Building the Penny Flipping game using Clojure, ClojureScript and PubNub Author’s note: A portion of this post was also published on PubNub’s blog If you have ever attending a lean or agile process training, then you may have encountered a coin flipping game. It goes by several names, including the lean penny game or “pass […]

How do you blend a distributed offshore team with your in-house development team? Our teams are based around Latin America and our clients are often in the United States. When you want to hire a team from another part of the world and have them blend in seamlessly with your own development team, there are […]

Software development is by its nature a very creative process. Obviously graphic design is an art form, but there is also an art to the technical architecture of a project, the coding style, the way you test, and the interaction design. Those roles are filled by multiple people on a single project, each one bringing […]

At AgilityFeat, we are a very distributed and very agile team. Culture is important for any team, but it’s even more important for distributed teams because you need a strong culture to overcome the possible inefficiencies of doing work remotely. There are many ways we have learned to cultivate the culture of our team, but […]

If you’re looking for a couple hours of agile video to watch, a way to help you go to sleep at night, or just from free agile training, then I present to you the following videos. Our development team at AgilityFeat is spread out around Central America. When we bring on a new team member, […]

“How do we get started?” This is a question we hear from clients all the time, often it’s the first question they ask after signing a contract. Most clients are familiar with the concepts of Agile at that point, including the processes and artifacts that will make a project a success but they are stuck […]

As a recovering agile coach*, I’m sometimes asked a question about the make up of an ideal agile team. The idea of having scrum teams around 7-9 people is well known. It’s also well known that they should be cross disciplinary, and that there are only 3 official team roles in Scrum: Scrummaster, Product Owner, […]

2014 is only 9 days old and before we get too far into the new year, we wanted to take a look back at our top posts from 2013. We covered a great deal of ground last year on our blog, including our experiences developing products via distributed agile, Ruby on Rails, our perspectives on […]

Sprint length is a topic of debate for companies employing Scrum. In my opinion, there is no one “right” length for sprints because of the myriad of factors that influence how effective a specific sprint length can be for a company. Availability of stakeholders, the stage of the company and experience with scrum are all […]

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. The development of the internet has made creating and selling a product or service more accessible to more people than ever before. New technologies are dropping development costs while marketing and distribution costs are also decreasing. While some record executives might tell you that this is a bad thing, the rest of […]

Last week I was working with an entrepreneur friend, who is building his product with a distributed team. His group includes people on both coasts of the United States as well as a two person team in western Europe. Throughout the course of our discussion it became clear that many of the challenges he is […]

We’re excited to announce that our resident rockstar, Arin will be make a repeat appearance at the Lean Startup Conference. He’s been asked to return to the conference, this time as mentor following his electrifying “Just Deploy It!” speech at the 2012 Lean Startup Conference. Tickets for the event are still available here.    

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Boston’s Lean Startup Circle, titled “Sprinting Towards Innovation”. Lead by C. Todd Lombardo the Principal Innovation Catalyst at Constant Contact, the evening was a very hands-on event that focused on a process for innovation. This particular process, typically held over a 5-7 period was condensed into just […]

Agile methodologies in software development have been around for a long time.  The Agile Manifesto was written almost 13 years ago in fact. Initially a hit with developers who were struggling to find a better way to build software, Agile thinking has been adopted across organizations in a variety of ways as technology managers shared […]

If agile development were easy, everyone would be doing it. Or at least doing it better. On October 18th AgilityFeat CEO/Founder Arin Sime (that’s me) is presenting at InnovateVirginia on “5 reasons you’ll love to hate agile development.” In this talk I go beyond the hype about faster and more efficient software development teams and […]

Last weekend I attended Lean Startup Machine in Boston. It was a learning-packed 72 hours and I think all entrepreneurs should attend one. In addition to the hands-on exercises applying Lean Startup Methodologies, it was a great way to meet other entrepreneurs and be energized by their passion for solving problems. The experience put my […]

“So how do you ever tell your customers how much something costs?” My cousin asked me that question as I tried to explain to him what we do at AgilityFeat. My cousin is the CFO of a major division of a large multinational European company. He knows numbers really well, so it was no surprise […]

Has your company adopted lean or agile, but it still hasn’t quite sunk into your culture? You may want to incorporate some lean games into your next company retreat or all-hands meeting. Games can be a great way to have fun, do some team building (without cheesy “trust falls”), and learn something along the way. […]

Branching code is a bit of a pain. And agile teams need to do more of it typically. This is because we are balancing new features with production bug fixes, and working in short scrum sprints while also keeping an eye on longer term visions for our product. As an agile coach, I am often […]

  At AgilityFeat, we work by applying Agile methodologies in a distributed manner. Our clients are generally based in the US while our team members are located in Costa Rica, Nicaragua as well as the US (Charlottesville and Boston). Recently, I’ve had a few discussions with prospective clients who ask about how we manage daily […]

When I do agile coaching for our clients, I hear a lot of Yesbuts. That’s when I say something that agile teams are supposed to do (like short iterations or frequent releases), and the client says “Yes, but…” There are always lots of reasons (or excuses) why a client won’t buy into agile principles right […]

Last week I went to the Lean Start-up Meetup in Boston where Florian Motlik of Codeship lead a discussion with Amos Benninga from GrabCad, Dan Rowe from ETSY and Ken Eimer from InsightSquared on Continuous Deployment. The presentation was excellent, a great mix of best practices and practical application. Their comments rang true with our experiences [...]

UX Magazine had an article last month by Michael Lai entitled “UX and Agile: Tying the knot”, which used a great marriage analogy to discuss how UX and agile are and must be intertwined. At AgilityFeat we are very passionate about both UX and agile methods, so this article certainly spoke to me. Michael emphasizes [...]

Luxr.co has been providing great content for accelerators on Lean Startup methods for a while, and now they are launching an monthly subscription model that we can all use to access their content. This looks like a very exciting offering with input from several friends of AgilityFeat such as Sam McAfee and Patrick Vlaskovits. Here’s [...]

When teams move to Scrum from a more chaotic development method, there is often a struggle with convincing the new Product Owner (or the business folks that they report to) that the team cannot be retargeted on a whim. A benefit of Scrum is that teams get to focus heads down on a set of [...]

I’d like to share with you a common cadence that we are using on agile teams that I coach, and also on many of AgilityFeat’s development teams with our clients. For an agile team to get into a solid rhythm of work, they need to have a set cadence of sprints. This means that demos [...]

Recently I was in a meeting with one of our clients at AgilityFeat. The project lead at the client made a simple, but very powerful statement as we presented an assessment and proposal. “One of our challenges is that we need to learn to accept simplicity.” I love simplicity, and breaking complex systems down into [...]

How’s your year going? Ours has been crazy-busy. That means we haven’t blogged as much as we’d like over the last month, but nonetheless we’ve got some important and hard-learned lessons to share with you. We’ve just gone through a period of intense deadlines and some long weekends at AgilityFeat, but we made it to [...]

Not every project is going to run smoothly, even in the best of teams. We have a great team here at AgilityFeat, and we’re very selective when choosing our customers, so our projects tend to be very successful. But every team is going to hit bumps in the road sometimes, and we’re not immune to [...]

Whether you are a bleeding edge startup or a large corporation running agile teams, here are four ways that you may be abusing agile concepts and letting perfection kill your chances of success. Product Owner Perfection In an agile team, the Product Owner (PO) is the “voice of the customer” to the development team.  They [...]

Project on-boarding is key to success Step two is always a question mark. It’s one of my favorite meme’s on the internet. Some joker on a message board will say they have a great idea, and their business plan usually goes something like the image on the left. It’s a light hearted way to poke [...]

How do you convince engineers that it’s okay to build quick experiments, and deploy code that you will probably throw away? How do you convince rigorous engineers that it’s actually more efficient to work in a lean startup style? That is a topic that Sam McAfee from Change.org addressed during a panel at the LeanStartupConference [...]

Who’s ever heard of a telecom lean startup? That’s sort of what Twilio is, and it’s a pretty cool company and interesting case study. When I attended the LeanStartup.co conference in San Francisco recently, one of the parts I was most excited about was the tour of area companies. The first tour that I did [...]

Yesterday, I went to The Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. It was a full day of incredible presentations, fireside chats (without the fires), sharing of lessons learned and of course networking. This was my first Lean Startup conference and I was blown away by the diversity of ways Lean thinking is impacting the world [...]

Here are the slides that I used last night at the Lean Startup Conference‘s Ignite talks.  I am indebted to Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein of The Lean Startup Conference for giving me the opportunity to present.  I have spoken at a good number of conferences before and given a lot of talks, most of [...]

Want to get a sneak peak at what to expect at the DareToBeLean conference? Well, here’s your chance! On November 15th at 12:30 EST, AgilityFeat will present a “fireside chat”, interwebs-style with Patrick Vlaskovits. You already know Patrick from his book, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development. He’s written a new book called The Lean [...]

CIO magazine posted an article this week entitled “7 Tips to Offshore Agile Development”, and they got it mostly right, but I would like to add 4 more tips that I think are critical to effective agile outsourcing. Stephanie Overby wrote these 7 tips: Be prepared (with standard tools and communication rules) Start small (use [...]

Time for a demo of wishlisting.org!  In this post I will give you a demo of the current features, and then we will step through a couple of the automated tests that we have in place for the site. Using wishlisting.org to teach agile… First let me give you some background. Wishlisting.org is a service [...]

My wife and I love the TV show “The Big Bang Theory.” And given the name of the show, this clip is particularly funny to me because software betas are discussed in the context of a relationship. Leonard and Penny are flirting with the idea of dating again, and in his usual slightly awkward way, [...]

Today’s your last day to see what the buzz is about Sensei and Agile Retrospectives at Agile 2012!  Lithespeed has launched their Sensei product into beta, and we at AgilityFeat are particularly proud of it because our team of Costa Rican Code Commandos built it! We’ve been working with Lithespeed and their awesome Product Owner [...]

Get your green now before it’s too late!  Green Cucumber tests, that is. This is the last day of the Agile Dev Lab at the Agile 2012 conference, where we are working on the website wishlisting.org for charities to use for very specific fundraising needs.  Our beta client is AHIP, and you can donate online [...]

I hinted at it previously, but now the fancy landing page is ready and I am proud to invite you to join us in Costa Rica in early 2013 for an awesome 3 day hands on workshop for entrepreneurs! The workshop is called Dare To Be Lean, and you can learn more here: DareToBeLean.AgilityFeat.com We [...]

The Potential Pitfalls of Outsourced Development If you are looking for a nearshore agile team for a project there are some common problems to look out for, or you risk losing time and money. The short and sweet summary of these problems is: people aren’t always who they claim to be. Body shops An outsourcing [...]

Words to know and live by for a lean Startup Here at Agility Feat we use Lean methods to keep our business responsive and effective. But what does it mean to be Lean? Listed below are some of the core concepts of being Lean that we follow, and how it has helped make us better [...]

David Alfaro and I had a good conversation with Jon Tonti from Nearshore Americas earlier this week that led to a nice blog post about the benefits of using agile in nearshore projects.  You can read the full post here: http://nearshoreamericas.com/agile-nearshore-software-development/ As we all said in the article, it’s very hard to implement agile practices [...]

Retrospectives are important at higher levels than just your individual projects. At AgilityFeat we also hold retrospectives within our company and across our projects regularly. This is so we can look for patterns across our most successful projects and also learn from projects that had more challenges. These retrospectives also keep our team members informed [...]

How to have a well run remote standup session with your team. Standups are a key part of the agile and scrum process. Each standup is a time for our team to sync up with each other and the customer. It is also an opportunity to let our customer know of any unexpected delays or [...]

Congratulations to Dave Haeffner for having his Agile 2012 submission “Selenium Users Anonymous” accepted!  Dave will be leading a “counseling” session for Selenium users at Agile 2012 in Dallas.  The conference is from August 13 – 17 2012 and you can get more information at agile2012.agilealliance.org. Dave Haeffner is the Chief Quality Officer at AgilityFeat, [...]

Today we held the first of many future “AgilityCasts”, where we record a short presentation by one of our team members on a topic related to agile software development, nearshore agile development in Costa Rica, or anything that suits our fancy. These sessions are meant to be pretty informal, and while we are using powerpoint, [...]

Last week we just finished up the kick off for a new project in the AgilityFeat Costa Rica offices.  This is a fast growing area of business at AgilityFeat and one I am very pleased about, so I would like to take a little time to describe to you how a kick off week might [...]

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with estimation.  I find the topic fascinating.  Estimation is like a car wreck, it’s hard not to slow down some and take a look, even if you know it’s wrong and you are afraid of what you might see. As my views on software development have changed over the [...]

Dave Haeffner and I are proud to announce a new workshop on Acceptance Test Driven Development using Cucumber and Ruby that we are offering in 2012.  The workshop will initially be taught as private courses to companies, so if you are interested in a quote, please contact me at Arin@AgilityFeat.com or 434.996.5226. ATDD Kick-Start with [...]

I’m excited to be part of a great upcoming agile event in the Charlottesville area! VGT (Video Gaming Technologies) in Ruckersville is hosting an evening of agile in a few weeks in coordination with AgileCville and Impact Makers.  There going to be multiple speakers, free food, and this event is being promoted in Richmond as [...]

Would competition in a game help create engagement and conversation, or stifle the conversation in favor of “one-ups man ship”? That was one of the questions that came up when I led a session of Agile Failure Pattern Poker last month at the Agile Iowa meeting. I’ve played this game in a few settings now, [...]

If you’re looking for a fun way to kick off discussions of difficult topics, then failure bows may work for you. In September I was at the Agile Coach Camp US (#ACCUS) in Columbus Ohio.  Friday was “Games Day”, devoted to fun ways to engage agile teams with games. Tobias Mayer led the “keynote game”, [...]

I tend to write blog posts that are too long.  Which is why sometimes I don’t blog as often as I should. But I really want to share everything with you that I learned at Agile Coach Camp US (#ACCUS) in Columbus Ohio last week. So instead of a long blog post that I feel [...]

Developing software for the cloud can make test-driven development more complicated, but not impossible. In this article that I wrote for TechWell.com and StickyMinds.com, I offer advice for continuing good development practices in the face of challenges from cloud hosting and distributed computing. To see the article, visit either site: TechWell.com or StickyMinds.com Bookmark It [...]

This article was published in Sogeti’s QANews on September 30, 2011. See their article here Acceptance tests are a great way to improve collaboration between testers, developers, and customers. When all three parties agree ahead of time how to test the feature, it makes it more likely the developer will deliver working code. Automating those […]

What is the ideal contract model to use with sub-contractors, and is it any different than you would use with a lead contractor? I’m curious myself, and so I’ll just post a couple of quick thoughts and I encourage you to share your thoughts with me. In July my local agile user group, AgileCville, focused [...]

Are you looking for an inexpensive way to learn agile methods?  Improve your agile engineering practices?  Or learn about how agile methods are being employed in government?  AgileDC is the place for you! I’m very pleased to be speaking on Agile Estimation techniques at AgileDC on Wednesday Oct 26 at the Kellogg Conference Hotel in [...]

Why are some developers so afraid of commitment? I’m not talking about relationships, but something equally as important. Committing your code to a repository before it goes stale or you lose the changes. I’ve witnessed a couple of different scenarios this year that drive me a little nuts: I’ll commit as soon as I’ve got [...]

How do Lean principles complement and reinforce the roles in a Scrum project?  That was one question on my mind as I drove up to the Agile Leadership Network DC meeting, held in Tysons Corner.  People sometimes discuss Scrum, XP, Kanban, and Lean as competing agile methodologies instead of focusing on all the common values [...]

What’s the deal with story points and agile estimation techniques, and why can’t we just improve our estimates over time?  That’s part of the question that a friend of mine asked recently, and I’m going to respond to it in this blog post. My friend is relatively new to agile and so he has been [...]

The Innovate Virginia conference will be held in Richmond, Virginia, on Friday September 16th, and I am proud to be one of the speakers there.  It will be an excellent one-day conference bringing together many excellent speakers in a cost effective and local setting perfect for the many teams around Virginia who are learning about [...]

This past Tuesday at AgileCville we had a series of lightning talks on “Agile for Newbies.”  The meeting went very well, and I’ll provide a brief recap of it here. Thanks go to RallySoftware, who sponsored the meeting this month and provided pizza, and also provided their Iteration Planning guides as handouts.  Their guides were [...]

Have you ever been asked for a rough estimate, and then later regretted giving a “rough” estimate because the customer tried to hold you to it? A familiar story This week I spoke with an agile coaching colleague of mine, and he relayed a story that rang all too true.   The team is working on [...]

What’s this agile stuff all about?  Come to the next AgileCville meeting and find out! Our next Agile Cville meeting will be on Tuesday June 28th, from 6-8pm at OpenSpace in Charlottesville.  Please note that the date has changed from our regular 3rd Tuesday due to a personal conflict I had on the previous Tuesday. [...]

Have you ever faced prioritizing a long list of stories or requirements and thought, “This is going to take forever!” I have, and so I was thrilled to learn a technique at XP2011 that helps with this dilemma. I had a chance last week to apply “Silent Grouping” with a client, and since I found [...]

On Wednesday September 28th, I’ll be speaking at the Verify/ATI Conference 2011 in Arlington Virginia at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. According to the recently published schedule at the VerifyATI website, I’m in the 2:15-3:15 time slot. I’ll be leading a session in the Automated Tools & Implementations section on “Continuous Automated Browser Testing With Selenium […]

As mentioned in a previous post, we played a game last night at AgileCville’s meeting last night that was fun and definitely kept the conversation going. We had some very good discussions around a number of agile topics, and so that itself is the strongest indication that the game had the desired effect. Prior to [...]

Let’s play an agile game! Tomorrow will be the next Agile Cville meeting at OpenSpace in Charlottesville, from 6-8pm.  The topic this month is “Agile Failure Patterns”, and I agreed to kick off the discussion.  Rather than start off the meeting with power point, I think we’ll try a game instead to get the discussion [...]

Last month the QANews newsletter by Sogeti was released, and I was pleased to have an article I wrote on Agile Database Testing published in it.  I’ve reproduced the article below, and you can also see the original article here. Agile Database Testing Testing database changes Testing is rarely easy, and is more often thankless. […]

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to two undergrad business classes at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce.  The students are primarily accounting and finance majors, with a few engineering majors thrown in for good measure.  I provided an overview of Agile methods to the class, and we did an exercise […]

I’m getting very excited for the XP2011 conference coming up in Madrid in May.  I was also very excited to have my lightning talk on range estimation accepted to the conference.  If you’ll be at the conference, I hope you’ll stop by! My lightning talk is in the Decision Making section, room S242, on Wednesday [...]

Tonight at the AgileCville user group meeting, we discussed Scrum in Schools.  This was a roundtable discussion of group members, and it was very interesting.  Paul Erb kicked off the discussion for us.  Paul is an Agile Cville regular, as well as the business manager at Tandem Friends School in Charlottesville.  Paul considers agile more [...]

About a month ago I was working with a team planning another iteration for the project, when we had an interesting discussion about how to manage our burndown. On all of our previous sprints, our burndowns were based on hours.  That is, for each day of the sprint, team members would revise their estimates of [...]

I’ve heard other Agile Coaches say that leading a team through any change is as much about coaching them on their personal interactions as it is training them on the mechanics of Agile methodologies.  I was reminded of that insight when I recently read a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Make 2011 the Year of [...]

That Sinking Feeling When a project starts to go wrong, you know it well before you admit it to yourself or your customer.  You know that feeling when you start to realize you don’t have enough budget, time, or the scope is unachievable? Long after we first get that sinking feeling, we may delay the [...]

Have you ever heard that oil and water don’t mix?  It’s pretty common knowledge that oil will float on top of water and the substances will not mix together.  This simple chemistry is easy to demonstrate, and most of us learned it in elementary school science. In the software development world, we also tend to [...]

If you are a consultant, even on an Agile team, you probably have to track your hours.  I used to hate tracking my hours – and I’ve seen first hand how it can demoralize people.  I once worked at a company where they decided to build an internal tracking system for us to put our [...]

Over the last year or so, I’ve been considering all the various lessons that I’ve learned throughout my IT career, and in particular during the last few years as I’ve really embraced Agile methodologies.  I realized that there is a definite intersection between many of my lessons learned, the types of experiences I’ve had, and [...]

You may have heard it said that the best Agile teams are cross-functional in nature. That means that each person on the team is capable of working in multiple functional silos (database, service layer, presentation layer, testing, etc). A cross functional team is well suited to agile projects because you can easily trade tasks among [...]

If I could promise you returns of 6:1 on a project in a single year, would you take it? That is a pretty impressive return for a project, and most businesses would be happy to run a project that will yield that sort of return. Essentially, this is the type of benefit that hiring an […]