There is much written about Scrum and chaos, and how Scrum dances on the edge of chaos. This is quite well know and acknowledged in the community [1]. Crisis however is the point at which one system ends and another begins. It’s an inflection point. It is dramatic, disruptive and often very painful. There is [...]
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An overview of Agile Contracts
Part 1 and Part 2. We’re all familiar with the Agile Manifesto but sometimes it’s unclear how to interpret the principle without some concrete examples. The third item, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, is a good example of this. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. [...]
Scrum and Fixed Price Contracts
Fixed Priced contracts don’t make a great deal of sense in a Scrum world. This is really because traditional software development and Agile software development are two different paradigms … and solutions that work in one paradigm often doesn’t make sense in another. This difference is paradigm is best explained by one of my favorite [...]
Presentation: Introducing Scrum to an Organization
I recently did a presentation (hosted by Boost New Media in Wellington, NZ) about introducing Scrum to an Organization. It wasn’t a very lengthy presentation but it was fun. I certainly hoped that the audience enjoyed it as much as I did. Anyway, here’s the presentation for your amusement!
Managing the transition to technical excellence.
I drafted this post over two years ago, and I’m only just getting to post it. Time has passed, but I feel the post is still relevant and current. The topic originally started on the ScrumDevelopment news group as a discussion about flaccid Scrum. George Dinwiddie posted an excellent comment in which he discusses some [...]
Complex systems and software in medical insurance companies
One of my favourite American institutions is National Public Radio (NPR). Whenever I went in a new city, the first thing I would do is find the local NPR station. I still really enjoy NPR but I don’t listen as often as I use to. About a year ago, NPR ran this story about complexity [...]
Algorithms on the hunt for profit
The image below shows an automated trading algorithm called Stop-loss terminator, trying to trip loss triggers and cause a surge or loss collapse. Evolution has gone electronic. From Zerohedge: … the end game is obvious: hunt for loss triggers on both the up and the downside, and hope to precipitate a stop loss collapse or [...]
Big banks need IT reform almost as badly as regulatory change
I‘ve been talking about the sorry state of banking IT for a while. Many banks have systems that are design dead. Changing or adding new functionality is a high risk operation because of the unknown (and unknowable) impact of those changes. Even worse, it’s impossible to turn off these machines because they’re tied into a [...]
[From the Archives] Collaborative decision making and the impact of Scrum
I‘ve been blogging about Scrum and Agile software development since 2005, and you can find my older work on my personal website. Some of the material has proven to be very popular over the years. So, in an effort to share this the material with a wider audience I’ve decided to start a series featuring [...]
Two wonderful videos from RSA
Here are a couple of videos that I’ve been watching recently. Both are talks given at The RSA and animated by Cognitive Media. I’ll start with my favourite which is “The Empathic Civilisation” by Jeremy Rifkin. And, this second video is “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us” by Dan Pink. More fascinating videos [...]
Software defects in quantitative investment funds
There was an interesting article in the New York Times over the weekend about software defects in quant funds. Quantitative funds (also know as Black Box funds) are investment funds in which investment decisions are determined by elaborate software algorithms. Over the last 10 years investors have put vast sums of money with quant funds [...]
[From the Archives] There can be only one Scrum
I‘ve been blogging about Scrum and Agile software development since 2005, and you can find my older work on my personal website. Some of the material has proven to be very popular over the years. So, in an effort to share this the material with a wider audience I’ve decided to start a series featuring [...]
The High Cost of Business Disruption
In an interesting blog post titled Make the Hairs on the Back of Your Neck Stand Up, Israel Gat discusses the difficulty of maintaining and adapting large ERP installations especially with regard to technical debt: “The software decayed and decayed but technical debt had never been reduced. Consequently, the cost of change, any change, today [...]
Bob Sutton on “Crappy People versus Crappy Systems”
I‘ve enjoyed Bob Sutton’s blog for a while now. If you’re not familiar with Bob, he’s theProfessor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He often blogs about topics that are directly relevant to the Scrum community including topics on systemic change, collaboration and management behavior. I recently saw Esther Derby retweet [...]