Agile YOW! Night Melbourne - Dave Thomas - Sept 2013
Published on September 11, 2013
There seem to be more events not running free catering, is this due to a lack of sponsors or a change to methodology? A thought to ponder on…
This was what Dave called an “unplugged event” that contained some home truths from teams and businesses, so with respect for Dave, I will leave them out. I like his rawness. What follows is basically a list of tips I collected throughout the presentation:
- How to convince a business to go agile without implying it just means cheaper and faster.
- With many large product companies agile is something they’re trying, not a way of life. It’s hard on leaders and hard to sustain.
- Identify who can say yes and no to requirements and who can make timely decisions that may be wrong.
- Respect remote teams, treat them as part of yours and get to know them.
- Have specialists, but not people who think they are special and ruin a group dynamic.
- Technical ladders are needed to allow due progression of tech folks without losing them to management.
- Encourage staff to come to events and learn.
- Have a product culture. Continuous improvement instead of quickly out the door.
- Are they up for a true agile, continual integration culture, it’s not just putting teams in scrum.
- Put everything in the backlog to feed all other systems.
- Let product owners worry about big picture and everyone else worry about their areas.
- If there are no acceptance criteria, tear up the story card. How can you measure it?
- Envision your projects fully before commencing them.
- Reduce the fear of developers giving estimates, but story points will scare people as not being formal enough.
- Try planning poker/wide band Delphi.
- Try “Extreme design”
- Refactoring is nigh on impossible in larger projects, it’s basically rewriting.
- Dave doesn’t like dependencies and frameworks. Object oriented programming Introduces complexity.
- Feeds can be better and easier than apis. Learn about queries.
- Scripting can help getting things done quicker.
- Simple loose coupling between components.
- It’s ok to use and try different tools and languages.
- Think outside the box.
Phew, find out more about Dave Thomas here.
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