Are We Agile?

i was just thinking about how far my work dev team has to go before we can really call ourselves "agile".

we've started sprinting and having planning meetings and product reviews based on a two week sprint length, i've put our backlog onto index cards as my previous combo of TeamFoundationServer/Excel plugin took too long to maintain, AND was really hard to get the user/product owners (yes multiple, i know) to prioritise, i took over one of our large whiteboards and drew up a cardwall, with lanes of 

• new
• to be estimated
• ready for dev
• in dev --each dev/dba has their own column
• dev done
• testing
• testing done
• problems

tonight is the end of sprint number something and i've gradually been incorporating more artifacts with each sprint. as i'm learning about the process i'm finding that the more i read about agile/scrum processes, i'm not going more than half a day without having a lightbulb moment. 

tomorrow i'll be doing the sprint review a bit different than last time. I normally sit at a large meeting table in front of my laptop and projector and drive my way through the program, discussing items in the backlog and our time estimates. this time i'll still have the laptop and projector demoing the application, but i'm bringing along all the index/story cards and getting the users to physically move the remaining index cards into an order. which i'm really excited about.

also an advantage of the card wall is that i can see what has been done in the last sprint. now the agilers will notice my use of the word 'done'. our current 'done' is not good enough. for example this fortnight, there was a card in the dev done lane, i started to test it, and realised that it wasn't actually done, not even 50%, through the use of this i'm hoping to teach myself and the team what 'done' actually means. rather than sit down and sprout about how we need to come up with a definition of done straight away, i'm hoping to teach the concept over time. don't want to scare the team off it.

i realised after googling "am i agile", and came across this article , and realised it doesn't matter, just that i'm am aware and making improvements.

Explaining To Stakeholders how Agile will help

As a part of my recent CSM course, i have encountered a great term for dealing with huge projects.

 

Sashimi slicing.... like thinly cut sushi. geoff burns article  mark monster article also rowan bunnings article about sashimi smells (!)

but i just finished reading this article by Mike Griffiths

A great explanation with diagrams of why you are better off with your agile team all on the same page, without your BA running ahead with the customer to get through the product backlog, meaning that when your dev and QA team run into problems with what they've received, the customer and BA don't have to backtrack or redo the work they've already done.

also some ideas about getting your velocity sorted out and orientating your team all in the same direction.

the things i managed to gleam out of this article are kind of missing the original point about managing velocity fluctuations. i suppose as i'm an agile beginner these sorts of things will become more visible to me as i get some more scrum mastering time under my belt

Welcome

 Gday interwebs.

im going to be using this to track and share my thoughts on anything that i choose.

music, programming, marriage, films, and other generally nerdy crap.

the title of the blog is from meshuggahs 2008 album obZen and perfectly sums up how i feel doing what i've been doing for the last couple of years. this is the first verse of that song, youtube 

Listen to the hidden tune

- The essence of lies in notes defined

As we dance to the dissonant sway

- The choreography refined

Will subdued and shackled

Reason washed aside

Pledging our love to the chains

Our ignorance ever-amplified

i live in blacktown, which is west of sydney, nsw in australia with my wife Felicity (fliss), dog Scruffy and a horde of neighbourhood stray cats.

we got married in October 2008 up in the blue mountains, and i'm amazed how much different life has been since. 

we have a small business together called "Badges Of Honour" , it's fliss who does all the hard yards for it. we used to spend 1 weekend a month sitting in a shopping centre, making badges on the spot, with my laptop, photoshop, scanner, laser printer, and all the badge making equipment. i used to call it extreme photoshop. grab an image, scan it, put it in the badge template (a complicated and precise circle) and then add text and other crap, all while the customer is looking over your shoulder trying to leave and get the rest of their shopping done.

we also used to go to music festivals and do the same thing, that was heaps of fun. but we don't do it anymore, its too much hassle lugging the gear around. i'd probably do it if we made more doing it. when it's not fun, it doesn't have any appeal.

my day job involves me working for a charity in sydney programming c#/asp.net applications for internal use, which is challenging and inspiring. i've been there for nearly six years, (since april 2003), i started off as a casual doing filing in the payroll office. That was six months after i joined descend (thrash metal) so my life involved band practice and gigging and copious amounts of indulgence. I wasn't looking for anything that involved thinking as my brain didn't have a chance to recuperate during the week. but i hung around enough and learnt about payroll so they gave me a job. in my time there i became an self proclaimed excel expert, managed to write a payroll application that did timesheet interpretation to the three different awards that i looked after. anyway. so around that time, i realised i wasn't going anywhere and started to look for another job. i grabbed a VB.net book from a book store and started to work my way through it, nothing ground breaking, just catching up on the basics. 

i got approached by the manager of our Business Systems group for a testing position that became available, that was in August 2006. Then i became a Certified Software Testing Professional. Eventually, i picked up enough knowledge working in the C# domain, that i am now a Developer/Analyst. Got that position through my knowledge of the companies domain and my persistence that i can improve the perception of our department.

i spend most of my spare time reading about programming topics that i have no idea about so i can learn. 

just like in real life id rather spend time reading books and the webs, than socialise, kind of like i'm hardly ever on facebook anymore, just sick of the crap and the people. apologies to my close friends.

i've been absorbing agile/XP/scrum and other programming methodologies trying to work out how to work better and more efficiently. I'm a recent CSM (Certified Scrum Master, as of last Friday!) I've been trying to get our team into it, to work efficently and actually deliver software, sometimes feels like we do nothing even though we are working our arses off. the task of implenting it has recently been given to me, which i'm stoked about. We had a previous team leader who was hired and given the task, but they failed epically and got laid off.... something to do with lack of skill and not delivering any code in the 4 months they were there. ha!.

so last week i put all our work remaining on index cards and made a card wall with heaps of lanes on our mutual whiteboard, i'll be talking more about this. i learnt heaps in the CSM course about tracking work visually and what details need to be captured.

as always, what started off as a quick dump of what i'm thinking. turns into an autobiography of my life story. which is what i'm hoping for.

retrospective

• smaller chunks of story
• focused

/retrospective