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.

Tags

adoption architecture books build change collaboration deploy design integratoin learning management release safety team Team Member team safety training user stories

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 training

Aug
30

Who are the users

Posted by: Delmar Hager | Comments (0)

We are in the requirements gathering phase for our next project. This has been a interesting experience because the product owners are still using a waterfall approach. We have product requirement document that has been created by the product own. Of course this is not a very user centric document. It is a use case document the covers many technical details.

We have now decided that we need to write user stories. The begs the questions as to who our users are. When I first started thinking about our users I originally came up with three or four users. I believe this is very typical when people start with user stories. They pick the obvious users and then create their stories around them. In doing this we miss many requirements.

I decided to do some brainstorming using a mind map. With this mind map I wanted to explore the users of our product. What you see below is 15 minutes of one person doing the mind map (me).

Our Users

Wow there are many more than 4 users. I am sure there are more users if more of us were working on the mind map. (I actually thought of several other users since I did this map.)  When you start evaluating these users you realize that there are many requirements that can be derived from each user. Of course you may see roles that an user enacts that be combined with other other roles to streamline the number of users.

My premise is that every requirement can be derived from a specific user role. Even the technical requirements have a user.

So as you start creating user stories,  brainstorm as to who all of your users are. When you do this you will be able to derive a rich set of user stories that will cover the majority of your requirements. If you find a missing requirement it is my premise that a specific user role was missed.

Categories : Agile
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Feb
21

Working together as a team

Posted by: Delmar Hager | Comments Comments Off

Every team members contributes. It is vital the the team cultivate ideas from every member. Each of us has a unique perspective that helps make the team succeed. Working together a community helps each of us to better understand our unique skills.

This entails that we are willing to learn from others on the team There is no place for a prima donna on a team. The member fresh out of college has knowledge that a 30 year veteran does not have. It takes humility to learn from the junior member.

Also we much be willing to teach each other. A person should be willing help others learn the skills they have acquired. Many times this will require patience when other team members do not learn easily.

Categories : Agile, General
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