Technologies
- I need to learn Ruby
- Learn Cucumber
- Play with Vagrant (thanks Patrick Debois and Julian Simpson)
- Git (it's time to move on from subversion Scott!)
Agile Practice
- Introduce games to help improve retrospectives. I learned the 5 Whys, timeline, and movie conversations games.
- Develop a "kaizen mind" by creating and sizing kaizen stories with acceptance criteria (based on a lunch conversation with Jeff Sutherland)
- Assume someone is trying to kill your project everyday. Use the daily scrum's self-organization to perform your evasive maneuvers. Jeff Sutherland compared this to his days as a fighter pilot.
- Update my coaching material for self-organizing teams and introduce some new games (60 steps in 60 seconds and the single file line)
- Update my coaching material for ScrumMasters - the ScrumMaster is the friend to the team. How many PMs can say that about themselves?
- Explore how focusing on positive emotions can enhance sprint planning and backlog preparation, see http://www.unc.edu/peplab. Must counter each negative emotion with three positive emotions to maintain balance.
- Read up on vagal tone
Observations
- Jez Humble embodies his name: humble. Cool guy based on my 30 minute conversation with him.
- Find @ernestmeuller from NI and talk with him about windows devops
- Waterfall optimizes for utilization, lean optimizes for cycle time (with the slack going to kaizen)
- "Great teams change people's lives" (Jeff Sutherland)
