Creative Sparks

They are everywhere!  Right now, near you, is another person.  That person cares about something, cares enough that they could talk about it with enthusiasm, energy and sparks!  And even if you didn’t really care about the subject, their enthusiasm just might rub off on you.

One of the things that helps create a high performing team is diversity of opinion, personal culture and points of view.  Make sure you help team members give each other the gift of passion.  Hold learning events to present about hobbies.  Ask for book reviews or presentations on some new technology.  Heck, go bowling.  Do things that expose your people to new ideas.  One day those “unrelated” creative sparks will trigger your next market-winning innovation!

Check out more inspiring presentations at the Ignite Phoenix YouTube Channel.  What will they inspire you and your team to do?

The True Measure of Agile

I’m passionate about Agile and the power it brings to the people who apply it as intended.  I’m also frustrated by strong evidence that many who speak the words of Agile development are only wrapping the same old practices in buzz.  This is very bad for Agile and developers everywhere.  So many times I’ve talked to engineers who “did Agile” or “did Scrum” and then proceed to describe a broken and painful experience of micro-management or loosely controlled chaos to failure.  Coaching someone back from such a false agile implementation is often harder than pulling them out of waterfall.

The goal of my presentation was to point people back to the Agile Manifesto, to consider that there are meanings and values behind those words.  Pick a framework, like Scrum or XP.  Combine with practices like TDD and continuous integration.  Do your “stand-up” meeting sitting down if you want.  But make sure you check against the Agile Manifesto to keep driving to what Agile really means.  That if those values are promoted by what you are doing, whatever it is, you are on the “true Agile” path.

My slides are available below for download and reuse.  Because the Ignite format allows only 15 seconds per non-stop slide, there are few words, if any, on most of them.  Perhaps you will find better words than mine to fill in!  Let me know what you think of the message you get from them.  The video will be posted soon at the event web page.  Then you can compare what you thought to what I said.

• Download presentation as an ODP. (Open Document Presentation format, as with OpenOffice.org Impress)
• Download presentation as a PDF.

What I Learned

All of the presentations were great! A few points that stood out for me were:

• Tomasz Stechly (@tstechly) introduced me to the concept and benefits of immutable code.  I’m now sorry to say it’s not a technique I have looked into very much.
• Derek Neighbors (@dneighbors) highlighted that we have too much information to slog through every day and that geo-location is one of the ways we can filter the flood to get at what is relevant where we are standing right now.
• Leo Godin (@leogodin217) re-enforced many of the things I read about getting to done and giving what the customer wants, a solution.
• Clayton Lengel-Zigich (@claytonlz) told 10 fables from Aesop and applied each of them to software development, including pair programming and TDD!

All of the presentations were great! I said that already and I’ll say it again, if anyone asks.  Such talent in the Phoenix area!

Thank You

I give thanks to everyone who sponsored, organized, promoted and spoke.  Especially I thank the audience for an awesome experience!