TwitterBlog
No Cold Storage Issue Here!
One of the biggest challenges corporate learning practitioners face is the ability to ensure learning transfer occurs, that there is real life implementation of the new skill, and that it’s done consistently and over the long term. Our training strategies can include detailed follow-on strategies to evaluate learning transfer, i.e Kirkpatricks level 3. But the reality is that the dependencies external to the training organization make it very difficult to do this consistently. Also, the learners themselves experience various...
read moreOur Clients Asked…We Delivered! Scrum Boot Camp Training
Jan 31 – Feb 1, 2012 we executed our Agile Boot Camp training offering for the first time and are excited about the results! Our client, an online retailer, was the first to experience the course instructed by our own Rod Bray, Certified Scrum Master and software architect. The participants were a combination of software developers, quality teams and business analysts. This was the perfect audience to test our gap theory. The theory that our customers want a course that takes Agile principles that a firm like...
read moreAgile Training (Boot Camp) in Toronto added to WFS service offerings
I wanted to introduce a new course we launched today called Agile Boot Camp for software delivery teams. We recently reviewed the Toronto market for Agile training and what we found some great Agile Scrum and Scrum Master Certification training. But we could not find any courses that were focused on both Agile and software delivery. Berteig Consulting provides excellent training; in fact our Scrum Master was trained by Berteig, and I would recommend them to anyone looking to obtain the CSM designation. However, what we noticed was the need...
read more5 Tips for the daily Scrum
Things You Must Do In a Scrum Meeting Scrum Meetings – those 15-minute “stand up” meetings that we do every morning – are a simple, powerful tool to keep your project moving. But it’s easy to go off the rails and lose the effectiveness of these meetings. I’ve listed five tips that we can emphasize which will optimize our Scrums. Start on time and keep to schedule. It’s a little thing with big consequences. Like other meetings – Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospective, Sprint Demo – we...
read moreIBM Innovate Comes to You – Toronto
Agile’s Role at IBM’s Software Development Conference IBM Canada recently invited Web Financial Solutions (WFS) to participate at an IBM Conference called Innovate Comes to You. This conference is a smaller local one-day version of a much larger five-day conference that occurs once a year in Florida called “Innovate.” It’s IBM’s way to bring some of the larger conference’s content to localized markets. The conference had over 150 people registered and about half of that number...
read moreTest-driven development ‘Tipping Point’
In his seminal work "The Tipping Point", Malcom Gladwell describes ideas that take hold as epidemics - viral if you will. Gladwell identifies key factors that play a role in determining whether a particular trend will “tip” into wide-scale popularity.
read moreAgile Burn Down Chart – an executive dream tool
The lack of meaningful metrics is one aspect of software development that has always baffled me. This lack of metrics causes project issues to simmer without action. The business dimension that suffers is “predictability” – or delivering functionality on time. Recently, I was invited to attend a project ‘stand up’ meeting or Scrum meeting. A ‘Scrum’ meeting lasts 15 minutes and discusses the project in terms of its current status and what is ‘blocking’ progress. After the meeting the...
read moreSoftware Development Testing. What is the problem?
No one would argue that testing is important. But among the people that I speak with regularly the prevailing opinion is that it is never done enough. What is the problem?
read moreA real misperception about Agile
There appears to be a real misperception about Agile - many executives and business leaders perceive Agile to be ‘ad hoc’ and therefore not an approach for larger, more-complex systems. One key point I would like to make is that Agile is not an Software Development Life Cycle process. Agile is a learning framework. If you are moving toward Agile, one key thing to keep in mind - your development teams still needs a Software Development Life Cycle process. A Software Development Life Cycle process provides...
read moreIt’s never been this good!!!
I've been involved with software development for over 30 years. That's a lot of projects, roles, deadlines, meetings and team members. In all that time there have been some recurring themes. One of them is the "death march".
read more