colorful moments...

we just finished a great evening with agile talk by  stephen forte, chief strategy officer at telerik and on the board of the scrum alliance here at the somewhere in… office.  hasan (our head of technology) and mehfuz (steve´s colleague at telerik) had invited a small audience of bobs from somewhere in… and several other companies to learn more about agile practices, and everyone got much more than they possibly expected. the great thing with a small crowd is the intimacy and closeness everyone gets to the speaker.  

no more death by powerpoint, presentation by excel…

steve used his picture gallery and excel throughout the whole talk, who needs powerpoint?  excel is interactive and inclusive, powerpoint works as sleeping pills…

shovelling snow may not be the favourite hobby of steve, but a man´s got to do what a man´s got to do

after a brief history including start-ups, waterfall, early .dotcom, sexy marketing girls opening his eyes to co-location, fartsdumps in norway, snow shovelling in the US, rugby jerseys, mobile users in himalaya and girlie bars in kathmandu, the audience was fully in his hands:

explaining the OBTW factor that often messes up scrum estimation

i am obviously an OBTW (oh, by the way) guy that messes up sprints by suggesting new features.  scrum is very nice for disciplined work, but discipline is of less use when the product owner keeps on adding and then can´t understand why delivery delays…  we learned a lot about estimation, velocity, new feature addition rate, etc.  very useful, at least for me, to hopefully build better understanding with the developer teams.

ok, so we missed our estimate by a factor of three, but we all can improve through iterations

perfect predictions can be done only after seeing the agreed delivery in stable observation for several days, while the first estimates could miss by any factor between 0.25 and 4, as demonstrated by estimating the time needed to travel to dhaka airport.

thanks steve, your agile presentation gave us new insight and energy

steve, we do hope you will come back to dhaka and somewhere in…, we want to do more and bigger agile talks with you.

on the lighter note, steve seems to love norwegians, partly for their friendliness and partly because they so often get lost in translation:

Det er ikke farten som dreper, det er smellet. means “It’s not the speed that kills, it’s the bang.”. By using the Norwegian words for “speed” (fart) and “bang” (smell) one gets the phrase “It’s not the fart that kills, it’s the smell.”.