Dale Emery wrote an excellent article on Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests. It's at http://dhemery.com/pdf/writing_maintainable_automated_acceptance_tests.pdf. He showed how tfo do the testing in Robot. Bob Martin gave an alternative way to do the tests in Fit at http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/12/07/writing-maintainable-automated-acceptance-tests.

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I have been doing a lot of seminars and webinars in the last few weeks. People are always asking me to contrast Scrum and Kanban. There are several salient points that come to mind. But one is particularly relevant and I thought I'd just post this quick blog to state it.

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Before you read on, let me give a disclaimer.  This is not intended to be read by anyone who provides Scrum training or consulting.  If you are a Scrum trainer or coach, please stop reading now.  This is for those of you who have been trying to implement Scrum and are having challenges in doing so. This is especially to those of you who call yourselves (or are called by others) “Scrum Butters” (that is, those who do Scrum but). If you are in this latter category, please read on.  My message has three parts:

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I recently had to install a driver for a network printer in my home. This is, I would say, a pretty commonplace thing to do in modern life.

I don't want to suggest that what happened was limited to a particular vendor, so we'll leave the company name out… however, it is one of the most prominent and successful printer companies in the world. Not some little podunk knock-off, in other words.

I put the CD that accompanied the printer into my drive and ran the SetUp program. Given that this is a device intended for home use, one would assume (as I did) that I would simply answer a few questions that the rest would be handled for me by the installer.

I'd installed this driver before, on other computers in my house. I knew it was large (much larger than I would think it would need to be) and that the installation took upwards of 20 minutes to complete, and that the "progress bar" would often just seem to be making no actual progress sometimes, but so long as the task manager said it was "running", I'd just have to be patient. So, I left it alone.

I came back a few hours later, and it was frozen at 24%. Task manger reported that it was still running (no "not responding" message or anything like that), so I left it. Two hours later, still nothing, so I finally cancelled the process and tried to determine the cause.

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Last year I was diagnosed with a "nodule" on the right side of my thyroid (this is the word they use when you have a tumor and they don't want to freak you out). My doctor told me that the nature of the thing (soft, large) meant that it was unlikely to be cancerous, but that we might want to remove it anyway because it might turn cancerous later.

I asked "would I have to stay overnight in the hospital, or could this be done on an outpatient basis?"

He nodded and said "well, it's superficial, so…"

I interrupted. "Ah, good, so it's no big deal."

He looked puzzled. "Um, no. What?"

"You said it was superficial, so that means it's no big deal, it's trivial."

"No," he said, "it is not trivial, it is superficial."

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In an interview in February 2008 (http://www.agilecollab.com/interview-with-ken-schwaber), Ken Schwaber said “I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.” He continued to say “Scrum is a very simple framework within which the ‘game’ of complex product development is played. Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organization’s product and system development practices.The intention of Scrum is to make them transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them.”  read more »

Hi. Most of the blogs I've written in the past have been what might be called 'article' type blogs.  That is, blogs that make a particular statement or discuss a topic  I think people would find useful. However, blogs are used by many others to talk about their attitudes or insights on things, in a more informal manner.  I’m going to start writing blogs of both types. A weekly, informal, here’s where I am, sort of blog (one to follow shortly) and more of an article type blog, which is what I’ve done in the past.  read more »

When I first talk to a team as their agile coachf, I often discover that they've read some books or attended conferences, and they've come away from these brief experiences with lingering concerns over certain "agile catch-phrases." Of course, the skepticism is healthy, and the misconceptions are natural. This is all part of a team's transition to true agility.

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Whenever I attempt to coach others, I have to acknowledge two things:

1. People will only do what's in their best interest
2. You can only get people to change their mind if it makes them right to do so

(Take a look at Joe Caruso’s excellent book, The Power of Losing Control, for more about this).

These strongly inform my beliefs about how to help people learn new approaches. I am often asked how to get other people to learn about Agile or Scrum methods.  read more »