First Italian Agile Coach Camp
Welcome to the unconference for Agile coaches, ScrumMasters and other agile addicts.
We are proud to welcome everybody to the first ever Italian agile coach camp. Two days of highly collaborative, (mostly) self-organized event with Agile coach dojo and Open Space for everyone involved in coaching, training, mentoring and leading Agile Organizations, Teams and Individuals. ScrumMasters, team leads, guerilla Change Agents, Product Owners, managers, other roles are all welcome. Diversity makes us smarter!
User Stories
User stories are one of the primary development artifacts for Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) project teams. A user story is a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it.
In Extreme Programming a user story is a story about how the system is supposed to solve a problem or support a business process. Each user story is written on a story card, and represents a chunk of functionality that is coherent in some way to the customer.
These written cards are preserved through the entire planning and development process (Planning Game, Release Plan, Iteration Planning). They are given priorities by the customers, they are given estimates by the developers, they are broken down into engineering tasks at the time that they are scheduled for development. There are one or more acceptance tests, owned by the customers, to give them confidence that the user story has actually been completed.
A user story is an informal statement of the requirement as long as the correspondence of acceptance testing procedures is lacking. Before a user story is to be implemented, an appropriate acceptance procedure must be written by the customer to ensure by testing or otherwise determine whether the goals of the user story have been fulfilled. Some formalization finally happens when the developer accepts the user story and the acceptance procedure as his work specific order.
IAD 2010 OpenWare sponsorship
Here you cansee the delivery of my contribution as a sponsor of the IAD 2010 Conference held in Genova the November 19 2010.
Burn down chart
A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal. That is, it is a run chart of outstanding work. It is useful for predicting when all of the work will be completed. It is often used in agile software development methodologies such as Scrum.
Scrum artifact: sprint burn-down
A sample burn down chart for a completed iteration, showing remaining effort and tasks for each of the 21 work days of the 1-month iteration.
The sprint burn down chart is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work in the sprint backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the sprint progress. It also provides quick visualizations for reference. There are also other types of burndown, for example the Release Burndown Chart that shows the amount of work left to complete the target commitment for a Product Release (normally spanning through multiple iterations) and the Alternative Release Burndown Chart, which basically does the same, but clearly shows scope changes to Release Content, by resetting the baseline.
Fabio Armani @ Better Software 2010
I’ll be a speaker in Better Software 2010 to present a paper called: “Agile Lean Development – a war story”.
Better Sofware 2010
An eclectic conference dealing with subjects and opinions raised by Italian and international experts in the software development field, with the intention of creating new ideas and finding fresh sources of inspiration.
Better Software is the first Italian conference dedicated to software development and the training of managers and new entrepreneurs in the sector.
The event revolves around various heterogenous themes linked to software production: from a collection of specifications to design, from project management to development, and from licensing to marketing.
Evaluating your Agile project
Jeff Patton recently posted an excerpt of Alistair Cockburn’s book Crystal Clear regarding the seven properties of successful Agile development projects.
Read his article at this link: Evaluating your Agile project
Kanban Development Oversimplified
How Kanban-style development gives us another way to deliver on Agile values
http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/2009/kanban_over_simplified.html
Leadership Redings
Leadership is important, but it doesn’t just happen. You can improve your leadership skills through study and practice. Just as there are books such as Design Patterns that we expect developers to be familiar with, there are books and articles that aspiring leaders will want to study as well. We’ve suggested some key ones below.
On Becoming a Leader , by Warren Bennis. ISBN 0738208175.
Confessions Of An UnManager: Ten Steps To Jump Start Company Performance By Getting Others To Accept Accountability , by Debra Boggan and Anna Versteeg. ISBN 1892538148
Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges. ISBN 0738208248
The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, by Marcus Buckingham. ISBN 0743261658
Resolving Conflicts at Work: Eight Strategies for Everyone on the Job, by Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith. ISBN 0787980242
“Situational Leadership for Agile Software Development,” by Mike Cohn. Cutter IT Journal, June 2004
Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions that Make or Break a Leader, by David L. Dotlich, James L. Noel, and Norman Walker. ISBN 0787974277
Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, by Howard Gardner with Emma Laskin. ISBN 0006381235
Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology, by Paul Glen. ISBN 0787961485
Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, and Richard E. Boyatzis. ISBN 157851486X
Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, by Robert Greenleaf. ISBN 0809105543
Leading Change, by John Kotter. ISBN 0875847471
The Leadership Challenge, by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. ISBN 0787968331
The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know: Studies in Organizational Behavior, by R. Richard Ritti and Steven Levy. ISBN 0471736465
High Performance Leadership: Creating, Leading and Living in a High Performance World, by Graham Winter. ISBN 0470820810
The Next Level: Essential Strategies for Achieving Breakthrough Growth, by James B. Wood. ISBN 0738201596
Product Owner collaboration
The product owner is required to closely collaborate with the team on an ongoing basis and to guide and direct the team (e.g., by actively managing the product backlog, answering questions when they arise, providing feedback, and signing off work results.) In simple terms, the product owner sits in the driver’s seat, deciding what should be done and when the software should be shipped. The team decides how much work they can take on in a sprint and how the work is carried out. I have experienced that having a strong, empowered, and present product owner is a key success factor for Scrum projects – just like a strong, empowered team is.
