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Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback
On Monday at the first day of Agile 2009 Liz Keogh ran a workshop and Effective Feedback.
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Models of Apprenticeship
Uncle Bob Martin recently wrote about his experience with apprentices and what he considers key to progressing from apprentice to journeyman. He describes two hypothetical apprentices: Sam, a developer who has apprenticed with the same master and had the same year fifteen years in a row. Jasmine has changed jobs (and therefore masters) a number of times - growing her skills along the way.
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Rebooting Computing Summit 2009: Computing is Not Dead
Rebooting Computing Summit 2009 concluded recently and had over 250 people representing industry, practitioners, and academia convene to discuss how to 'reboot' the computer science field, since reports show that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001.
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Questioning Servant Leadership
Is the role of an agile manager only that of servant leader? Should they ever use traditional command and control tools? Should the agile manager ever wield authority and make demands of the team? Should they ever make changes in the membership?
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Presentation: Do The Hustle
In this presentation at RubyFringe, Obie Fernandez shares his experience selling consulting services for both Thoughtworks and Hashrocket and gives advice on how developers/consultants can deal with clients by setting minimal requirements, saying "No" and how to choose hourly rates and much more.
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Presentation: Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep
In this presentation made during QCon London 2007, Dave Thomas talks about expanding people's expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them uniformly as they had the same amount of knowledge and level of experience.
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Castle Project Founder Joins Microsoft
The founder of the Castle Project, Hamilton Verissimo de Oliveira, has decided to join Microsoft as Project Manager of the MEF team according to his blog. Castle is a .NET open source project intended to help enterprise and web development.
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Death of Hybrid Camry Chief Engineer is Ruled Overwork
Last month the Japanese labor board ruled that the death of the Chief Engineer on the Camry Hybrid project was ‘karoshi’ (death by over work). This story raised a number of interesting issues about what we can learn from Toyota, sustainable effort and why we develop software.
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Seniority, Respect, Authority and an Agile Team
Senior members, who have been working in traditional teams, can face issues related to respect and authority when they come to an Agile team. An interesting discussion on Scrum Development group and Agile India group tries to uncover answers that Agile might have for the situation.
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Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence - A New SEI Paper
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) recently published a paper entitled "Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence", which looks at using four models of human behaviour to help assess and improve software architecture competence.
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What is the Role of a Manager in an Agile Organization?
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
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Distributing Bonus to Agile Teams is Like Playing with Dynamite
Everyone is excited when bonus is declared. However, for Agile teams it could eventually become a make-or-break situation. The general consensus is that distributing bonus should be a 'well thought-out' strategy there is no 'one size fits all' here. In an interesting discussion on the Lean Development group, people share their thoughts to find the best way.
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Apple Manager Writes "Managing Humans" to Help Techies
It’s Michael Lopp’s belief that developers are trained to manage bits well, but not humans. When developers are promoted to managers much harm can be inflicted. Michael uses stories and humour to warn us of the many perils of management and how to navigate around them.
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How To Survive in a Turbulent Job Market
Steven Haines usually spends his time writing about new Java technologies that can help developers in their jobs, however, this week he has turned his attention to those technologies that can help you find that next job.
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Kent Beck: Be Yourself - Create More Value
Recent discussions on the extremeprogramming list keep returning to "telling the truth". Why do we bite off more than we can chew? Why the overtime heroics? Kent Beck's one-hour talk "Ease at Work" explored how to get off what he called the "genius-shithead rollercoaster" and just be yourself at work. Question: Would you rather spend energy on maintaining an image, or doing more cool stuff?