Below is the detailed outline for my August 8, 1:30-5:00PM Technical Debt Workshop in Agile 2011. I look forward to meeting you and interacting with you in the conference before, during and after this workshop!

Best,

Israel

Technical Debt: Assessment and Reduction Part I: Technical Debt in the Overall Context of the Software Process A Holistic Model of the Software Process Two Aspects of Output Three Aspects of Technical Debt Five Aspects of Software Part II: What Really is Technical Debt? What’s in a Metaphor? Code Analysis Time is Money Monetizing Technical Debt Typical Stakeholder Dialog Around Technical Debt Analysis of the Cassandra Code Project Dashboard Part III : Case Study – NotMyCompany, Inc. NotMyCompany Highlights Modernizing Legacy Code Error Proneness Part IV: The Tricky Nature of Technical Debt The Explicit Form of Technical Debt The Implicit Read more …

Over the past few years I had the privilege of carrying out numerous technical debt engagements for Cutter. The typical makeup of these engagements is: A) align the various stakeholders through a one day workshop on technical debt; B) measure the technical debt; C) devise a plan to reduce it; and, D) work with the client to implement the debt reduction plan. The Cutter Consortium case study here describes how we simultaneously addressed the strategic, tactical and operational needs of one of our clients through such engagement.

These days we are starting to break new grounds in technical debt research, analysis and field work by integrating technical debt techniques in the fabric of Cutter’s client companies. Specifically, we make technical debt techniques an integral part of both the software process and the business process. We drive the software process through Read more …

Software Engineering Radio, the world’s leading podcast on software development, published an episode on “10 Years of Agile Experience” yesterday. In this podcast Marcus Völter interviews me about introducing agile technology to different organizations, the experiences I made doing this job in the last 10 years, and stratgies I derive from this experience. The podcast was recorded in January at OOP 2008 in Munich.

This is the second post on the German book “Evolutionary Management” by Klaus-Stephan Otto and others. If you missed my first post on this, you may want to start there.

Traditionally evolution is connected with fight and competition. Darwin phrased the mechanisms “Survival of the Fittest”, which is often interpreted as “Survival of the Strongest”. Otto and his colleagues point out that modern biologists have a slightly different view on this: It’s not the fittest who survive but the unfittest who die out. In other words you don’t have to be best, it is enough not to be the worst – an observation you can also make in today’s economy. In addition Otto points out, that most interactions between species are based on collaboration rather than competition: Bacteria help mammals including humans Read more …

I recently ran into a book by a German psychologist and executive consultant on “Evolutionary Management” (If you speak German, you may be interested in the full reference below). Since this book is not published in English (yet?), I’d like to share some of their thoughts on this blog.

“Evolutionary Management” sees itself as counter concept to a traditional command-control management and as a further development of Systems Thinking as it has been discussed by Peter Senge for general management and Jerry Weinberg in the context of IT. Evolutionary Management analyzes the mechanisms and solutions evolution uses in the nature and maps them to organisational problems. The results sound strikingly familiar to Agilists, although the book comes from a completely different background.

One of the most interesting approaches is the comparison between the traditional “machine metaphor” of an organisation, and the Read more …

I don’t care if it works. It’s not our way. I don’t care if it’s expedient, effective or simpler. It’s not right. Those sound like counter-productive and potentially hostile kinds of comments.

NOW, put them in a different context.

CMMI. SAP. PMBOK. ITIL.

These are the cookbooks of organizational success. By following the recipes, we can ensure great success. My two analogies come from my kitchen. I’m the chief cook in our house, and I love it. I was a short-order cook in high school and college, and found the experiences at a small-town restaurant to be enlightening. First, I “roast” my turkey with an inch+ of water in the bottom of the roaster. Talk to a purist. They’ll tell you that’s heresy. Talk to my family. They’ll tell you I make a VERY tender, moist turkey. When I cook Read more …