Archive for category tools
Course Canvas
Posted by David Bland in agile, course canvas, kanban, scrum, tools on October 28, 2011
In attempting to create courses and workshops to educate people on agile techniques, I found that I’ve struggled to find the right flow.
So I created a tool to help me do just that.
Introducing the Course Canvas.
It uses techniques rooted in agile and visual management to allow me to craft a course with less effort than a cumbersome outline.
It is also a Minimum Viable Product, as I only built just enough to learn whether or not you will find it useful.
Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.
How to Create a Burndown Chart in Google Docs
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum, tools on May 3, 2011
A burndown chart can be used by an agile team to track their progress against a release plan. In its simplest form, the chart consists of time on the X axis and the amount of work on the Y axis.
You can choose to burn down on whatever metrics that are relevant to your team. Since I prefer burning down on story points against iterations, that is what we’ll use for this tutorial.
It only takes a Google Account, a few minutes of your spare time and best of all it’s free!
Create a Google Spreadsheet
How to Create a Virtual Story Wall in Google Docs
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum, tools on June 21, 2010
Google recently released an enhancement to Google Docs called Google Drawings. While you can use this is a kind of collaborative work space for wireframes as you might with Visio or Omnigraffle, I’ve found another use for it…
As a virtual story wall for distributed teams.
It only takes a Google Account, a few minutes of your spare time, and most of all it’s free.
Create a Google Drawing
… [Read More]
Top 5 Build Failure Sounds
Posted by David Bland in agile, humor, tools on March 25, 2010
I find continuous integration tools essential to Agile software development. One click CI software helps us seamlessly pair collective code ownership with frequent deployments. Yet as we all know there will come a time when the build fails, and we all must be held accountable. I’m not one to punish individual team members that trigger [...]
Distributed Video Standup
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum, tools on November 24, 2009
Distributed Teams need high bandwidth bidirectional communication to succeed, and the organization should provide these tools for collaboration. Luckily for us, Video Chat and Broadband are becoming more and more affordable so this is no longer an unrealistic goal. With a decent Video Chat setup you can teleconference with teams around the world and pick [...]
