Rick Tonoli

Tag: Agile

  • Accuracy and Precision

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Today I got asked what I thought was the difference between accuracy and precision as it pertains to relative estimation, I wasn’t ready for the question though and it’s been sitting on my mind bugging me so here are my thoughts: I would think accuracy would be how close the estimation was to the truth…

  • Continuous Improvement

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Thinking about continuous improvement the other day I tried to figure out what makes a continuous improvement process work and what makes it stick, these are my thoughts: It should be a slow, gradual process of change, no “sudden movements”. It should be a continuous flow of change, no settling down into a rut. It…

  • A great team

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    Rick Tonoli
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    For me agile is about many things but first and foremost it is about people and dynamics between people, you get the right recipe going and anything is possible. I work with what I think is a great team, but what makes them a great team? I’m not entirely sure but here are some of…

  • Velocity for the layman

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    Rick Tonoli
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    WARNING:This is a brain dump of an idea I’ve been playing around with, some confusion may occur! As a ScrumMaster I often struggle to explain the concept of velocity to people, a critical concept to grasp to understand how to report on progress and capability. I often get these questions thrown at me: How many features…

  • Star Trek, a model for Agility

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    Rick Tonoli
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    As a Trekkie I’m prone to watching reruns of old Star Trek episodes from time to time and I started seeing many similarities between an agile approach to “getting things done” and the way the crew of the Enterprise work. Yes, granted, it’s a militaristic structure but that’s not to say you can’t still be…

  • Change is good

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I’m often amazed at the number of dogmatic “prophets” out there when it comes to the latest fad’s of agile development. I myself am about getting productive and like to take the best of ALL worlds; change is not only inevitable but necessary, even changing of a process BUT, only if the change leads to…

  • Performance appraisals, do we really care?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    I often wonder why companies think the current way of doing Performance Appraisals are actually effective (you know, a few times a year, you sit with your manager and he tells you what a good/bad boy you were). For me they’re unnecessary and this is why: Firstly, “appraising” someones “performance” is something that should have…

  • But haven’t we always been working this way?

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    Rick Tonoli
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    When I was a kid I had a Commodore 64 with a cassette player, awesome little machine with cool games! I decided I had to write my own game, this is where it all started some 25 odd years ago. I decided I would write a “maze-like” game where an “avatar” would navigate through a…

  • My questions on agile processes

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    Rick Tonoli
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    Something I have found very interesting in today’s “agile environments” is the adoption of processes. I’m caught in an endless loop on my thoughts around the place of processes and how they should fit in a team. Generally processes are put in place in order to protect the team, sort of like a safety net. …

  • An (agile) environment…

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    Rick Tonoli
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    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…