A lot of writings about agile processes seem to assume that everyone comes with all the skills they need, but in the real world people sometimes need to gain new skills which cannot easily be learned “on the job”. Planning ahead enough to ensure team skills are available when needed, and dealing with the impact on development speed of people spending time on training or independent study rather than productive work seem like tricky problems.
Jooli Atkins has written a bit on this topic for the British Computer Society (BCS) Agile Training : Blogs : BCS
I’d be really interested to hear from anyone how they deal with this!
This looks like a neat idea. A presentation technique constrained to 20 slides, each of which gets exactly 20 seconds (with time for questions at the end).
I guess the logic is that of the Haiku or the 30-second TV ad. Setting extreme constraints squeezes out waste, forcing every word and image to pull as much weight as it can.
Pecha Kucha - Simon Brown
This looks interesting. The role of testing (at least, testing beyond unit-level regression testing and TDD) is the subject of much discussion where I work at the moment. Maybe I should actually attend this talk at Skills Matter in London on 18 September.
In The Brain of Gojko Adzic: Agile Acceptance Testing
The world is becoming a progressively stranger place. Now a company can buy a service to direct “phishing” attacks at its own employees. Such attacks send plausible appearing emails with instructions to click on a link and enter private details (or otherwise follow some dangerous series of steps).
Usually “phishing” is used by people wishing to steal money or identities, but in this case it is positioned as a technique to inform and train staff about the dangers of gullibility.
And to top it all, we get a new term “spear phishing” - the use of “phishing” techniques against specific targets.
Phish Your Colleagues With PhishMe — Security — InformationWeek
I love the idea of running training in an agile manner. Back when I was teaching I did something a bit like this. It seemed to work a lot better with evening students who had chosen to attend the course for their own benefit rather than the day students who just wanted a government handout and the quickest route to a qualification.
My approach was to list out everything remaining from the syllabus at the start of each lesson, and get the students to agree on what we should cover that session. I found that I still had to guide the learners quite a bit, though, as they found it difficult to choose between a bunch of things they knew nothing about.
I hope it works better with workplace learning - where the learners typically come to the course with some knowledge and a better understanding of what they want to gain from the study.
Agile Classroom Management (Agile Advice)
Intuitively it makes sense (to me at least) that investing in staff skills, knowledge, training and qualifications is not only a good investment socially, but also financially. After all, each person will be responsible for a huge number of tasks and decisions during even a short stay with an employer; if investing in improving that person improves the speed, quality, appropriateness or overall cost of even a few of those tasks and decisions, the benefits to the employer could be enormous.
So it’s nice to see that a financial study has agreed with this understanding.
KnowledgeAdvisors and Bassi Investments’ Human Capital Measurement Portfolio Outperforms S&P 500 by 15 Percent