Category: interview

The 12 Best Questions for Team Members

November 18, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

In their book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman present the twelve best questions you can ask your team members to determine how they feel about their jobs.

These questions are the result of one of the largest research efforts ever performed on the topic of people management.

In order to get a feel of your team’s motivation, you would do well to use these questions as the basis for an in-depth conversation. You might want to do this in a formal way, with an objective interviewer and a linear scale of ratings, so that you can carry out some statistical analysis after the interviews. Or you can just do this informally, by pasting the list onto the coffee machine. And whenever you “coincidentally” meet someone while getting a cup of coffee, you make sure to point at one of the questions on the list and have a little chat about it.

Agile Success Story: interview on how Agile movement helps company to grow and succeed

October 23, 2008 by Przemysław Bielicki

Picture courtesy of M. Keefe@flickr

Last week I had a great fun and honour to interview Janusz Gorycki who is a partner and a team manager in an Agile Software Development company - Spartez. Janusz is also the author of the open-source screen capture and painting utility for Windows named Mazio.

In this interview I'm asking Janusz about how they founded their company and how agile movement helped them achieve success. I'm also asking how they see their agility, what problems they have and how they deal with them. Janusz also answers why you can be CMMI-compliant using agile methodologies and recommends steps by which you can start applying Agile practices in your company.

Is this interview about yet another agile company? Not really - Spartez is an extraordinary company composed of ordinary engineers who were not afraid of making their dreams come true. Their determination, team work, a bit of luck and an extreme agile spirit helped them be and work together and become successful. This is a real-life example how cross-functional team, where each member is an expert in some areas, is able to deliver any software to any customer. And how do I know this? I used to be a part of this team at Intel and know this team as well as each member pretty well, however I'm not affiliated with them anymore in any way.

If you are interested in getting to know how they started, what and how they do now, this article is for you. Maybe you will follow their dreams and ideas - I think it's worth.

Video: Artem on Agile tools and common sense

September 8, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Serena software and Valtech are gathering the "firsthand experiences from Agile users". It means that they ask many people about their stories and then publish them. The video interview with me just got published on YouTube. Enjoy it below and also check the project's YouTube channel. In the 4 min long interview I am telling about how it all got started, how Agile tools improved lately and about the common sense. Some parallels between MS Word and Agile tools are also included.

Certified Product Owner - interview with Mike Cohn

March 19, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Last week while taking the Certified Scrum Product Owner course in Oslo I had a pleasure to have an interview with our trainer Mike Cohn, an author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied. Mike shared his point of view on the value of yet another certified Scrum Alliance course and provided advices for those going to become Scrum Product Owners.