Monthly Archives: May 2008

Scott Ambler Presentation

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Scott Ambler was in town earlier this week to be a keynote speaker at the local BADD 2008 conference, and I was fortunate enough to attend a separate presentation on Thursday night at the West Des Moines Marriott, where Scott talked to around dozen of IT individuals about strategies for scaling agile development in real-world environments.

Overall, it was a great presentation. Scott has a reputation for speaking his mind about topics, and there was no shortage of that here. However, he is also known for making arguments based on factual material and he shared a number of research data with us around the adoption and success rates of agile (of which some of the data can be found here).

It definitely had a flavor of IBM Rational bias, but a lot of the messages were applicable beyond the scope of IBM and its RUP product to agile practices in general.

Overall, the message was clear: Agile is making (or has already made) its way into the mainstream, and it is going to be around for the long term.

The Definition of “Done”

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There is a good post over at the Agile Advice blog regarding Scrum’s definition of “done” and how to customize it to your own team environment.

This is something my team has been struggling with lately. We’ve been implementing a Kanban-like approach to managing our work items. For most of our work items, we have common activities that we need to accomplish, such as:

  • Holding peer design reviews
  • Writing unit tests
  • Filling out PCM requests (gotta love SOX)

However, we don’t keep a list of these activities out in the open which means we sometimes forget – or “forget” – to do a particular task.

By creating a checklist of tasks required to call a work item “done” and posting it in a visible location (like a wall), this helps keep everyone on the team honest and makes sure that no tasks are forgotten.