First Agile Dundee

I organised the first Agile Dundee meeting last night. It was a good talk titled "An Introduction to Agile" presented by Clarke Ching of Vision consulting. 13 people from 4 different companines turned up and the presentation was video taped. The presentation covered Agile from a first principles approach and stayed high level and targeted for business people. The feed back so far has been very positive.

I think next time the focus shoudl be on the mechanics of XP or something more concrete to the developers I will be doing a Test Driven Development example and I'll let you know how it goes.

Time Boxing

There is an interesting summary of the options when limiting the time and cost, or timeboxing, a piece of work. I think the dangers of increasing the cost to increase functionality, adding more people to a team to get more capacity are poorly covered. Fred Brooks said in the Mythical Man Month that "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Adding people to a team to increase capacity late in a project is particularly dangerous in Software projects but perhaps less so in other activities.

http://tynerblain.com/blog/2006/04/12/how-to-use-timeboxes-for-scheduling-software-delivery/

Ron Jeffries on the Impact of Overtime

Here's an article from renowned XPer Ron Jeffries. Itn the article he talks about the demonstratable dangers of overtime. I think this would go nicely with my earlier post on Context Switching.

Enjoy.

http://xprogramming.com/xpmag/jatSustainablePace.htm

The 5 levels of planning

Stacia Heimgartner writes an interesting post on the different levels of planning that are involved in agile projects. Hopefully the the myth that Agile projects don't plan is dead

http://theagileblog.net/2006/04/gimme_five_the_five_levels_of_1.html

Dangers of Context Switching

Here is a good article from "Amplifying your effectivenesss" on the problem of context switching when doing technical work.

Article

An interesting read

Malcom Gladwell

This is an interesting article by Maclom Gladwell in "The New Yorker" on the different type of reasons that people to different people. It made me think about the reasons that developeres give to customers for work which isn't complete on time and the reasons that customers give to developers about why a story has to change. I will be listening very closely to the style of reasons I head in the future.

link to article

I try to read everythign Malcom Gladwell publishes . His blog is available here