In scouring the web for new retrospective techniques, I stumbled upon two great resources. The first was a book by Ester Derby, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, and the other was an Agile Wiki specifically for Retrospectives, RetrospectiveWiki.org. Just in time for the holiday, the Christmas Carol Retrospective focuses on a few year-end behaviors to be shared with the…
Markdown is simply a syntax that allows a writer to create a text file that can contain common textual elements (headers, lists, bold, italic, etc.) with a limited character set. Here is the basic syntax for the most common elements in a markdown (.md) file. Note that many development sites use a standard readme.md file to represent a repository or…
SPEED BOAT RETROSPECTIVE Start by drawing the following speedboat diagram on the board and labeling with the underlined words. Also note to explain the diagram with the sentence descriptions. Sun – What went well this last sprint, what do we need more of? Wind – What worked against us, what do we need less of? Engine – What do we…
During Sprint Planning or even while developing a large backlog of epics, there will eventually arise requirements that require some specialized skills, such as architecture, design, user experience (UX), etc. However, these items are not ambiguous of their true value or acceptance criteria. So how should these items be handled in a Sprint? A Spike is time-boxed technical investigation to…
So you know how to code in twenty different languages from Assembly 8088 to LINQ, but how much do you know about business processes, project management and business acumen. The following series is my personal take aways from Tek Pub’s Coder to Developer open community videos and Mike Gunderloy’s Coder to Developer book. This online streaming series breaks the book…
Almost every programming language has their own specific way of putting comments into the code, so let’s recap the various ways so that you can quickly reference your tool’s syntax when you need it. Visual Basic (VB) and VB.NET Comments ‘an apostrophe at the beginning of the line indicates a commented line C#, JAVA, and JavaScript Comments // specifies a…