When Craig Smith and I were planning our presentation for Agile 2011 – we toyed with the idea of listing 7 anti-patterns for automated testing. I’ve taken these patterns and loosely matched them to the classic seven-deadly-sins. This metaphor also allowed me to include a linocut that my uncle Errol Smith made – pictured here. Senior management often [...]
Large scale construction projects suffer from cost and time overruns that are typically a symptom of productivity problems and directly affect overall industry profitability. As a result, methodologies have been developed to reduce the risk of overruns and improve project outcomes.
Craig Smith and I be presented at STANZ 2011 on The Future Tester at Suncorp: A Journey of Building Quality In Through Agile in Melbourne, Australia. Our presentation was based around work that we have been doing at Suncorp to improve testing capability, skills and approaches. We also included some of the work we’ve done [...]
Craig Smith and I presented a session called Accelerating the Speed To Cool On The Road To Building Quality In at Agile2011 in Salt Lake City. The talk was based around work that we have been doing at Suncorp to improve testing capability, skills and approaches. We also included some of the work we’ve done [...]
Startup businesses face significant risk in the search for a sustainable, profitable and scalable business model. Consequently, the success rate for Startups is low, making them a typically high risk investment. Agile methods offer a way of reducing the risk for both the technical implementation and the development of customers. This is achieved by increasing [...]
Recently I helped facilitate a workshop with a major engineering company focusing on the use of Work Packages to manage the execution of industrial construction projects. Part of the workshop included a team exercise that compared the efficiency of teams working with and without Work Packages.
Agile Australia 2010 was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in a while. The following are my brief notes from the sessions I attended.
I presented a session at the Brisbane Agile Academy Meetup group on Agile for Startups. I discussed some of the Agile principles and practices relevant to a startup and demonstrated some of the tools used by Ennova. Despite numerous technical issues (which rendered the video unusable) the content stimulated heaps of questions. Craig Smith and [...]
In many organisations (especially larger commercial or government) it is common for the project governance processes to require an estimate of project costs before funds can be released and the project launched. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an estimate that can be used as the basis of a go/no-go decision. In the example discussed [...]
Later this week I’m participating in a round table at the Building Community Centred Economies Conference in Brisbane. I’ll be one of the panelists discussing leadership. The session title is “Leading the Future: Is a new management paradigm a precondition for sustainability transition”. The other panelists have interesting backgrounds so hopefully we’ll get some good [...]