Changing The Frame
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Changing The Frame
For nearly everyone who seeks to facilitate change, the first faltering step is usually in the crafting of a persuasive argument.
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Coaching
Slash the Load
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change
The people who hire me ask me to help their teams make changes. Most of the time, my first step is to see how I can slash those teams’ load. Here’s a technique card from my seminar, “Leading Technical Change” Raw text of a technique card: Wait, what? First thing I do To me, this
Ten I-Statements About Change
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Leading Technical Change
Here’s ten I-Statements about change, in the geek trades, and beyond. My hope is that it will give you a richer sense of where I’m coming from in my blogs, talks, videos, and courses. Before we begin, though these statements are about the geek trades, I am actually far more concerned with change in the
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Random Coaching Tips
As a person who has been successfully coaching software development teams for twenty years, let me throw out a few ideas to chew over. With luck, maybe one of them will jiggle the frame enough for you to find a next step. Nothing, absolutely nothing, always works. There are thousands of forces in play in
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Three Short Coaching Pro-Tips
A respondent asked that I combine these three short Pro-Tip muses into one post, so here goes: Coaching Pro-Tip #1: Everything good about agility is rooted in relationship, so everything good about coaching is, too. As coaches, we usually start from negative trust, and our central priority has to be reversing that position. In the
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Two Mantras, One Theme
Two recurring phrases in my work are 1) It is like this because we built it to be like this. 2) The code works for you, you don’t work for the code. Two sides of one page, phrased on the front as negative critique, and on the verso as positive encouragement. Before we dig in,
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On Agile Methods
A couple of days back, I tweeted about SAFe. It created some stir on the timeline, which was great, as I got to see a lot of perspectives. I want to use that tweet as an excuse to talk about something much larger. This will be a long one. 🙂 Meanwhile, I remind you, geekery’s
Standup Braindump
The standup is a short recurring meeting used to (re-)focus the team-mind on effectively moving stories through our workflow. Here’s my recommended approach to having standups be useful and brief. The general sequence is 1) address team-wide emergency issues, 2) work story-by-story, 3) distribute new work, 4) address team-wide non-emergency issues. Note that, quite often,
An Early TDD Experience
HOT TIP! Click the image below to get $75 off Ted Young’s new interactive online class running March 8th-11th 2021. Use special code "GEEPAW" at checkout. Thanks! When we talk about transitioning to microtest TDD, we have to figure out how to provide the right experiences in the right order. That’s why I propose we
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Technique & Transition
HOT TIP! Click the image below to get $75 off Ted Young’s new interactive online class running March 8th-11th 2021. Use special code "GEEPAW" at checkout. Thanks! Microtest TDD is a "way of coding", not an after-market bolt-on to old-school approaches, and as a result, we have to constantly intertwine our conversation about technique with
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