One of the big challenges faced by distributed teams is how to get over the communication gap created by the physical distances that separates them. We all know that communication, either verbal or non-verbal, is fundamental for any project to be delivered successfully. When a team is good at communicating, they cultivate a more effective [...]

Last week I attended the Lean Thinking And Practices For IT Leaders workshop organised by ThoughtWorks. There we had the presence of Mary and Tom Poppendieck, my colleague Jason Yip and two consultants from KM&T. One of the things that I really liked about it was that it wasn’t only driven by presentations, but also [...]

One day, while reading Esther Derby’s book, preparing for a retrospective session, I came across a great analogy between retrospective and development life-cycle: While continuous builds, automated unit tests, and frequent demonstrations of working code are all ways to focus attention on the product and allow the team to make adjustments, retrospectives focus attention on [...]

The agile software development practice I like the most, and at the same time, the one I find the most difficult is pair programming. Each individual has his/her own way of working, and characteristics such as motivation, engagement, habits, open-mindedness, and coding/design style varies a lot from individuals. Sometimes, to get a balance between these [...]

Are defined as tasks or features that represents something that needs to be fixed, because it represents a risk to the system in production (or going to). Generally they represent acceptance criteria that was not defined during development. They should have higher priority over the other stories to be implemented.

Last Wednesday, 5th of November, we run our first Coding Dojo session at Sydney office. We had a reasonable number of attendants, and the experience was fantastic, although we still have some points to improve. The Initiative The idea was originally from my friend and flat-mate Mark Needham. Since we moved in to our new [...]

One of the most difficult tasks for consultants is to influence business people to embrace and support test-driven development. Seems like they do “understand” the values, “agree” with that, but when it comes to put into practice the figure is generally a bit different. When I say to put into practice, I mean stick with [...]

This Monday and Tuesday, as I mentioned in the previous post, I attended the JAOO Conference here in Sydney. The event was fantastic, I had the opportunity to meet some great developers that I previously knew from the web. ThoughtWorks had a stand there, where people could catch up during intervals and play some Wii! [...]

Next week (June 2-4) I’m gonna attend the JAOO Conference here in Sydney. ThoughtWorks is sponsoring the event and I’m very happy that they chose me to be one of the attendants. It’s quite exciting to have the opportunity to catch up with professionals that influenced me, such as Robert Martin, Rod Johnson, Martin Fowler, [...]

Last week, I went to a hospital in St Leonards, yes I was feeling sick, but now I’m fine. The thing is, while I was waiting to see the doctor my wife called my attention “Look, the doctors are having a stand-up meeting!!!!” (she’s been reading about agile…). It was awesome! There were about six [...]