New(s)

Recently, Dave Rael, interviewed me for the Developer on Fire podcast. Our conversation ranged far and wide, but never strayed far from the central theme of learning and life. Hope you enjoy listening!

At Agile2016, Ainsley Nies and I met with Dave Prior and the LeadingAgile media crew to discuss the newly published second edition of our book, Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams.

There’s this thing…as Jim (James Shore) and I have mentioned before, in the early days of Agile we would visit teams and hear, “This is the best job I’ve ever had. I love this work.” People who were doing Agile (usually Extreme Programming) were excited about it, they shared it with others, who did it, and got excited. But at some point, someone shared it with someone who got excited about it and shared it but didn’t DO it, so their sharing lost a bit of fidelity, like a copy of a copy.

In December 2011, cbsnews.com published an article by Dave Logan, Ph.D., author of Tribal Leadership, suggesting that “work-life balance “ is a crock, an idea whose time has come and gone. Although I too have felt that this is an unrealistic ideal, I’m not so sure that I could clearly articulate what I do believe about this idea. I decided to take a look at some other current commentators writing about work and life balance. Here’s a sample of what I found:

David Greuse at Convergence Design, noted that “…we reject the notion of work-life balance, although...

When the rains came down and the flood waters rose in Nashville TN one month ago, it became clear the Agile Alliance would have to “respond to change” rather than “following the plan” for our annual Agile 2010 conference—with the conference scheduled to open in only 14 weeks.

Tom Cagley posted an interview with me at his Software Process and Measurement-Cast blog. Tom begins the podcast with part 7 in his series of audio essays, "Traceability, A Radical Approach Based on User Involvement." The interview with me starts about 25% of the way in. We discuss Agile, Agile Adoptions, Retrospectives and upcoming events.