On Twitter, my good friend Mike Sutton said, “CSD is a misnomer. The value of existing Certifications needs to be justified before new ones are released.”
Many of the terms we use are misnomers. For example, “acceptance testing” is a misnomer because it doesn’t indicate acceptance if the tests pasts–it indicates lack of acceptance if the tests fail.
What is the misnomer in the phrase “certified scrum developer?” Read More
I was asked about how I would mentor people in the context of being the team leader. Tricky situation, that.
On the one hand mentoring people without their request is an instance of what Jerry Weinberg calls “inflicting help.” At best, it’s ineffective. Usually it’s worse.
On the other hand, an organization has a reasonable expectation that the people working there will improve over time. Who better to help a team do that than the team leader? Read More
I saw this question in a blog post by Mark Schenk:
About two-thirds of the way through the workshop one of the students asked “when do we get to the stage where we can tell the client what the answer is?” This literally stopped us in our tracks ““ we were so accustomed to working on the basis that complex problems have no single correct answer that we hadn’t explicitly explained this and we had bumped headlong into a prevailing management mindset.
That question struck a chord. I thought back to the days when I first learned XP. Most of the ideas and practices resonated strongly with me. The one that seemed most foreign, Test Driven Development, became a personal fixture after trying it for three days. Yep, this was the way software development should be done! It was so obvious and right, and I told everyone I knew.
They all immediately agreed and thanked me for the information. Well, not exactly. Read More