Tuesday, January 31, 2006

SeaSpin February 20th

For my readers living in the Seattle metro, I’m presenting MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at the Seattle SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network), on February 20th. Please come along and discover how we’re delivering the evidence for a CMMI level 3 appraisal and how we managed to leverage core agile principles and still meet the requirements for the CMMI model and a SCAMPI appraisal.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Norms Revived

Norms were an idea that Peter Coad brought to the FDD party. He learned them from Fred Racey and wrote about them in the Coad Letter. My recent post on the 40 Hour Week seems to have started something as described by Agile in Action. Defining norms is indeed an ideal thing to kick off a workshop. The workshop participants can then learn to use them throughout the rest of the day or week.

Friday, January 27, 2006

WAM Skunkworks Reunited on Redmond Campus

Martin cranks up his powerpoint slides

The old WAM skunkworks team (from Sprint 2001) had a partial reunion today when Martin Geddes appeared on campus to reprise his closing keynote from the Emerging Telephony conference. Earlier Martin, and I had got together with Scoble to talk about business blogging, the risks of getting fired and how difficult it is to drive change for new products. It’s a pity the day that the Scobleizer crashed in to the Telepocalypse hadn’t happened a year earlier. If so then Martin might have featured in Naked. Afterwards, Martin and I had lunch with Wenqi Shen which meant at least 50% of the WAM strategy team was back together again for the first time in 4 years. The other members missing were Daniel Vacanti, Parvez Yusufji and David Cox - though David and Parvez weren’t on the team at the same time.

Martin, David and Wenqi after lunch. The guy promoting Windows Server R2 in the background has rightly identified the joker in this pack.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

One I’m not Attending

I’m not speaking at nor will I be attending Waterfall 2006. Looks like it might be a popular conference though. They’ve attracted some big name speakers. I’m particularly sorry to miss the Super Model Driven Architecture. I imagine that this event will easily exceed the expected attendance of 1100 folks at Agile2006. The insurgents have a long way to go against the silent majority slamming away on those massive requirements documents. Next year, I’d like to suggest that they move the event to February 2nd with a change of venue to Pennsylvania. Remember trying the same old thing time and again is absolutely the best way to produce a different and better result. As my email sig used to say, When something is not working, do more of it!

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

MSF Blogs to Watch

Inside Microsoft we have an elite group of MSF practitioners and trainers that we affectionately call the MSF Elders. A few months ago Randy Miller and I did a train-the-trainer session for them so that they could start to spread the word about MSF v4.0. Two of them have started blogging, Andy Delin and Clementino Mendonca. I’m sure both of them will be providing good MSF material over the coming months and I’m relieved to have some help promoting MSF in the blogosphere. Welcome guys! Blog on!