SPaMCAST 591 Special! – Advice For Remote Teams, A Discussion with Dalton, McDonough, Koorse, Hurney, and Cagley

http://www.spamcast.net

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The SPaMCAST 591 is a very special podcast.  On the 18th of March, I convened a panel of luminaries to discuss how they were supporting and working with remote teams. I recorded both the audio and video, today I am releasing the audio version.  The panel for this show was  

Jeff Dalton jeff@broadswordsolutions.com 

Amy McDonough Amy.McDonough@spr.com 

Sandeep Koorse Sandeep@koorse.com 

Christopher Hurney    Christopherhurney@gmail.com

And myself! tcagley@tomcagley.com 

We kept the session short but full of practical advice!

 

Trust and Effective Teams (Remote or Not!)

Effective teams exhibit a number of common characteristics.  In an earlier article, we identified four critical attributes.  

1. Members actively support each other so the team succeeds as a whole.
2. Teams actively interact and communicate.
3. The team has a common goal.
4. How work is performed.

 

SPaMCAST 590 – Future of Testing, An Interview with Nancy Kastl

http://www.spamcast.net

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The SPaMCAST 590 features my interview with Nancy Kastl. Nancy and I discussed testing and the future of the testing profession. The future of testing is not cut and dry; in the short run more automation and in the long-term more codeless testing and AI might replace entry-level testers. An eye-opening interview!

 

Teams are to agile as the atom is to classic physics!

Teams are more than names on paper!

Teams are to agile as the atom is to classic physics. In our article, “Simple Checklist: Are They A Team?”, we began exploring what makes a bunch of people into a team by establishing seven basic questions that need to be asked about behavior and organization. Once we have established that a group of people are a team, it is important to establish what predicts whether a team will be a good team. In order to avoid my cognitive biases, I asked 10 Scrum Masters, managers of Scrum Masters, successful entrepreneurs and Released Train Engineers; that is, people that are highly skilled at working with teams.  Four categories of attributes that emerged (in descending order) are:

 

Simple Checklist: Are They A Team?

Teams like cooking is about people.

We use Scrum or any of the team-based agile methods for many reasons. Working as a team with an agile mindset:

• Provides an understanding of how what we are doing fits into the bigger picture.
• Furnishes the transparency needed to keep track of work with less overhead.
• Focuses work on deliverables.
• Avoids the peril of being interrupt-driven (and its nefarious sibling, multitasking).

 

Guest Post: Why are Team Charters more than just identifying roles?

Team Charters aren’t nuts!

By Jeremy Berriault

A couple of weeks ago, during a conversation, the topic of Team Charters came up. The person I was speaking with was starting to move their development shop to agile delivery and was getting some advice from me.

 

Guest Post: From Story Points to Test Driven Development – A Dev Team Story

From Story Points to Test Driven Development – A Dev Team Story

By Rebecca Schira

I’ve been supporting agile teams for almost six years. What is the one common issue I’ve seen across many teams and two companies during that time? Everyone loves story points or at least proclaims to love them. But why? The common answers we’ve all heard -they’re easier to understand, they’re a good way to do a gut check, etc. Without fail, each and every one of these teams sucked at estimating how much work they could accomplish.