in bangladesh, many people (those who mostly get confused with their career) want to get MBA. mostly because they want to get into the top position. success joins with your when you let other succeeds too. arrogant can’t help in anyway.

thanks for sharing

Update: I’ve just noticed that WP removes links in comments … bugger!! So, I’ve extracted the URL’s so that you can follow them.

A number of people have asked for more details about the Squirrel Burger exercise. Joe Tenczar wrote a nice description on the ScrumDevelopment mailing list, here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/message/8798

The exercise is really about assuming risk inappropriately. It’s easy to see when it’s cast as the Squirrel Burger story, but much more difficult to see in our day-to-day behaviour. Many participants will feel ill when I walk them through the exercise, but will happily behave in exactly this way during their professional lives.

So, how does this relate back to technical debt? Assuming risk inappropriately is the root course of the problem. When we (and I include myself here, because I’ve been guilty of this in the past) compromise quality in order to deliver a fixed set of functionality in a given time, we make a decision that’s not ours to make. We deliver a Squirrel Burger. Ken argues in his infamous “Canary in a coal mine” presentation that, if quality is to be compromised then it’s ultimately a CXO decision. The video can be found here:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/agile-quality-canary-coalmine

Thanks,
Dutch Driver

Regards,
David
jacksguides.com

Continuous Deployment is clearly the dessert of making a serious and consistent effort in your testing and automation infrastructure.

>Scrum focuses mostly on the software development process …

There is nothing within Scrum that limits you to software development. Certainly that is it’s historical roots, so a large part of the current literature talks about Scrum in this context. However, Scrum can (and is), being applied to whole organizations*.

The whole organization approach does indeed provide a much better sense of flow (as you’ve mentioned).

>without an organization which adapts and supports the idea of lean manufacturing, it is just an agile island in the wild sea.

I would agree that organizational support for Scrum is absolutely very important. Whether it’s a Lean Organization or a Scrum Organization is, from my point of view, just a variation on a theme. Both approaches have benefits and both bring something valuable.

[* Probably the most high-profile set of companies that are using Scrum at the organizational level, are those funded by OpenView Partners:

http://www.openviewpartners.com/portfolio/index.html

This is a VC which is advised by Jeff Sutherland.]

Thanks for mentioning it.

There are many intermediate steps that need to happen before Continuous Deployment makes sense: there needs to be robust CI, a solid set of unit and functional test, and a test environment that substantially close to the production environment. All this takes a lot of discipline and hard work.

At the moment there are probably 5* companies world wide that can do this.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s definitely a goal that companies should aim for. There is, however, much work than needs to be done before most companies can even get to stage 1 (ie. robust Continuous Integration).

*This is a total guess … and it’s probably on the high side. =)

(And chance you’ll make it to CITCON? It is a good place for this kind of story.)

good articles.

Walter
Buenos Aires – Argentina

I try hard not to draw analogies between creating software and anything else (art, cooking, music etc) having already tried that and failed.