Tweets

Tweets 

Why I can't really respect consulting companies

It's great to hear experts in their field share their knowledge about how to create great software, but I have to admit when I'm listening to a consulting company share their wisdom there is a little bit of unease about it.

Agile Conference - keynote Roy Singham ThoughtWorks

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 conference session

 

agile community in australia is per capita most active in the world
gsm coverage better in africa than access to power
cell towers are run on generators and fuel
constraints in africa will create innovation

Leadership keynote

Agile Conference - keynote - Essendon coach - James Herd - notes

be yourself, be the leader you are don't try to follow someone else's framework / system
building team with complementary skill sets in management
everyone is engaged in the coaching process

Board hacks

Notes from session at Agile Australia 2012 conference

lonely planet and others - share board hacks on this website
boards are evidence
if data is just recorded but not presented as evidence, hard to use it
all about evidence to make right decisions

Agile Infrastructure - Amazon

Notes from a session at Agile Australia 2012

compute is now a fungible resource
fungible - something is replaceable by something else of a like type
usually get new server is a big task, what model, what hardware
today don't need to think about what hardware any more

Changing methods is easy, changing culture is hard

 CIO Telstra - changing methods is easy, changing culture is hard - Patrick Eltridge at the Agile Australia conference 2012 - my rough notes

Telstra are building the best IT shop in Asia Pacific
Telstra will be soon most successful story in agile adoption in the world - soon!
Deliberately bold statements to enable cultural change

Management 2.0

Notes from session at Agile Australia 2012 conference

flickr - you have to push code to production on your first day
categories of systems - systems of record and systems of engagement
enterprise agility - a lot being written and not coming from IT - Stephen Denning "The Leaders Guide to Radical Management" - did not come out of IT but has melded with it
convergence now in thinking in totally different disciplines
Thoughtworks live - Eric Ries, Jim Highsmith, Jez Humble - (how do I get an invite to that!!
decide your commitment to continuous delivery and deployment and make the investment
agile experience design book + continuous delivery (Jez H) -> together are the answer

Emerging Patterns in Testing

Notes from conference session Agile Australia 2012

case study - 60 devs, mainframe, SOA, multiple front end, 5 testers, one week to go live after dev finished
after go live could make a code change and deploy in the same day

principles:
- build quality in
don't find bugs prevent bugs
reduce reliance on band aids

Design Eye for the Dev Guy

Conference session notes from Agile Australia 2012

 

 

perfect product - intersection of viability, desirability, feasibility

the bar has been lifted in user expectation of design
expect polished ui

design is no longer competitive advantage, it is the cost of doing business in software

if we value design, let's all understand it so we can talk about it
is it just taste and judgement?

Collaborative Analysis and Design - NBN

Notes from a session at Agile Australia 2012

BA <-> UX - conflict
skills not roles
overlap of skills between BA and UX, not clear who should do what
need to know particular skills on people not 'ba' 'ux'

Agile Development for Large Legacy Applications

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 Conference session

Integrated Research - a product
single code base of around 4 million lines of code, 24 years old
many platforms, windows, unix

NoSQL Databases

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 Workshops

case study - customer using couch db found it helped to evolve data
DBAs claim 'agile doesn't work for databases'
stranglehold of relational databases on data is lifting - ployglot persistance - now we are asking if relational is the right choice, before only had files, relational database or data warehouse

Continous Delivery and Deployment

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 conference

 

 

delivery - available for deployment - more wide spread
deployment - in production - automatically deliver to production - quite rare
CI in the cloud, AWS
github, jenkins instance on Amazon, cloudbees
deploy to development - automatically
integration - automated acceptance testing
staging -manual testing by testers - deployed automatically if automated testing runs
uat - user testing

Defintion of Done

Agile Australia 2012 rough notes 

 

done, done, done = development complete, testing complete, UAT complete
is it wider than this? what else? 
primary - directly use solution
secondary users -help desk, support
tertiary - use result such as reports on results

Agile Australia 2012 Key Note

Agile Australia Key Note presentation 2012 - Fiona Wood

 

All about technical practices in the operating theatre...parallel to engineering practices needed to support excellence in delivery. 
Obsession, passion are powerful, you can achieve great things
Learn something everyday, don't be average 
Drive to do it and getting it done
Understand whats out there, learn, build on it
Spray on skin - flash of insight and went and did it .. on years of expertise 
Whole team are at world level in their field, she was taken to task for not sharing a vision, so she was able to address that
Respect for every team member and their expertise, even cleaners ..for infection control
Taking basic science to the beside...its where I live everyday
Need enormous support around us to get that innovation, idea done
Doing the very best you can, not toning it down so we don't show up everyone else
Celebrate doing your very best everyday, celebrate people doing their best
Engagement with negative energy is a waste of my time, outcomes are the focus
Don't even engage in the argument...but it is hard not to engage...look elsewhere for positive energy...a piece of your jigsaw
Today is not as good as it gets, its the journey towards getting it better
Need to engage way beyond our boundaries to solve problems 
Who am i not to dream, dream but anchor in reality
Ideas are cheap, what matters is making them work and making it happen

Design Bottleneck

 Notes from Agile Australia 2012 Conference presentation

agile is a culture not a process, changes what it means to be a team
view your product not only through the 'feature lens' but the 'experience lens'
ux conferences - ux going to facilitators rather than owners
Atlassian - dev come on secondment to design team then go back to team and be designers
get out of your comfort zone, being comfortable with ambiguity
anti-patterns

Scrum and Mainframe Test Automation

 

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 Conference

 

Bram  Surti
Rob White

cics cobol db2 12-18month project, decided to use scrum, team sceptical about test automation, today they are converted

value of test automation - obvious!

Breaking up user stories

From presentation at Agile Australia 2012 conference (notes only)

 

user story card is an invitation to a conversation that will result in confirmation of the requirements

can't break up a story?
too complex - take each separate activity, run through INVEST

split into 'get it done' and 'make it perfect' - especially if early in product cycle

complex rules - split rules into different stories

Richard Lawrence - breaking up stories

People Not Process

Rough notes from presentation at Agile 2012 conference

 

1. We don't spend the time understanding people
2. There is a lot of literature to help our understanding
3. If you think you know yourself you don't  - self awareness!! and know the people in your team

Kanban for Software Development

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 Conference

kanban is not:
cards on a wall, not a story card wall
a visual indicator
an entire methodology - not a competitor to scrum

Kanban is:
a technique (that may fit with scrum)
a smalll technique

Continuous Product Design

Notes from Agile Australia 2012 Conference (rough only!)

 

incremental innovation
adjacent innovation
breakthrough innovation - very liiitle info to go on

Building the Right Thing Through Collaboration and Discovery

Notes from a presentation at Agile Australia 2012 

stories are a promise to have a conversation, they are a place holder
they work because they have no detail so you have to discuss them
a fully formed document discourages discussion 
people keep asking me how you write good user stories and I say you don't, you tell good user stories - Jeff Patton

Why Developers Need an Online Brand

My thoughts so I can prepare for upcoming talk* to the StackOverFlow meetup

Why Developers:
Because this is a developer meetup
Because I'm hiring developers right now
Because I'm looking for developers with an online brand...read on to find out why.

(*what was I thinking volunteering for this)

The Frog in the Well

I wish could find the Steve Yegge post about the concept of plateaus of knowledge, thinking you know it all and realising you know nothing, and this is Steve Yegge talking, I think he actually knows quite allot! If he feels this way suddenly we all have permission to feel this and embrace it. It goes like this -

Conferences Updated

A blog post is not the ideal way to do this, but till I get around to building my own site, I'm going to maintain a list here of conferences I come across that sound good.