What's the best way to use tools like continuous integration or 6th Sensor Analytics? Should we see a problem and hit developers over the head? Scream and run around? Or force developers to follow a rigid set of steps to "guarantee" success? (Herd those cats!)
Much of Agile is about being flexible. It's about getting feedback and adjusting your daily practices to match. This is why so many people have rejected the idea of universal best practices completely.
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Last Friday we posted a 3 new reports for your enjoyment: Status Report, Churn Trends, and Flow time audit.
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For this interview we've got Ken Pugh talking about what he thinks you should be doing over the next year and his favorite career tip. Ken's video is a bit shorter than the Scott Davis post, but he's got some interesting insights on becoming a domain expert.
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Real developers write code — not status reports.
I Need It
There are typically 2 reasons for needing status reports: 1) collaboration and 2) monitoring.
Agile shops recommend status reports for the first reason. Software development is a team sport. Rarely do individuals work in a vacuum, so regular status is important to address dependencies, remove blocks, and ensure folks don’t step on each other’s toes. The manager may collect reports for logistical reasons, but the reports aren’t for managers — they are for the team.
Monitoring is more common in consulting arrangements. Work is being done on someone else’s behalf and that person wants to monitor the activities. Very simply they want to ensure they getting what they are paying for. Every once in a while you read about dysfunctional uses of status reports. This “use case” is commonly the scenario where that’s found. The reason is that people often don’t care until there is a problem. Then the reports are reviewed to help understand where things went wrong.
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This is the first post in a series of video interviews with software development industry notables.
I recently had a chance to sit down with Scott Davis and discuss where he sees our industry going this year. He also has some sound advice for any ambitious developer planning their next career move. And for those of you that don’t know Scott, he is a fellow No Fluff, Just Stuff speaker and author of several books including Groovy Recipes and GIS for Web Developers.
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Our most popular chart is our burn up. It's a great way to get a handle on several facets of your project at a glance. I like the way Allister Cockburn describes them in this article.
Burn charts have become a favorite way to give visibility into a project's progress. They are extremely simple and astonishingly powerful. They reveal the strategy being used, show the progress made against predictions, and open the door to discussions about how best to proceed, including the difficult discussions about whether to cut scope or extend the schedule. They have a natural mapping to the earned value charts used in military/government projects. They should part of your standard bag of tricks for project planning and reporting.
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Introducing change to an organization can be difficult and there are dozens of things that can go wrong. John Maxwell's great book 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership has a set of steps that I've found very helpful.
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