The Silence Experiment at #Agile2017

While at #Agile2017 in Orlanda I was able to participate in ‘The Silent Experiment’ being run by Sal Freudenberg, Katherine Kirk , and Chris Corriere, as part of the Audacious Salon. I’d missed this in Edinburgh during it’s unveiling at Lean Agile Scotland, and had read about it in Sal’s ‘Inclusive Collaboration Experiments‘ book, where

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Crucial Conversation Card Game

A friend suggested reading Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High and I found the book very useful. It offers strategies to help with those difficult conversations that we all need to do now and then, which are ones we need to do, but which we know will be difficult. I also

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Simple (non-coding) TDD Game

I did an intro to test driven development (TDD) talk for TechMeetup Aberdeen last night and started with the ‘simple TDD game‘. I modified the game based on comments there, and made a few changes of my own. I used 2×4 Lego bricks as ‘rulers’ to be the ‘testing tool’ as this was easier than

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The Four Process Phases

I’ve previously written down the system development process for students to use from the high level. This post will break things down into each section of the four sections of cycle (discover, define, develop, and deliver) with some ideas of what should be proposed for each of them. Discover Starting with ‘discover’ is where the

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The Development Process for Group Work

Discussions with a good friend this last week made me realise that I’d never put my thoughts down on how students should be building their applications before. Thanks friend, your prodding is greatly appreciated. Sure, I’d been thinking about it and determined what was needed from the software development process, but since moving more into

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PM Camp Aberdeen, 26 November 2011

The PM Camp Aberdeen event for project managers ran on Saturday, 26 November 2011 at the University of Aberdeen, as noted on the sign up page at http://pmcampaberdeen2011.eventbrite.com/. We had a dozen people in the end. There was a mixture of people like myself, who ran some projects, to several consultants from Logica who ran

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Time for a project managers open space event?

See the update from 4 November at the bottom of the post I’m thinking we need to have a project managers open space day. There seem to be plenty of unconferences for developers and coaches to attend, but I’ve only seen one in Austria that a friend is helping to organise in a few weeks

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Agile, evo and kanban games

As part of the MSc summer projects preparation I ran a number of workshops and lectures on agile, evo and kanban related topics. These all went well. Some of them were being run for the second time (agile with Lego and the Evo workshop), so they went smoother, while the kanban game was new. I

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Solution to fixed price projects

I  found the solution to pricing agile projects. It has been staring me in the face for ages. You see it mentioned by lots of people: Anderson, Gilb, Cohn, Poppendieck, etc. It’s obvious really when you think about it. However, it took Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James Trott to spell out the answer in

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Software house starts

The student software factory is up and running. It’s on a volunteer basis with about four or five students meeting twice a week for about two hours each session. Some of them do a bit on the projects outside of this time, but not a great deal as they still have other committments for coursework,

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