Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Fireside Podcast with Lisa

I recently interviewed with Lisa Haneberg, author of Focus Like a Laser Beam - one of my highly recommended books for 2006. You can download the podcast here. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lisa+Haneberg, Management

Saturday, August 19, 2006

My Return to the Birthplace of FDD

I’m in Singapore this weekend as part of my Asian tour. Tomorrow, I’m giving a class on Agile Management for 60 local customers. Yesterday, I just had to make a pilgrimage to Tiong Bahru to visit my old office and my old condo, Central Green. I took pictures of where I used to live, and the HDB block next door where my wife used to live (before we were married) and the office tower where I used to work. It was known as Tiong Bahru Plaza in those days. For some reason it has been renamed Central Plaza now.

This is the door way in to the office. I remember my first experience walking through it. Two Malay guys walked out wearing their jackets on back to front. I thought it might be a strange local fashion. I later learned that motorcycle riders wear their jackets back to front to keep their chest warm but their back free to perspire.

Both Coad’s color modeling and Feature Driven Development were created on the 11th floor of this building. It was the first time I’ve been back since 1999. The lowest window on show is the 3rd floor. The window on the far left of the 11th floor has the meeting room where we first used color on models and where we first moved to a wide rather than deep - model the whole scope - approach. That was a significant change from The Coad Method of 1995/1997 editions of the Object Models book. We covered the windows with models and it was hard to see out by the end of the month. The date - August 1997. The FDD method emerged over the next 6 months as we gradually included all the aspects - Class Ownership, Feature Teams, Chief Programmer Work Packages, Configuration Management, Feature Tracking with a KMS, and reporting with a Feature Complete Graph and a Parking Lot Diagram. By mid 1998 the project was running like clock work. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, FDD

Thursday, August 10, 2006

What would Agile Auditing Look Like?

Following on from my thoughts from Agile 2006 and the notion of Agile Process Auditing, I started a thread in the Yahoo! group to discuss it.

I’d like thank all those who are contributing and try to summarize some of the initial thoughts.

1. Auditing is the wrong term. It has too much baggage. We need a new name for the idea of reporting who well a team is following an agile process or sticking to its agile discipline. Please leave a comment if you have an idea.
2. The role of auditor should rightly go to the agile coach.
3. The agile coach must be in an independent reporting structure and though involved with the team must not report to the same manager in order for him/her to be objective.
4. In the role of auditor it is not a good idea that the agile coach is an external firm or consultant. They might not be objective and try to hide a lack of discipline or adoption in order to continue collecting their fee.
5. Auditing of conformance to process or in more agile terms sticking to discipline ought to become a standard part of a retrospective.
6. Projects can go wrong for many reasons and simply falling off the agile discipline bandwagon is not the only reason. However, some form of process conformance audit (to use existing non-agile terminology because it is all we have today) is important to help management make appropriate interventions to get teams and projects back on track.

This is proving to be a very lively thread and I don’t think we are nearly done discussing this topic. Please join in - either here through comments or in the Yahoo! group (see sidebar for link to join). Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Cockburn on the DOI

For those who might have missed it, here is Alistair Cockburn’s take on the APLN rallying cry, the Declaration of Interdependence, published in Better Software magazine recently. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Cockburn+Alistair, Better+Software+Magazine, APLN

New Agile PM Blogroll

I’ve added a new blogroll section to explicitly list blogs focused on Agile and Lean project management and people focused on promoting the project management paradigm behind the Declaration of Interdependence.

If you have a blog I haven’t listed, please write to me and I will add it to the list. I want to build out a miniature blogosphere of advocates for the DOI and agile and lean approaches to managing projects.Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, APLN