InfoQ

News

Mindfulness and Agile Teams

Posted by Amr Elssamadisy on Nov 16, 2009

Community
Agile
Topics
Agile Techniques

At Oredev 2009 Marc Lesser gave a keynote titled "accomplishing more by doing less".  Although not directly about Agile development, the topic will resonate with many Agile practitioners and is related to the success of self organizing teams.  Specifically, Marc advised us to do less of:

  1. Fear
  2. Assumptions
  3. Distractions
  4. Resistance
  5. Busyness

Most, if not all, of these recommendations fits in with Agile in many ways.  Less fear relates to the "courage" value in XP.  Fewer assumptions matches the experimentation that we find in emperical methods.  Fewer distractions can be found in many Agile teams as they focus on delivering customer value and having self organizing teams focused on one project at a time.  And so on...

This reporter attended the keynote and felt that this presentation is valuable enough for Agile practitioners to watch, reflect upon, and share.

 

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

No comments

Watch Thread Reply

Educational Content

Brian Marick on 4 Challenges and 5 Guiding Values of Agile Software Development

Brian Marick takes us through a quick tour of the most important values and challenges to adopting Agile successfully (they aren't the typical challenges and values we hear in the community).

Are You a Software Architect?

The line between development and architecture is tricky. Does it exist at all? Is an ivory tower actually needed? There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from developer to architect?

Agile – A Way of Life and Pragmatic Use of Authority

The word 'authority' sometimes produces an allergic response in hard-line agilists. Freedom and authority – both are bad if misused and both are good if used in right spirit for a noble cause.

Getting Started with Grails, Second Edition

"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?

Using ITIL V3 as a Foundation for SOA Governance

Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted towards service-orientation.

Adrian Colyer on AspectJ, tc Server and dm Server

SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer discusses AspectJ, SpringSource's dm Server and tc Server products, OSGi and Scrum.

Adam Wiggins on Heroku

Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about Rails, Background Jobs, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.

SOA as an Architectural Pattern: Best Practices in Software Architecture

For Grady Booch the foundation of a good architecture is patterns, SOA being just one of many patterns. In this Second Life presentation, Booch attempts to bring more clarity on what architecture is.