The Background Here’s the background. I’m part of a small Scrum team that started work on a particular project over the summer. Our project manager, to whom most of the team reported organizationally, moved on from the company near the start of this project. We had a change of business analysts in September. I joined …
Jeff Patton at Agile NYC Meetup
A Man After My Own Sense of Humor Before meeting Jeff Patton in person, I already appreciated his sense of humor as I’ve been reading his book, “User Story Mapping.” His dry humor was no less apparent when I met him at a recent Agile NYC Meetup. When I arrived to hear Jeff’s presentation on …
Professional Scrum Master Certification
I earned the Professional Scrum Master I certification from Scrum.org today. The exam for this certification consists of 80 questions and has a one hour time limit. It was tougher than I expected. The questions that direct you to pick the best answer or the two best answers were tricky. There were several questions that …
The Agile Imposition
This post is a response to Daniel Mezick’s invitation to explain my position on “The Agile Imposition,” as posted on Twitter: You're invited to explain your position on "The #Agile Imposition" to the entire world. Via a blog post, podcast, social media post or Youtube video. The goal is to advance understanding, in service to…PROGRESShttps://t.co/8T4PGqa6Y4#inviteorimpose …
Have You Read the Scrum Guide?
(I originally posted this article at work for my colleagues.) Many of us are now working on Scrum teams, some starting recently and some for many months and more. Some of us have joined already existing, well-functioning Scrum teams. Some of us are founding members of teams that are trying to figure it out as …
Agile Day 2018
Above: Joe Krebs kicking off Agile Day 2018 at Pace University in NYC. I had the opportunity to attend Agile Day 2018 on September 5. It was wonderful! The schedule was jam-packed with fantastic speakers. There was great camaraderie among the attendees. It was a hot humid day in New York City but this event …
I Crossed All My T’s But Forgot to Dot My MQ
That face you make when it’s 10 PM on a Friday, you’re doing production release testing, and you realize your MQ Connection Factory wasn’t configured in the WebSphere admin console. Dang it.
A Musk Read
A few months back, on social media, I came across an article from Business Insider: “12 Books Elon Musk Thinks Everyone Should Read.” I was immediately intrigued by the list. Plus, I felt a bit of smugness seeing that Elon recommends two that I’ve read and love. Here’s the list from the article: The Lord …
A Journey of a Thousand Miles
A Journey of a Thousand Miles For quite some time I’ve thought about adding a blog to this website. I’ve had the domain for a number of years and have intended for it to contain meaningful content, as opposed to merely facilitating my email address at my-own-name-dot-com. All the networking/career-building advice I’ve read has concurred …