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Tips from a Top Sports Team Coach

In team sport, as in software development, the team factor is crucial for success. In fact, team sport shows many inspiring parallels to software development. This article outlines 9 essential principles top-coach Marc Lammers discovered while building the world’s best field hockey team, and maps them to software development practices

Urs Peter
on Aug 20, 2008
Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility

Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.

Craig Larman Bas Vodde
on Jul 15, 2008
Using Numbers to Communicate - in the Spirit of Agile

It's an old story. Techies cave in to the business guys because they don't know how to push back. The problem? Developers use numbers primarily for computation, but the business uses numbers to make decisions. In this story the "Spirit of Agile" encourages a developer to turn non-computational problems and issues into number language.

Barbara Chauvin Linda Rising
on Jun 13, 2008
The Agile Coach, from A to Z

Agile approaches introduce a new leadership role, the "Agile Coach," which is not familiar from traditional methodologies. What's so important about this role? Is it just a new name for an old role? Why does Monster.com list 54 positions with this title? Patrick Kua of ThoughtWorks lists 26 useful answers to this question, in the form of an A-to-Z primer.

Patrick Kua
on May 22, 2008
Culture & Methods

Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through

Since Linus Torvalds presentation at Google about git in May 2007, the adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems has been constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of Distributed Version Control, see when to use it, why it can be better, and have a look at three actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar.

Sebastien Auvray
on May 07, 2008
Software Development Lessons Learned from Poker

There is no silver bullet. We know it, but don't act like it. Your language, tool or process is better, right? Jay Fields says: "It depends". The right choices varies with context, people, and more. This article touches upon how a lot of things must impact a choice; learning culture, skill levels, teamwork, incomplete information, metrics - and context.

Jay Fields
on Apr 26, 2008
Development

Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon London 2008

This article presents the main takeway points as seen by the many attendees who blogged about QCon. Comments are organized by tracks and sessions: Keynotes, Architectures you've always wondered about, The Cloud as the New Middleware Platform, SOA, REST and the Web, Evolving Java, Banking, Agile in Practice, Programming Languages of Tomorrow, Effective Design, .NET, The Rise of Ruby.

Ryan Slobojan
on Apr 09, 2008
Help Your Teams Trade Cubicles for Communication Skills

The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Mar 24, 2008
Better Best Practices

Organizations often introduce Best Practices as part of a change program or quality initiative. These can take a number of forms, from cheat sheets to full-blown consultant-led methodologies, complete with the requisite auditing and accreditation. In this article, Dan North shows how best practices can not only fail to help, but even have a severe negative impact on your top performers.

Dan North
on Mar 11, 2008
Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive

The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is a practice used by many teams as part of their continuous improvement cycle. As outlined in Norm Kerth's book, it is intended to foster the deep learning that is the heart of a retrospective. This article is an enlightening conversation, captured by Linda Rising, between senior practitioners on the benefits and the challenges of using this practice.

Linda Rising
on Feb 14, 2008
The "Consulting" Contract

Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.

Michael K. Spayd
on Dec 30, 2007
Don't Let Miscommunication Spiral Out Of Control

We miscommunicate every day, with results ranging from trivial to catastrophic. In this seasonally themed article, J. B. Rainsberger shares one of his secret weapons - the Satir Communication Model. It's a thinking tool to help us analyze troubling conversations, and to more deeply understand the people around us, building trust, the first step towards building an effective team.

Joe Rainsberger
on Dec 23, 2007

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