Continuing with my recap of the AYE Conference sessions I attended, I come to Johanna Rothman‘s session, Choosing the Right Coaching Approach: Congruent Coaching. This was a time-slot where I wanted to attend every single session. I chose this session because coaching is a big part of what I do, and Johanna is one of the best people I know to learn to coach more effectively. Read More
On last Monday afternoon, I attended the session, Remembering Your Resources When Stressed: The Self Esteem Toolkit led by Jerry Weinberg. This session dwelt on a idea Jerry borrowed from Virginia Satir. We have the capability to do the things we need to do, but we often forget our powers when we’re stressed. The toolkit is a set of reminders of the capabilities we have. Jerry has added to Virginia’s original list, and published them in More Secrets of Consulting. Read More
The AYE 2008 (Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference) is now history. I never have time to blog about this conference during the conference–I’m always too busy. Besides, it’s so rich with learning that it takes me awhile to process it. This year (my fourth at AYE), I’m going to look back through my notes and blog a little about each session I attended.
The first session I attended was titled First Steps for Organizational Change: Unearthing the Data You Need and was presented by Johanna Rothman. I say presented, but like all the sessions at AYE, the word “presented” doesn’t convey the essence of the session. Johanna presented a lot of information, to be sure. (And you can find some of the same material on the AYE Wiki.) But the power of AYE lies in the fact that all the sessions are experiential. In this session, we took turns, in small groups, interviewing each other, and observing each other interviewing. And after each interview session, we examined the experience in a debrief. The debrief is the heart of the experience, for it’s where we make our actions explicit to ourselves. And it’s where we share our insights with others, and share theirs.
A few Johanna tidbits from my notes:
Thanks, Johanna, for a wonderful and rewarding session!
The term “non-functional requirements” has always bothered me. “Do you mean the software isn’t supposed to work?” 😉
This post is about how I approach test-driving the solution to non-functional requirements such as performance, and how it differs from test-driving a functional user story requirement. Read More
Jeff Langr requested a Blog Pair for a tic-tac-toe program that he says “screams out for refactoring.” I looked at the code, and didn’t see an easy way to refactor it given the fragment posted. I did, however see a different solution. Read More
Esther Schindler quoted me in her article, Getting Clueful: 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development, on CIO.com. Unfortunately, my advice got altered a little in the editing process. She says,
Consultant George Dinwiddie from iDIA Computing suggests using a burn-down chart to track project progress.
I actually recommend a burn-up chart to track project progress, and a burn-down chart to track iteration progress. There are specific reasons that I think a burn-up chart is superior to a burn-down for tracking over the course of a project or release. I’ve been meaning to write a long post about this, but haven’t found the time. I just wanted to correct the record, in the mean time.
The full comments of my note to Esther: Read More
I know this has been bandied about hither and yon by lots of people. But I still see statements like the one by James Bach quoted on Matt Heusser’s blog that “the part of the testing problem they address is a small fraction of the whole.” Well, yes. Of course it is.
Maybe that’s because Test-Driven Development (TDD) isn’t a testing technique. It’s a software development technique that happens to create a safety net of unit tests.
Or, to paraphrase Captain Jack Sparrow, Read More
Some of you may remember that I started a house construction project. Things are moving very fast, now, and the actual construction may take less time than it took to get all the necessary permits. So far, the project’s about 100% over the time budget. And people say that software development should be more like the construction industry!
But the fact that the construction has run slower than expected is not the reason for this post. Neither is the fact that this project has been consuming a large portion of my attention, and hindering posts on this blog.
This post is about an example of refactoring found in the house construction domain. Read More
Do you have a hard time keeping track of those articles that you read and think “I could have used this when I was talking to ….?” Do you sometimes need an article to back up a point that you’re making, but don’t know where the data is? Well, I do. I’ve started lists a number of times, and keep misplacing them.
This time is different. When a discussion on one of the mailing lists got into studies demonstrating the effectiveness of Agile Software Development, I decided to start a list in a place that won’t get lost. That place is (well, was) http://biblio.gdinwiddie.com/, the Agile Bibliography Wiki.
I’d really appreciate it if you’d use it too.
UPDATE: After spending untold hours reverting changes from wiki spammers, I gave up. You can find the information archived on the Wayback Machine.
Recently, I wrote about using the JfcUnit and Abbot frameworks to test-drive the creation of a Java Swing GUI. Since then, a post by Liz Keogh on the ExtremeProgramming yahoogroup led me to another option. It a wrapper around Swing written in conjunction with JBehave, but as Liz points out, it’s not dependent on the framework and can happily be used with JUnit, also. I like the fact that it’s really lightweight and fast. Read More