Finding better ways of developing software

Video tutorial: Managing your Scrum Product Backlog with the help of a simple Excel sheet

Fri, 2008-04-25 08:11 — Artem
In this tutorial I demonstrate how you can manage your Scrum Product Backlog in a very simple Excel sheet based on a popular free template. Watch this screencast if you want to get started with Scrum. You will see how to get started, how to detail, inject and remove requirements, how to build burndown and velocity charts.

You can download the somewhat lower quality version of the tutorial from Google Video.

The size of the video above might be a little small for you to pick up all of the detail in the screen cast. For a larger version click on the post title

A Tasty Team Building Exercise

Sun, 2008-05-11 23:09 — JurgenAppelo

CookingA good team building exercise which (at least to me) is preferable over helicopter droppings, mountain climbing and mud wrestling, is to invite a bunch of colleagues for an evening of cooking.

Team Building
I regularly organize these team building events so that employees have a chance to get to known each other, to improve communications, and to show off my Italian kitchen. On such an occasion six of my colleagues come over to my place, usually straight from work, and when they arrive I hand out some copies of different Italian recipes (after hiding the expensive wines and having made sure that all ingredients and cheaper wines are prominently displayed and ready for use). These team members have no experience in cooking together, while some of them have never had to cook their own dinner at all. And on top of that they are working in a kitchen they have never used before.