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Nov 4

Election Day Electricity

by Chad, Agile, Comments Off on Election Day Electricity

Nov 4

November 4, 2008

This November 4th day is brimming with excitement. I just returned from casting my vote, and found it interesting to use a traditional paper ballot to color in a dark circle signifying my voting choice, in this age of computers, software, and modern technology. Quite different than the last election, which used those old booths with the curtain like the Wizard of Oz. I understand they were invented in 1905, and my city still used them in the last election of 2004. (Ignore that man behind the curtain!!)

chicago%20lever.jpg

How interesting that we’ve “advanced” to using a piece of paper and a pencil, now that it’s 2008 🙂

Agile Development Conference

Speaking of exciting, next week I get to travel to every retiree’s favorite Red State – Florida. [November 5th Election Update: Holy smokes!! BOTH Florida and Ohio turned BLUE! YES WE CAN!]

I’ll be speaking at the Agile Development Practices Conference at the Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando. I had the privilege of Keynoting the last SQE Conference in Las Vegas, and if you’re not constrained by your company’s travel lockdowns in this crappy economy, I hope to see you at any one of these 4 sessions. Lee Copeland and his gang at SQE run amazing conferences, and this one promises to be even better. Here’s where I plan to be:

Monday – I’m teaching a full day tutorial on “Using Metrics in Agile Environments,” showing people how to do what I do using SLIM. I’ve taken my previous half-day session and expended it to a full day, to include estimation practices for Agile releases under tight deadlines. It got great reviews at the last Better Software Conference, so we’ve expanded it and made it even better. The class is virtually full, but I bet a space or two might still be available if you’re interested.

Wednesday – Rally Software will be showcasing the results of a recent productivity study that QSM Associates conducted on results of using agile. We’re going to give attendees an inside view of how we ran this analysis using the SLIM model and our database of 7,500 completed projects collected worldwide. This study showcases more than 30 projects from 9 companies using SCRUM and XP. I get to co-present with Richard Leavitt of Rally, who is a very dynamic and brilliant presenter.

Thursday – I’ll be giving a talk entitled, “Maximizing Team Dynamics and Avoiding Dysfunction.” This is a very cutting-edge talk about the people-oriented issues when teams work as closely together as in pair-programming. I plan to introduce ideas about “systems dynamics” and interpersonal interaction, bringing in concepts from my colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project, and the work described in a remarkable book called “Difficult Conversations.”

Friday – Israel Gat, Sr. VP at BMC Software, will discuss how his team achieved results that we measured on very large Network Management releases using SCRUM, where their time-to-market was among the fastest in the QSM database. This kind of performance can be a dramatic disruptor to the status quo – rippling through engineering, marketing, and management. Being “too productive” apparently brings interesting problems. Israel is a powerful speaker, and I’ll be on hand to answer questions about our work with them.

I hope to see you in Orlando!

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