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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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

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

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

Archive for books

Apr
14

Are You Reading?

Posted by: Delmar Hager | Comments Comments Off

I believe that a college education’s purpose is to train you for a lifetime of learning. I myself have a liberal arts degree in biology and chemistry. My present occupation has little to do with my degree but my education helped to train me to learn.

Reading good authors is an inexpensive way to do self training. People are always amazed at how many books I own. A good friend of mine asked me how many linear feet of books shelves I have. I never considered that question before and the estimate I came up with is 250 linear feet of shelf space. Needless to say I am an avid reader.

This amount of shelf space has caused some friction with my wife. So now days I do not buy physical books if I do not have to. If I buy a book I try to get the Kindle version or the mobi version. I have readers for both. I read them on my TabletPC which is a slate form factor and on my iPod touch. It sure beats adding more book shelves and pleases my wife.

I have a subscription to safaribookonline. This is really a great technical resource. There are thousands of technical books available for you to browse or read. What is really great is the Rough Cuts section. This allows you to read books published by Addison-Wesley before they are released. In the last six months I have read all of the new Mike Cohn Signature books weeks or months before they were published.

I have listed some of my top books for Agile practitioners in the side bar of my blog. Please take a look at these books. I will be adding more books in the future.

As I always say “Leaders are readers and readers are leaders”.

Categories : General
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Feb
24

What are you reading today?

Posted by: Delmar Hager | Comments Comments Off

I have alway stressed continuous learning. The constant comment from people who know me is how large my library is. I guess I got this from my father who was constantly purchasing and reading books. Because technical books are outdated so quickly I constantly removing old books from the library. A couple of years ago I joined http://my.safaribooksonline.com/ . This has been a great resource for technical and business books realated to technology. I am no longer filling by books shelves. It helps having a tablet pc because it make reading online more natural.

Today I ran accross an excellent book, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, 1st Edition. I highly recommend this book. It is easy reading but one of those books filled with axioms that we need to reminded of all of the time.

The first maxim is “Don’t Put Your Resume Ahead of the Requirements”. How often do we want to use a new technology because it will look good on our resume?

There are 96 more to go. You may disagree with what these experts are saying but they are thought provoking. Take a look at this book.

Categories : Agile, General
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