Justin York – Simdesk

“Del's leadership was instrumental in bringing agile methodologies to our development team. While transitioning to scrum, I often consulted with Del about how to handle things in the scrum framework. Once our team was fully running on scrum, I felt that we were at least twice as productive as we had been in the past.”

Matt Willson – Pervasive Software

“As Delmar's manager for over a year, I was very impressed with the simplicity of his designs, the quality of his software, and the tenacity he brought to problem solving, especially customer issues. Delmar provided strong leadership for the developers who worked under his tutelage.”

Steve Mook – Pervasive Software and Simdesk

"Del is experienced,enthusiastic and tenacious - an excellent team lead with expertise in UI design and development and Scrum project management. He is willing to learn new technologies, challenge assumptions, take risks, and be accountable for results. His skill and leadership would benefit any team that seeks to improve its ability to deliver value to customers and to the business."

My Agile Experience

What was really exciting was to see the Scrum methodology adopted company wide at Simdesk. Because of the success of our team I was able to train and mentor other team leads, managers and corporate executives to use Scrum. This lead to increased productivity and better communication among the teams, support, product managers and upper management. Goals are well defined and consistently meet.

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books change collaboration learning management release team Team Member training

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My Reading List

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)) by Lyssa Adkins (Paperback - June 14, 2010)

Available on safaribooksonline.com as a Rough Cut.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum [Book] by Mike Cohn - Addison Wesley

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders - Paperback (Jan. 16, 2006) by Jean Tabaka

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) Roman Pichler

Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Book Shelf

Jun
24

There is much to change

By Delmar Hager

This morning I had a very interesting discussion about the culture at the company I work for. We as developers have been instructed to use a testing tool that our QA group uses. This is all well and good because the tool is based on JUnit and is XML driven. The problem is that the tool is only supported in the QA testing environments. The tools cannot be used in the regular development environment. So if developers do use the tool for tests it will have to be for QA regression testing and cannot be used in a test driven development (TDD) style.

This is very frustrating because TDD is the proven way to create quality software. Also, developers are going to resist using tools that do not enhance their job and the quality of their software. Who wants to add more time to an already tight schedule to develop test that one cannot use.

I was informed that our culture does not value testing by the developers. Oh, there have been directives that all new code will be unit tested but because good tools have not been provided this type of testing is spotty at best.

To do our job efficiently and produce top quality code we need to have environments that support us not hinder us.

Categories : Agile, General, Work