Within Readify we have a number of different teams working with our customers in a mix of on site and off site arrangements. Regardless of the physical arrangement, a primary element of any engagement is establishing mechanisms for fast, rapid, ad-hoc communication with our key stakeholders. Ideally this is largely built around face to face communication,... Read more

When the Programming, Mother**** site first showed up some time ago I though it was kind of amusing. At it’s heart it’s an over the top response to people who claim to be doing agile but are instead forgetting everything agility is about, killing team productivity, wasting time, screwing over their customers and doing what they’ve... Read more

A number of Australian agile community people, including my colleague Steve Godbold, have decided to run a conference for Lean and Kanban approaches.The interesting thing about this conference is that it is being funded and run using a crowd sourcing model and the organisers need to know if there's enough interest to run this thing.  Of... Read more

In Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (VS 2012.1) Microsoft delivered a feature for the Ultimate edition called Code Map with the goal of visualising relationships in code. In Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS 2012.2) they’ve extended the Code Map experience to include debugging support and the ability to generate code maps on the fly as... Read more

The Scrum Australia 2013 conference has just finished and I had the pleasure of delivering a session for Product Owners aimed at helping them improve what they do and identify some of the mistakes they may be making. A big thank you to those who attended and for making the session as interactive as it was.As... Read more

n 1981, Barry Boehm published information on the cost of change in software at various stages of the development cycle. The following chart shows this cost curve:   Boehm's Cost of Change Curve – 1981 This model has historically led the industry to believe that the most important thing we can do is “get the requirements... Read more

The inaugural Scrum Australia conference is on in Sydney this April and I’ll be there, speaking about the mistakes Product Owners tend to make.  if that doesn’t interest you then fear not, as there’s plenty of other great content being delivered. Don’t believe me? Just have a look at the schedule. There’s even an open space... Read more

Yes, it’s true. Hell has frozen over! After much waiting the TFS team have today announced that Git is a fully supported source control choice for TFS, and that Visual Studio 2012 now has tooling available for working with Git repositories, built right into the VS shell.  I know, right?! Oh, and it’s not some Microsoft... Read more

When I run one of my Scrum.org classes I’ll often mention various books that I’ve found useful and students will typically jot down those book names for looking up later. When one of the students in a class I did recently asked for links to all the books I mentioned I thought to myself “Why didn’t... Read more

Have a read of this article on the NYTimes - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology/air-force-stumbles-over-software-modernization-project.html about a failed US Air Force project. Failed to the cost of US$1.3 Billion, 6 years and with nothing to show for it. Nada. Zip. Diddly squat. Zero. Take a few moments to get over that sick feeling you have in your stomach and then... Read more

This was an editorial for the Australian MSDN newsletter that got bumped for various reasons so I’m posting it here for your edutainment. ---- By now you’ve no doubt heard that both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 have been released to consumers and I’m sure many of you are looking forward to getting your hands... Read more

With Windows 8 being RTM’ed and a slew of new devices to be launched on October 26 (just a few weeks away) I can’t help but wonder where the new keyboards are.  Sure, Microsoft has announced some new keyboards and mice, but they’re not gesture enables and have no charm keys on them.  The keyboard is... Read more

Today on twitter I mentioned that a class I was teaching REST to was having trouble with the HATEOAS acronym and what it was all about. For reference HATEOAS stands for Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State. The concept that an application’s state is in the hypermedia sent between client and server and that both... Read more

I’m pleased to announce that my Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook is now available from Packt Publishing.  Amazon and other distributors should have it available shortly. As a developer you should always know how to make the most of the tools at your disposal and the Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook is a great way to reduce the... Read more

You may have noticed a few weeks back that Microsoft has released an open source project named Git-Tf which is very similar to Git-Tfs in that it allows you to have a local git repository that can push/pull from a remote TFS server. The first question? Why would Microsoft do this if Git-Tfs already exists and... Read more

I’m currently coaching an organisation undergoing a Scrum implementation and we’re having some problems with velocity within teams and the consistency of estimates across teams.  The teams are delivering well, but velocity is a little choppy and the teams are feeling a little blind as to their true rate of progress. As an exercise we looked... Read more

Of course you do. Everyone does. The question is do you know who to talk to? Often the best person is someone outside of the situation you are in who can give you the perspective you don’t have and the ideas that you may not have come up with on your own. Throughout my career leading... Read more

For all those people who can’t stand the ALL CAPS menus in Visual Studio 2012 there’s a way to switch them to normal casing. Crack open your registry editor and create the following registry key and value HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion REG_DWORD value: 1 Here’s what it looks like BEFORE And here it is after the change You’re all... Read more

I know I’ve been a little quiet lately, but with good reason; I’m writing a book :-)Visual Studio 2012 CookbookShort, sharp and to the point, and affordable as well! I’ll post more details as the publishing date gets closer, but there’s nothing stopping you preordering a copy now and helping me feed my starving children!I’m not... Read more

It’s not that rare an occurrence for a scrum team to get to the end of a sprint and find that they have one or more stories that don’t meet the definition of “Done!”. Question This week from one of my former Professional Scrum Master students asked me about this situation: ”What should we do with... Read more