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Showing posts from January, 2013

Agile Expects More Than Scrum: A Bulletin From The World of Rugby

Are you tired of being lectured by "Pure Scrum" fanatics?  Some people are so quick to judge!  They will tell you "that's not agile!" or "that's a smell!" when: you have a defined Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) team members are distributed to different rooms, cities, or time zones you write anything down on paper larger than a 3x5 card you spend more than a few days planning your work, even for a large project you don't release to production at the end of every sprint you start requirements an iteration ahead of development you have a management structure more than one level deep you use MS Project to do resource planning you work on fixed cost projects you have a PMP certification on your resume (even if it's the PMI-ACP ) you advocate use of HP Quality Center, which is Kryptonite to legions of agilists world-wide you perform end-of-year performance reviews Agile friends, let's take a look at ourselves.  Am I ri

How To Do End of Year Performance Reviews for Agile Team Members

I've been avidly following a discussion in the LinkedIn "Agile and Lean Software Development Group" called " Does Agile mind-set suggest any method for measuring the individual performance of developers and using it in a punish and reward system? :  (I included the url, but I'm not sure what will happen if you try to point your browser at it if you're not me.). From http://memegenerator.net/instance/25931448 There are a lot of interesting directions for this topic to take, but the key question I've been mulling over in my own mind is this:  What, if anything, do you need to do as a hiring manager at "annual review time," in order to reinforce an agile culture of teamwork without demotivating your star contributors?   It's Star Trek's notion that the needs of the many must battle and win against the needs of the few!  Or so it seems. Let's talk about these issues frankly for a moment. Punish and reward :   a significant p