A Year of Having No Work Access on My Personal Phone — For many, the end of 2021 and start of 2022 has been a time of reflection and comparing for many of us. It doesn’t help that this year social media sends us flashback reminders of prior years. Through the pandemic some of these has prompted feelings of hope for us…

Reflections From Lean Agile Exchange 2021 — As both an agilist and software engineer, I enjoy attending a mixture of conferences. Yet in discussion with developers I sometimes am asked what kinds of topics are normally covered. Or even hear jokes about which methodology won in the battle of Scrum vs Kanban (sigh). …

Comparing In-Person and Online Meetup Lightning Talks — I hear the buzz of murmurs for an excited crowd. The sound of glasses and beer bottles clinking as strangers meet and introduce themselves hums behind excited conversations. Heat from the lights and projector hits my face. The smell of wood from the bar floor fills my nose. …

Confessions of Creating My First Pre-Recorded Conference Talk — Recording yourself is hard! Recording yourself is downright uncomfortable! Nevertheless, with us all working from home for the past year it has become a more common format for conference talks. …

Tackling Tech Impostor Syndrome — When we were young, we relished the opportunity to pretend to be someone else. Perhaps you were a fan of playing astronaut. Or pretending you were a wizard at Halloween when you were wee. Or later when you pretended to be older and more grown up to sneak into an…

Reflections on Our First Mob Code Review — Two heads are better than one. Indeed that is commonly the term used to justify various paring and collaboration efforts. Including the deceptively contentious topic of pair and mob programming. …

Experiences Combining BDD Behavioural Specifications with UI e2e Testing — Sometimes in life, two unexpected elements can combine together to form something better. Quite often we talk about two minds being better than one. But this applies to other things too. One key example from music is the concept of a mashup. For those unfamiliar, a mashup is where at…

Identifying Sprint Review Anti-patterns — We’re coming to the end of the year, which means a lot of us are attending various town halls and high profile meetings showcasing achievements of the year. Particularly for me working in a large organisation, I’m attending a few of them. It’s nice to reflect back on recent accomplishments…

Gamification of Scrum Learning Using Scrum Delegation Poker — Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches play a key part in the development and supporting of Agile practice within Scrum teams. Both hold key responsibilities to support and educate teams in the ways of the Scrum force. However, sometimes more than talking needs to be done to help squads. Occasionally, bad…