Agile Support Helping You Get Better at Agile

Daivd Kroeze is a PM with RIM in the BB Apps PM team. I have only been with RIM for 6 months but in that time I have taken over the BB Desktop Manager projects Yeah!
Before RIM, does that exist?, I worked for an Avaition Solutions company called Navtech.

David Kroeze
dkroeze@rim.com

Another great day, learned a lot. I just finished blogging on my own blog and Mishkin mentioned this site/blog will probably move, but in the case anybody from the class is checking this out, here's the links to the stuff I was talking about in the class.

Microsoft Patterns and Practice's Agile work environment tour:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Tour-Patterns-and-Practices-Lab/

Tools We Use:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/

I learned a lot today. The material covered today filled in a few huge holes of stuff I sorta knew from reading blogs/books, but this really drove it home.

My biggest takeaway today was estimating and finally 'getting' why time isn't tracked. I didn't even know about 'planning velocity' vs 'commitment velocity' and that helped tremendously with some of the problems I've encountered.

I learned a lot today. I found it to very helpful that I've been practicing Scrum for about 10 months and then had the opportunity to take this course. It was great to be able to apply the theory and results of the exercises to some of my real work situations.

I've been live blogging on Twitter at the breaks and lunch ( www.twitter.com/jasonlittle ) and also started up a Plog at http://plog.jasonlittle.ca to track my own progress through the course.

I have a traditional PM background and have been working in an Agile environment for about 10 months now. I've done a great deal of reading about Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, and have raised quite a few questions with our implementation of Scrum.

I just completed the CSM training in Beijing and want to share some of my memorable points about Scrum here.
1. In most of cases, the Scrum is started ugly. But if we keep on improving, it is mostly possible to build a high performance team;
2. If you don’t know how to resolve the problem, ask the team;
3. Try to follow all of the basic Scrum rules at the beginning;
4. Don’t push too fast in an organization which just try to start implement Scrum.
5. The dead ScrumMast is a useless ScrumMaster;
6. Scrum is not a magic that can resolve all of the problems.

This is my first blog on this website. I will try my best to use this blog to capture notes, ideas and musings during the workshop. I just hope that the hotel will offer wireless connectivity.

We will see how this blog will grow.

If you are looking for a product or a service related to agile methods, then please visit our Agile Services/Products resource page. As well, if you are an independent contractor or represent a company that delivers agile services or creates agile products, please register on this site, log in and add your listing to the page! If you have any trouble with how to do this, please post a comment here, rather than on that page.

The officers of Agile Support will be uploading appropriate talks and presentations they have given. Mishkin Berteig has started with four presentations given over the last two years. You can find them on the sidebar under "Public Resources" as well as on the Talks and Presentations page. If you are interested in uploading a talk or presentation that you have delivered, please let us know in the comments below.

There is a difference between an in-house Agile project and an Agile contracting project. Iteration Zero requires significantly more attention particularly setting and managing client expectations and an awareness of the the changes in the client's mindset required to move forward effectively.

See the attached diagram for further details. (Revised 12/19/2007)