Articles

Integrating Games to Change Behaviors, Part 2

Training people and introducing new ideas requires more than just clear, factual explanations or theorems. Brian Bozzuto explores how games, simulations, and other exercises play an instrumental role in helping people be comfortable enough with new ideas that they choose to put them into practice.

Move Your Career Forward

Often we spend too much time analyzing or agonizing about where to go in our careers and too little time moving forward. This article provides a few practical tips to break out of career analysis paralysis and start taking the steps that will build forward momentum behind your career.

Who Is Agile? {Book Review]

Yves Hanoulle has edited a book, called Who Is Agile? I love this book because of all the back-stories, the pictures, and the links. And, oh my goodness, the links.

Agile Project Portfolio Management Video Posted

The very nice folks from Øredev 2011 have posted my video about agile project portfolio management. You might not think that Malmo, Sweden in November would be a hot time, but for me it was! I met great people and had a wonderful time.

The Boutique Tester Revisited

Between cloud computing, crowd-sourced testing, and even the recent claim that "test is dead," what's a boutique tester to do? Matthew Heusser offers his thoughts.

Integrating Games to Change Behaviors, Part 1

Webinar for Geographically Distributed Agile Teams on Feb 15, Noon Eastern

Please join Shane Hastie and me for a webinar about our Geographically Distributed Teams workshop on Feb 15, at noon Eastern.

Geographically Distributed Agile Teams Have Choices for Their Lifecycles

I hope that by now you see that you have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are geographically distributed team and you are transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager, for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project, which leads to more risk.

Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams: A Case Study

In this case study of a distributed agile team, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations, so they used timeboxes. Senior management had made the decision to fire all the local testers and buy cheaper tester time over the developers’ objections and move the testing to Bangalore.

"... talented QA Engineers with automation..."

I often receive emails from recruiters that go something like this:

We are looking for a talented QA Engineer experienced in /test automation|Java|C#/ for our /test automation team|agile team/. Can you refer anyone?

*scream*

Here's what I replied to the latest one (I really did! I've only edited a little!):

Dear Recruiter,