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When you adopt an agile methodology, you first try to apply its recommendations and often you will prefer to make your own dish with these good practices. After a few weeks of practice, you won't get the expected result that the agile guru has predicated you should. Most of the time, you will be told to apply the methodology you choose without changing a thing. The Shu Ha Ri way coming from Aikido is often the concept which is proposed for learning an agile method: Shu : first phase, concentrate on all the recommendations and practices, Ha : second step, now you practice the methodology correctly and start to understand the underlying principles, Ri : you have sufficient experience to make your own decision and adapt the methodology to your specific context. You will also learn, the agile world has not suddenly erupted from the clever minds which produced its manifesto . Instead, these efficient practices have evolved over a century. Toyoda , Taiichi Ōno , Edwards Deming will be...

As a product guy, working on mobile devices, I'm pretty impressed by this demo. Simple, with what you need in your day to day life. Microsoft is back on track. Thanks to Chris Pirillo for the video.

Most of the time, when guys were explaining the role of the software architect to me, I was not able to believe it would be possible to organise software development on such a division of responsibilities. I always feel the architecture is a discipline each member of a team should embrace. The " Design Patterns Quick Reference " from Mc Donaland is really useful because it allows the team to speak about the most appropriate choice in front of this great summary. But a common pitfall with these pattern design concepts is the fact people will over design and move to a solution too complex. One solution resides in the Test driven development principles where after coding the test and writing the code for them to pass, there is the refactoring step. This is the good moment to consider inserting a design pattern. Make things work, then focus on building maintainable code. Sources : Mcdonaldland : mcdonaldland » Design Patterns Quick Reference Davidhayden : Design Patterns and Agil...

Adopt Social media, don't buy but earn attention. Why do you still invest money in marketing areas where you are sure to get nothing in return? Fear of change? While I agree with the presentation "Social media marketing explained in 61 words" by David Meerman Scott, I still do not get how I could apply these concepts to niche markets, like the one I currently work in. Enjoy the show where you'll be explained what is introduced on David Meerman Scott's own blog : " You can buy attention (advertising) You can beg for attention from the media (PR) You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales) Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page. " David builds his argurment with real examples (links in sources) he has met these last years and jokes about the Gobbledygook you can fi...

On Tuesday 9th February, the 4th Agile Cara session occurred in Lyon. I was happy to see new faces, but on the other hand, it is hard to know why people are not regularly attending our by bimontly sessions. Alexandre presented us a subject he had enjoyed at the Orlando Scrum Gathering : Mapping Change Battlefield by George Schlitz & Giora Morein . Organisation change management is well known and is treated in many books like Leading Change (John P KOTTER) and online articles ( Pierre Collerette ), but in this case, the presentation has been constructed based on a Military battle Campaign metaphor. Even the subject is presenting a way to identify the resistance when it comes to proposing Agile adoption, these concepts are suitable for many other management situations. The main idea is to build an organisational map where influencers are red (Enemy of a move to Agile), green or white (Neutral) and then to draw arrows of influence between them. The result is clear, effecti...

Among the technical list given by Mikael Boman in his post dedicated to product owners, "Practice #4: Refactoring " is for sure, the most difficult to agree with. Version control system, Continuous integration, Automated testing are concepts around tools, consequently their deployment has a visual, understandable, palpable result, so there is no worry justifying their costs. If you don't get the Practice #6: Collective code ownership, wait for a few years until developers leave your company and then you will get it. Simple design: While the indicated article focuses on product owners, the simple design concept is obvious to many of us, but developers could feel it as a bridling of their creativity. While we all need to establish a software knowledge culture, where ideas around code design and patterns are understood, we face a dilemma when it comes to asking for simple creation. I didn't find a good way to recommend, but practices like pair programming and cod...

Last century, I used to send to my colleagues a constant flow of emails with links I considered relevant to our work. Experience has shown me that pushing information to people doesn't mean they assimilate the essence of the content. Worse, if you send too many messages they will get ignored and after filling up your colleagues' mailboxes, they will tend to automatically bin them. Pushing information is definitively a waste of time for both the sender and the receivers. While the enterprise's knowledge is supported by the enterprise content management , the availability of web tools has led many organisations toward Enterprise social software . A blog for a project, for a service or for the general news, are surprisingly adopted without an effort of persuasion, where the traditional content management tools have failed. Easy to use, and effective with a small amount of writing are the main characteristics of this technology. A wiki is a group of web pages that people can ed...