September 3, 2010
Part 2: Tracking tasks, or - Where the hack did my time go to last week? # After summarising some strategies for not loosing track of tasks, meetings and conferences in the last post, this one is going to focus on the retrospect on achievements. If at some point in time you have asked yourself “Where the hack did time go to?” - maybe after two busy weeks of work this article might have a few techniques for you.
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August 25, 2010
Berlin Scrumtisch - open discussion # This evening the Berlin Scrumtisch took place in Friedrichshain. More than thirty participants followed Marion’s invitation for discussions on Scrum, wine and pizza at Vecchia Trattoria.
As there were several new participants, Felix started out with a very brief summary of the very core concepts of Scrum itself: Most important to know is the basic assumption of Scrum, that is planning ahead of time in a very detailed way is impossible.
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August 14, 2010
Scrumtisch August Berlin # Just seen it - the next Scrumtisch Berlin has been scheduled for 25th August 2010 at 18:30 Uhr. So far, no official talk has been scheduled, so please expect two topics on Scrum and its application to be selected for discussion according to Marion’s agile topic selection algorithm.
Please talk to Marion Eickmann if you would like to attend the next meetup.
August 3, 2010
Part 1: Travelling minds # In the last post I promised to share some more information on techniques I came across and found useful under an increasing work load. Instead of taking a close look at my professional calendar I decided to use my private one as an example - first because spare time is even more precious then working hours, simply because there is so few of it and secondly because I am free to publicly scrutinize not only the methods for keeping it in good shape but also the entries in it.
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July 30, 2010
Series: Getting things done # Probably not too unusual for people working on free software mostly (though no longer exclusively) in their spare time, the number of items that appear in my private calendar have increased steadily in the past months and years:
Every three months I am organising the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin.
I have been asked (and accepted the offer) to publish articles on Hadoop and Lucene in magazines.
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June 27, 2010
Scrum - prepare your meetings # “But Scrum involves so many meetings - we already have meetings like all day and don’t get to coding anything.” - “However we do need transparency and communication to build great software.” - “Actually scheduling and re-prioritising items during scrum planning takes so much time.” Does that sound familiar to you?
What if you could fit Sprint Review and Planning I for a team of three people doing three week sprints into one hour?
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June 25, 2010
Using Scrum for software development # A few months ago I entered a new team of until then two software developers. Being so small and with a rather busy product owner, until then people had followed the rituals of Scrum only loosely. When starting to work on a new component the three of us decided to change a few thing several weeks ago:
We would setup infrastructure to be somewhat similar to what we knew from Apache projects: All issues to be accomplished were to be tracked in our issue tracker.
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June 14, 2010
Velocity update # After Berlin Buzzwords is over now, I thought it might be time to update a formerly published velocity graph. If you have been following this blog during the past few months you may know already, that we are using Scrum @ Home for several months already. I even published results of a Scrum Nokia test earlier this year.
Today I created another one of these nice velocity charts.
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March 30, 2010
Coaching self-organising teams # Today, the Scrumtisch organised by Marion Eickmann from Agile 42 met in Berlin Friedrichshain. Though no talk was scheduled for this evening the room was packed with guests from various companies and backgrounds interested in participating in discussions on Scrum.
As usual we started collecting topics (timeboxed to five minutes). The list was rather short, however it contained several interesting pieces:
(6) Management buy-in
(6+) CSP - Certified Scrum Professional - what changes compared to the practitioner?
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February 17, 2010
Alan Atlas at Scrumtisch Berlin # At the last Berlin Scrumtisch, @AlanAtlas gave a presentation on how he introduced Scrum at Amazon (starting as early as back in 2004). Introducing Scrum at Amazon by that time seemed natural due to a few factors:
Amazon was and is always very customer centric. The original methodology of working backwards in time - that is starting with the press release, from there writing the FAQ and manual and finally get to the code - really made people concentrate on the product.
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