Archive for category tools

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
Virtual Story Board in Google Drawing
… [Read More]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I’ll Pet Him and Squeeze Him and Call Him Agile

Posted by David Bland in agile, project management, tools on July 14, 2009

I’ve read through Scott Ambler’s IBM blog about the Agile Process Maturity Model several times, and his points are lost on me. His over engineered solution is the antithesis of agile. I do find some comfort that Kent Beck, Dave Thomas and others are not blindly adopting it either. IBM seems to be posturing for [...]

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Cut the MS Project Cord Already

Posted by David Bland in agile, tools on May 22, 2009

In a recent discussion over on the AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com Blog, I raised my concerns about the mind boggling need for expert MS Project skills in Agile/Scrum job postings. Laszlo Szalvay’s response was an enlightening one: I think of the top 3 agile tools on the market (v1, scrumworks and rally) only ScrumWorks does not have a [...]

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