The question of “what’s the right iteration length” may not be as interesting as any of the questions found here (gum really doesn’t stay in you for 7 years. Who knew?), but it is a common question from organizations moving to agile development. You can certainly get a lot of different opinions on this from a Google search, but since you’re reading this now, I’ll give you mine, based on personal experience. A number of years ago, one of the projects I was PM on decided to try out Scrum. I had attended some Product
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Over the past few years I’ve talked to a number of customers in the embedded software and medical devices industries, and I continue to see a significant number of these organizations either moving to, or planning on moving to agile development processes. With all of the inherent challenges for agile in these organizations such as standards/regulatory compliance, hardware changes and integration, security issues, etc. I must say that I’m a little shocked that customers are moving away from their current processes towards something like agile. Add to this the fact that the Agile Manifesto specifically
Read More »I came to the practice of procrastination late in life. I was always one of those annoying people who arrived for appointments early, handed in assignments early, went to bed early. Becoming a full-time working parent drove me to the dark side. Now I’m routinely late — late for exercise classes, late going to bed, late getting the kids to daycare. My forgetfulness factor has increased about 26-fold too. I’ve always been a list-maker, but now I have a few sayings that my husband is sick of: If it’s not in my calendar, it’s not
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Last week I toured the West coast with our friends from VersionOne, Perforce, and Electric Cloud on our Agile roadshow hitting the cities of Seattle, Santa Clara, and San Diego. In one of the after meeting discussions, one of the attendees asked me what the differences were between Agile and Lean. Having only been involved with Lean from an outside perspective, I didn’t really think there were huge differences and that they shared many of the same beliefs. Luckily, it looks like others believe this to be the case too. So rather than me trying
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At daily standup meetings, they eye each other from opposite sides of the room. Sitting on the same side of the cubicle wall is unthinkable. They’re united only by their desire to produce quality software products and their appreciation for coffee and energy drinks. What’s good to one side can be anathema to the other when it comes to code. I’m talking, of course, about testing and development teams. In the interests of generating more comments improving dialogue between two very important functions in a software organization, our marketing director asked me to interview our
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Yesterday we did our second Medical Devices software seminar, this time in snowy and cold Minneapolis. Say what you will about the weather, but this city is built for winter…it has various overhead ‘tunnels’ called ‘skyways‘ connecting what seemed to be the entire downtown core, so you rarely ever need to go outside. Anyways, our seminar drew the interest of over 75% of registrants, mostly software engineers and QA, so really another great turnout. The format was the same as our Boston event, with the same players from SterlingTech, Klocwork (duh) and Vector Software. There
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What comes first—the process or the tool? Yes. Any tool worth its salt should integrate into existing processes and tools. What’s interesting and informative is seeing the similarities and differences in how the same tool is applied in different organizations, across continents and oceans. The emphasis on quality unites everyone, but the level to which agile is adopted is what makes static analysis markets different. No one knows this more than Mark Grice, Klocwork Director and Manager of the International Reseller/Partner Network, and Steve Howard, head of Partner Support in Europe. Trying to talk to
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In a previous post, I discussed the problems we encountered when considering translating our entire MediaWiki-based documentation suite. I talked about how to get content out of the wiki for translation, and then get translated content back to our users. In this post, I want to discuss translation and globalization requirements more generally, and how our small, agile doc team, working in MediaWiki, handles each requirement. Fulfilling these requirements results in lower translation costs and easier translation: Provide a medium for the translated documentation that accommodates text expansion Use preformatted styles Minimize the amount of
Read More »We moved all of our user documentation from Author-it to MediaWiki a few releases ago. At that point, we translated only a part of our documentation to Japanese – the help pages for detected issues. For these wiki pages, we used MediaWiki language templates to display language links at the bottom, and we copied-and-pasted the translated text. For our most recent release, we expanded the translation effort. This meant more copy-and-paste – from the wiki to Microsoft Word, to send to the translator, and then from Word to the wiki, when we received the translated
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While I may not be the most active Twitter-er in the world, the one thing I have noticed is that there is an awful lot of activity around the term “code review” lately. Since code reviews have become a widely used practice, I thought I would share one of my experiences about code reviews with you, from a product manager perspective. In my first Agile team, many years ago, it was tabled (in our retrospective meeting after a couple of Sprints) that code reviews should be added to our definition of “Done”. Let’s just say
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