Interesting write up on experiences with language barriers among global teams: http://janetgregory.blogspot.com/2009/03/communication-language-barriers.html – thanks to DianaOfPortland on twitter.
language barriers with global teams
March 7th, 2009shared resources
March 7th, 2009Great post on Chris Sterling’s “Harmony with Agile and Architecture” blog about the impact of “shared resources” (plus it seems the author and I share a pet peeve about referring to people as “resources”, as if they were interchangeable widgets and not unique human beings)
book: Thinking Tools for Scaling Lean and Agile
March 6th, 2009Tonight I found a review of an interesting book, via the LinkedIn Agile CMMI group: Thinking Tools for Scaling Lean and Agile, by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. It’s going onto my wish list.
Agile Teams microblogs
March 2nd, 2009To complement our agile_teams Twitter microblog (agileteams was already taken, by someone who appears to be inactive), tonight I discovered and joined identi.ca as agileteams. (I’ve also joined their agile group) Now seeking interesting people to follow! (followers welcome, of course 🙂 )
company character
February 28th, 2009Today I found a thought-provoking and quite timely Harvard Business Review article, “The Layoff”, via Bob Sutton, one of the respondents to the presented case study. If you’re one of the first 25 to click through from his blog post, you too can get a free PDF of the HBR article.
Even if you’re too late for the free article, do check out his “15 Things I Believe” in the left sidebar.
agile tweets
February 22nd, 2009see http://twittgroups.com/group/agile
upcoming book release
February 22nd, 2009I’m planning to check out the new business novel “Aligning Ferret” after its release (note: its introductory price, good through the end of March 2009, is only $12.30 including shipping to the US). I will post here after I’ve reviewed it. I may also check out “Software Requirements and Estimation” by the same authors (Swapna Kishore and Rajesh Naik).
measurement and agility
January 30th, 2009I learned this week, thanks to a LinkedIn notification about a colleague’s change of position, that Rally Development recently acquired 6th Sense Analytics. I’m excited about the potential synergies that may come from this merger of agile and as-light-as-possible measurement, and plan to follow them closely via the Rally agile blog.
new agile-spirited blog
January 29th, 2009Just added http://softwareresults.blogspot.com/ to our blogroll. It’s a newly-started blog by Dave Moran (I discovered it and him through LinkedIn); check it out and see if it interests you, too!
agile management tools
January 20th, 2009Even the most agile project likely uses some kind of tools – index cards, whiteboards, etc. I recently checked out a few agile project management tools to help me with a small, but globally distributed, project. (Without continuously-on high-powered video support across the oceans, whiteboards and index cards are just too hard for everyone on the team to see 😉) After a quick check of ThoughtWorks’ Mingle, Rally Development’s VersionOne, TargetProcess, and Pivotal Labs’ Tracker, I decided to try out Tracker for my team. My main reasons:
- it’s free for our team size (under 5 people),
- it’s hosted (zero installation effort, and provides easy access from anywhere for globally distributed teammates),
- it’s reputed to be fairly simple and straightforward to use.
Although I’m all in favor of applying appropriate rigor (e.g. using a method like AHEAD) to software technology evaluations for which the business consequences warrant it, in this case, ‘doing the simplest thing that could possibly work’ didn’t appear to require anything sophisticated. I’ll post later on how well it works for us. I’d love to hear from anyone who has used them, or other tools, for similar geographically-distributed team situations.
