Good solid tips for getting the best out a retrospective (and they are also useful for meetings in general).
Column info : Five Tips for Retrospective Leaders and Meeting Moderators
Nice article on some ways to help achieve an effective llife/work balance
Paranoid Engineering: How to be a good specialist and still have a life
From time to time I have a burst of interaction with twitter. However, the single-site nature of the basic twitter user interface means I often forget to visit the site, and I certainly do not want to receive a SMS text message for every twitter update.
It seems a solution may be at hand. A growing ecosystem of assistance applications is surrounding twitter, offering interesting uses and alternative ways to filter the flood of messages.
Filtering Twitter, One Tweet at a Time – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
A very interesting post from Gojko Adzic, which seems to indicate that running a quality IT department is more important than aligning the goals of the IT work with other business objectives.
Gojko Adzic » Doing the wrong thing right is better than doing the right thing wrong
A neat article, even though some people don’t seem to see the point of it. For me it’s a useful summary of some potential application issues around machine-machine email communication.
We have a large project wall, on which paper/card stories, bugs and tasks progress from submitted through to tested. This is great for a quick view of state, but the physical movement of tokens does not help in tracking and analysing progress.
Akshay Dhavle suggests the use of “finger charts” to get a better and more useful of project progress, in particular to help identify time-related problems.
In our team we have found a tendency for the time spent estimating stories to creep upward. More and more design seems to be considered as we work through the stories. While this is a very valuable way of sharing information among the team, it is not a very effective way of estimating.
Akshay Dhavle has written a brief blog post reminding that sometimes, all that is needed is a simple “small, mediun or large” estimate. Business Analysis: Can’t negotiate size… and a good thing too
I read a lot of blogs and articles about education, software, and video. It’s often interesting to observe the differences and the similarities between these largely separate fields. In education, for example, the casual use of the internet for sharing and collaborating which characterises modern software development is seen as a new and contentious area of exploration. When shown examples such as this it’s easy to become blasé and to assume that software practice is at the cutting edge of everything.
Ted Neward points out that this is surely not true, and give some examples where software teams have a lot to learn from other fields such as management, sociology and anthropology.
In many companies, despite generally respectful and productive communication, there are sometimes problems and misunderstandings between the team responsible for designing, developing and producing the software and the team responsible for physical infrastructure and deploying/managing released software. Such situations can be uncomfortable for both sides, so I am always looking for ways to avoid and mitigate such problems.
Chris Read has a nice example of using a “retrospective” meeting to clear up and solve these kinds of issues.
Retrospectively Breaching the Wall between Developers and Operations « Chris Read
My link queue is filling up again. Here’s two links on commercialising video content.
Hey, Grandma, Let’s Put Up a Video Portal! – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
