by Bob Hartman on March 9, 2010
In about 5 minutes I’m going to play the role of being a “doctor” at the Scrum Clinic which is part of the Orlando Scrum Gathering. It’s an interesting concept. A doctor and a patient meet to discuss a topic important to the patient. In my case the patient wants to talk about the Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) program. Since I am a CSC and all of my CSC brethren wimped out I’ll be the one acting as doctor. I’m looking forward to it so I’m only kidding about the rest of them wimping out!
More on the Scrum Gathering later this week. It’s bee great so far!
by Bob Hartman on March 3, 2010
My friend, Arif Gangji, and I created this video to help his customers understand why his company uses Scrum as their software development framework. I decided I really liked the video, so I’m posting it here as well. It isn’t perfect, but it is plenty good enough to get across the basic ideas of Scrum. Over time it will probably show up in a few more places on the main website, but for now, enjoy!
I’d love to make our next video even better so if you have suggestions please put them in the comments below. Thanks!
Until next time I’ll be Making Agile a Reality® by pointing people to this video for some introductory information about Scrum.
by Bob Hartman on March 1, 2010
Have you ever had a computer meltdown? OK, so myIT infrastructure meltdown wasn’t as total as the picture to the left, but it still was pretty bad. In the span of a couple of days I had my main desktop and my main laptop both die. This happened just before I had several straight weeks of travel and as a result I was left working off of my MSI Wind U100 netbook for a few weeks. Let me tell you a bit about it and what I learned from it because anyone making a living on the road needs to know this stuff! [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 25, 2010
Dear Diary,
I completed day 1 of my 2-day Certified ScrumMaster course today and I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed. I didn’t have any idea there was a prerequisite of reading a particular book. Luckily not a lot of other people knew about that either so I didn’t look too stupid. Nothing we covered today was particularly difficult, it was just new to me. A whole lot of it seemed like common sense, but as was pointed out, common sense isn’t so common, especially in software development! [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 18, 2010
Dear Diary,
Tomorrow I am going in to speak to Henry about becoming a Certified Scrum Master. I’ve done more reading about it and it appears there are more than 60,000 people in the world who have done it before me. Those kinds of numbers have to help me with my argument. I also know the popular abbreviation is CSM. Apparently I just have to attend a specific course for 2 days then pass a test and I get certified. Who knows, maybe I’ll be certifiable instead! Ha, ha! The good news is we can’t get a whole lot worse than we are right now, so I hope Henry is open to the idea. We’ll see.
-Nick [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 14, 2010
I’m going to give you the punch line first: this is definitely the best agile book on the market today!
If that is all you wanted to know, then you can leave now. If you want to know why I believe this, then feel free to read on. In the next few paragraphs I’ll explain why I give this book the highest possible marks. [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 13, 2010
Ever see a trash can look like that? I know I have – plenty of times. I have 3 kids so I sometimes even see it in my own house! It is amazing how kids can walk right past a full trash can and decide it is not in their best interest to empty it out! But I still love them 
Anyway, back to the point of this blog post… Too often our process, even our agile process, of software development looks like that trash can, and like my kids we all walk right past it without emptying it. We tend to forget some of the basics about agile because we are focused on the process and doing the various practices well rather than taking time out to remember the principles that drive those practices. Or better yet, we should be LIVING those principles by BEING agile, not doing agile. In order to do that we really need to know and live by lean principles. I’ve touched on some of them, but in this blog post I want to say a little bit about each one and why I think it is vitally important. [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 11, 2010
Dear Diary,
This is Nick. I’ve never been much of a writer before, but I made myself a New Year resolution to try to keep an ongoing diary so I could look back in a few years and see how things have gone. Right now I’m hoping it will be a happy thing to see. I’m just not so sure it will be. Today was a pretty rough day at work and it is making me wonder if I made the right choice by going to work for WidCo 6 months ago. [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 7, 2010
I’m going to be spending a lot of time in 2010 writing blog entries. Remember, I’ve committed to trying to write 4 blog entries per week, but in order to continue to grow in my abilities as a trainer and coach I need to continue to expand my knowledge. The internet is great for things like this, especially now that blogging is done by more people. I can now find niche content which fits my needs and just focus on those sites. I’ve decided to share some of the blogs which will be on the top of my “must read” list. [click to continue…]
by Bob Hartman on January 6, 2010
The theme of the blog this month is “Getting a Fresh Start.” In order to get a fresh start it is important to know WHY you want to do it! I’ve seen many presentations over the years about why agile is something a software development organization should use. I’ve seen this sort of presentation called “The Business Case for Agility” and several other names. I’ve seen people walk out of those presentations, go back to their organizations, implement agile – and fail miserably. Clearly having a reason for using agile is not the only important thing. I think many of these presentations are presenting some possible reasons for using agile, but they sometimes miss a key point – WHY are those reasons important. In the spirit of Agile For All’s second agile belief, I’m going to try to explain WHY some of the popular reasons are important to consider. [click to continue…]
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