Author: Rick Tonoli

  • Fresh blood

    The activity on this blog has been, well, lacking of late, so I’ve decided to expand the list of contributors. This blog will become a multi-contributor blog focused (initially) around Agility in the Software Industry. With that in mind we’re adding a new contributor by the name of Nic, someone I’ve personally worked with and…

  • Software Craftsmanship…

    Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship I think this is long in the making and something that’s sorely needed in the industry. Too many people are getting away with too much these days. People call themselves “senior developers” but don’t have a clue when it comes to writing well understood and valuable code. Too many people entering…

  • Testing…

    Found an interesting article on generating test data entitled Testometer – Triangle Test. Here’s a blurb from the site to entice you to go there, give it a whirl, it’s quite good, I managed to score a 7 out of 10: “This is probably one of the most common question in software testing interview. This…

  • An (agile) environment…

    Scrum often talks about “ideal development environments” (Mike Cohn has a nice blog post on this entitled The Ideal Agile Workspace, well worth the read) and this often excludes anything related to engineering (hardware, software etc.), for the obvious reason that Scrum does not profess to offer guidance on engineering practices (but clearly states they…

  • Why do we do what we do?

    I thought of doing a few short posts on the why’s of agile and specifically scrum. Product owners are driven by ROI, so why should we not adopt the same attitude regarding the various “ceremonies” and practices we adopt in our day to day agile development lives… why do I do <something> and what is…

  • Retrenched?!

    Yes, it seems I’ve been retrenched, not due to the current economic crisis but I think purely because there just isn’t the interest in South Africa (Gauteng specifically) for consultant ScrumMasters, or is there? I have no idea, but based on what I was told (read: sold) I thought they were lining up like kids…

  • Anarchy anyone?

    I was thinking today, while watching a team fail miserably at planning, that we all know what we would do if asked to choose between Agile or Waterfall; but what if you had to choose between “MakeItUpAsWeGoAlongNoRules”-Agile and Waterfall. In other words, “Aspects of Agile” vs Pure Waterfall. I’d have to say I’d go for…

  • Qaulity Driven Development?

    I read an interesting post on Mike Cohn’s blog entitled A Requirements Challenge regarding a meeting he had with Tom and Kai Gilb. In short, from what I can tell, it centers around the idea that, as software engineers, we hardly ever, if ever at all, build new functions, but that we inevitably end up…

  • It’s about people…

    “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” I’ve been thinking recently on the importance of people in this whole agile “thing” (for lack of a better word). I think people lose focus of the actual PEOPLE in a team and still focus on them as resources (some nice baggage from our waterfall days). Agile pushes…

  • A new challenge…

    Today is my 3rd day as an official ScrumMaster. Although the first 2 days were, well, daunting at best, today there seems to be a bit more clarity. The challenges here are similar, but still different. Resistance to adoption is coming from a different place this time. The teams seem to want to do Scrum…