Agile Cambridge 2019: piecing it together

Last week was Agile Cambridge, the annual, three-day, conference on Agile at Churchill College in Cambridge. Despite the fact that my new job role doesn’t directly involve Agile any longer, I was speaking and I wanted to go for all three days anyway, because a lot of the sessions looked interesting. For the last couple…

My first six months in a new role

As those of you who know may will recall, I was made redundant from my job as a Scrum Master at Redgate back at the end of May 2016. Luckily, I wasn’t out of work for too long and since July I’ve been working at a major multinational ecommerce player in the travel and tourism…

What is technical debt?

This article is my own synthesis of ideas presented at Lean Agile Scotland in September 2014 by Dan North, Jabe Bloom and Torbjörn Gyllebring, with some of my own embellishments. Any misunderstanding of their points is mine! I’ve linked to their original talks at the foot of this post. Conway’s Law says that the design…

A year of whiteboard evolution

My colleague, Simon (aka The Agile Pirate), has written a post on his blog about how our team’s Scrum Board has evolved over the past year. Until I Simon’s summary, I wasn’t quite concious of how much we have achieved since January. It’s probably worth supplementing Simon’s post with something about the aim of the…

Reflections from Agile Cambridge 2013: Day 3

[This post continues from Reflections from Agile Cambridge: Day 2] Real Options in the real world (Chris Matts) This was a fascinating keynote investigating how we can consider the options we face in project management as being Options in the financial sense: they expire, they have a value and we should avoid committing to them…

Reflections from Agile Cambridge 2013: Day 2

[This post continues from Reflections from Agile Cambridge 2013: Day 1] Change or be changed (Janet Gregory) Today’s keynote dug down deeper into the concept of how we often can’t avoid change. The presentation was split into three parts: types of change, influences for success and how to introduce change. The types of change section…

Reflections from Agile Cambridge 2013: Day 1

For the next three days, I’m attending Agile Cambridge at Churchill College, Cambridge. These are my thoughts and notes from the sessions I attended on the first day (Wednesday 25th September). Keynote: Moving towards symbiotic design (Michael Feathers) Michael’s talk was one of those which warrants further time to digest. There were lots of individual…