The first installment in my ‘Going Agile’ series will reflect on the earliest days that led up to our development team becoming an Agile development team. Before I get into this too deep, I should first set the stage a little. This organization is a medium sized ($500M in revenue) software company, with no other teams using Agile techniques. We were going to be the first. The product was well established, having been on the market for about 5 years, and traditional development methods were fairly effective from a delivery and quality perspective. The team
Read More »After attending Agile 2009 in Chicago, and speaking with so many people about their experiences with Agile, I thought it might be an interesting opportunity for me to do the same. So with that as my inspiration, I’ll be putting together a blog series that will cover a number of topics ranging from introducing Agile to your team, through to the release, with a number of other interesting subjects in between. The series is in no way an attempt to tell you how to do things, but rather is intended to share experiences that
Read More »Succinctly communicating what Klocwork does and how it helps improve productivity during code reviews, integration builds, and of course for developers is always a challenge. We’ve tried to capture this visually with this simple SDLC image, and of course we always talk about the importance of finding bugs early. Then somebody else comes along and makes the point in a way you never thought of… here’s a funny that’s been going around for some time, but I figured it’s worth passing along to the Kloctalk readers
Read More »Agile Product Management and a lively talk about modern software development by Alistair Cockburn were the themes of the day. The day started off with a hotel breakfast buffet at 6:30. One thing I rarely miss when I travel is a good breakfast to start the day. My speaking opportunity was, um, unique. Basically a bunch of stages set up around all the food. Oh, and also starting at 7:45 AM. I was able to rush through my presentation and still answer a few questions. Next was the keynote speaker, Alistair Cockburn. He arrived in
Read More »Good start to the Agile 2009 show… seems bigger than last year and well organized so far. Interesting, we’re seeing lots of people from safety-critical shops – medical devices, telecom, military & aerospace, etc. Anecdotally seems like a big change from last year. Todd attended an Agile in safety critical talk that was a good general overview of why Agile is better than traditional development methods for these shops, but lacked specifics on how, why, etc. There’s an FDA & Agile presentation later in the week which will present an actual medical device case study
Read More »There I have said it. As a marketer, I am disappointed in my peers in their attempts to get their message in the hands of their audience. Over the past couple of weeks, I have attended a few webinars from other organizations selling software development tools that were truly atrocious. So here are a few pointers for my few marketers on webinars: Stop talking down to the audience – treating your prospects as unintelligent blobs is not the way to connect or be heard. These people are senior developers and engineering managers of Fortune 500 companies not kids coming out of school. Yes, there
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I sat in on an iteration review this week and came away feeling great about the team, the process and the strategic direction we taking our products. Reflecting on the meeting I asked myself what was the magic in the meeting? The strategic direction of the product had been hashed out months ago in a grueling multi day session, almost all of the members of the development team that were present for the review have been with the company since it’s inception back in 2001 and the meeting covered what it was billed to cover
Read More »I recently read a very good blog on the Triangle Offense and Scrum, and it inspired me to write a basketball related item as well. I used to play a lot of basketball growing up. I played point guard, and was in charge of running the offence, calling out the appropriate play for each time down the court. In order to get the best possible opportunity to score, a lot of things have to go right…1) the proper play for the defence presented must be called; 2) the play has to be communicated properly (from
Read More »When I first started at Klocwork, I didn’t really know a lot about source code analysis. I understood the basic concept of how it finds bugs in software, but that is was essentially it. Sure I knew about Memory leaks, but I truly believed that they were only found a day or two before the GA date…at least, that was when our testing team always found them. In one of my teams prior to joining Klocwork, we used Scrum. We were hard core, with daily 15 minute scrums, retrospective meetings, sprint planning sessions, defining “done”,
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