Almost any improvement method is hailed as the best way to save busi-ness from problems when it is new. Unfortunately, a few years later, this same method is now the reviled, flawed method that a new method is replacing. This parable tells how this happens.

Goodbye Staff and the Associates. My decision, to leave Clarus has been one of the hardest decisions I have made yet. I never have had a “bad” work day, some have been challenging, but overall I have truly loved working with the whole team.

On my recent visit to Wellington I was talking to some colleagues working with government departments interested in Agile. It was a bit of an eye opening experience and given the AgileNZ Conference in Wellington is only 2 weeks away is something I would like to start talking about.

So…. can Agile work in government?

In part one we we saw the beginnings of self-management emerge out of chaos. In part two of this two part blog I complete the learnins from the Scrum Training game. 

I love being Scrum Trainer, mentor and coach. It provides regular insights into human behaviour that I personally find utterly fascinating.One of my favourite exercises that I use in Scrum Training is the Ball Game. It is a simple game and gives teams a wonderful opportunity to experience the power of self-organisation, frequent micro-planning and retrospection.

Clarus Test Practice Lead Ian Ross featured in the cover story of the latest UK based Test Magazine.

 

Recently I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop by the legendary Donald Reinertsen called “The Science of Lean Product Development”. The workshop was part of QCon San Francisco 2011.

What happens to the role of the Business Analyst in an increasingly Agile world? I tried to answer this question a few years ago in a Modern Analyst Article and now having been through a number of Scrum implementations it seems like a good time to reflect on these predictions.

With a transition from Waterfall to Scrum the role of the Business Analyst changes and my opinion improves for a number of reasons.

In  sprint planning, how many times have you experienced deadlocked story estimation? Conversation and inforomation has been exchanged, but the team just can’t agree on a estimate number and the sprint planning meeting is getting painful. Normally people will settle with a bigger estimation just to be safe. Although I agree in principal to do that and not to drag the sprint planning overtime, I normally suggest two things before settling to a bigger number.

Scrum.org requires all trainers to attend a regular Face to Face session so this year I headed off to Seattle, Redmond and San Francisco for 2 weeks. I attended the Scrum.org F2F session, 2 Qcon workshops and then Lyssa Adkins Coaching Stance workshop. This series of four blogs outlines my experiences at these events. 

Recently I attended a Lean/Kanban training event in the US.  I found it an incredibly interesting session, not because of the material presented but because of the team dynamics at play and what I saw unfold in front of me. This blog is number 2 of a series of 4.

A number of people have been asking us recently what the difference is between the old Scrum Alliance style courses and the new professional Scrum curriculum at Scrum.org.  In the blog post I will try to answer this question!

In this movie "I want to run an agile project" we follow the experiences of one such brave project leader, Luke, as he has many different encounters throughout the enterprise, working to establish and deliver his Agile project.

Recently I have been helping a fellow Scrum practitioner with a strategy for working with a client who is determined that Scrum cannot deliver fixed date projects. The company has made wonderful leaps forward using Scrum but under pressure the evil, highly ingrained habits of predictive, deterministic thinking emerge and the company now risks the rocket we launched falling back down to earth as gravity drags them back to the same of way they have always done things.

Clarus had a great time presenting to the Auckland chapter of the IIBA recently.  Colart Miles and Milan Holzapfel took the group of 24 business analysts through Tom Wujec's Marshmallow Challenge (http://marshmallowchallenge.com). The Marshmallow Challenge is a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity.

Thursday 28th September saw Clarus facilitate a workshop specifically focused on the use of Agile within the embedded software arena.

For the last two years we have had an exclusive relationship with the Scrum Foundation. This commercial relationship meant that we managed all training in New Zealand for the Scrum Foundation. It has had some wonderful moments; bringing Scrum co-founder Jeff Sutherland to New Zealand twice was certainly a highlight. However, this relationship came at a price. It prevented Clarus, a New Zealand owned and operated company, from providing any form of certified Scrum training in our own back yard.

After a prolonged effort to negotiate a win-win, we are sad to say our relationship with the Scrum Foundation is now over. Unfortunately we were not able to negotiate a situation that allowed Clarus to be able to provide training to the local market while also being able to bring out trainers from the Scrum Foundation.

It is useful to think of test data as belonging to one of two camps:

• Natural (production data), data that has occurred in the “real world” due to users interaction with the system
• Synthetic data (artificial), is data that has been artificially created to support testing.

Recently I was asked to participate in writing a testing best practice for a company and honestly I struggled to come up with it. There are so many
things to cover and the last thing I want is to write a big fat document to cover everything. After tinkering many ideas, I’ve come to a conclusion that 
whatever I present it will be alright as long as it adheres to ‘ABCD’ of testing.