Conducting a retrospective at the end of a sprint is a core Agile practice. It constitutes one of the key ‘meetings’ for Scrum (along with sprint planning, sprint review, and the daily scrum meeting itself) and when done well it provides a valuable lever for the continuous improvement of the development team. The main scrum… Continue reading Looking back on retrospectives
The second book I finished in 2016 is the first novel by Argentine author Edgardo Holzman entitled Malena. Malena is the name of a central character as well as the name of a well-known Tango. This was a haunting book examining the repressive regime in Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s through its… Continue reading Malena by Edgardo David Holzman
I’ve written before about the importance of good testing in Agile development but a few things happened during our current sprint that raised this valuable issue for me again. Here are a few brief thoughts about this key topic. To set the context for these thoughts let me tell you a little about our development… Continue reading I love when our tests fail
Yesterday my wife and I watched the 2014 movie Selma about the event leading up to the Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. The timing for watching the movie was somewhat coincidental; it’s been in our Netflix queue for months and the disc just happened to show up in time for us… Continue reading Selma
In an effort to keep better track of the many things I read I’m going to post brief notes anyway about each book I finish this year. And that includes the graphic novels and comic trades I read (though I won’t write about individual issues unless they are too incredible to skip). To that end,… Continue reading First book I’ve finished this year
Looking at my posts here for 2015 is a bit depressing. I started the year full of excitement, with a plan to put up brief posts as often as five times each week on different topics – why that sounded sustainable after several months in which I’d posted only half a dozen times in total… Continue reading Back on the block
I do a lot of reading – so much in fact that by the end of the year I have trouble remembering everything I read the previous year. So I’m going to start recording what I read here and add (in general) some brief notes about the book. Here are a few of the things… Continue reading Books I read in 2015 (a partial list)
