions for team-work. If
What is safety? It is setting the environment in order to try new things, without the fear of the consequences of failure. When we have confidence, we can try new things. Some of them succeed. Some fail, and we learn from them. Safety allows us to try. With confidence, we can go out of our comfort zone, and be
The term “technical debt” was first introduced by Ward Cunningham as a metaphor. It was in the early 90s, when the rift between developers and business people was growing wide. The business people would urge developers do release untested, ugly code. The developers tried to explain why this was a bad mistake. (Not like today,
Had a great time in Edinburgh, and looking forward to getting back next year. Here are the slides.