Agile Awards 2010
Best Agile Programme/Project Manager 2010
UPDATE: Its a huge pleasure and honour to discover that I have been short listed for the Best Agile Programme/Project Manager award at the 2010 Agile Awards.This is a tremendous honour to be recognized by such a well respected peer group.
Best Agile Tool 2010
Fitnium has also been short listed for Best Agile Tool 2010. It's great to know that people are using Fitnium within an agile environment and getting real value out of it.Full details of the awards can be found at Agile Awards
Be Agile... Survive
Why Agile? - because in today's harsh economic climate you can't survive without it.
Businesses today cannot afford to enter into long drawn out Waterfall projects costing millions of pounds and taking months to realise business value. Today you need to respond to the ever changing business and economic climate faster than the competition.
Adopting Agile allows you to deliver products to market faster than your competition, for less money than your competition and far easier than your competition and still let your teams have fun.
Don't know what Agile can do for your -
- Customers . Find out how you can get the products you need, when you need them. Click Here.
- Managers. Find out how you can manage your customers expectations, exceeding them at ever step. Click Here.
- Developers. Find out to deliver better quality code, faster, cheaper and still have fun. Click Here.
- Testers. Find out how to drive quality from day one of development. Click Here.
- Analysts. Changing requirements, hard to define and priorities. Click Here.
4 Steps to Agile Understanding
There are a number of key ideas that under-pin the understanding of Agile :
Now you see the reasons Agile methods have come about, click here for a more detailed overview.Fitnium 2.0 Goes Beta
FitNium, a unqiue blend of FitNesse and Selenium is finally available, released under Apache License 2.0 its available to anyone to download and start using today.
Version has been completely rewritten to make the code base ( available ) to be more modular and flexible, in addition the following key features are incldued
- Support for the new SLiM Script Table, as well as the Fitnesse Do Fixture
- Almost Support 100% of Selenium API
- Support for latesst version of Fitnesse
- Support for the latests version of Selenium
- Support for nearly all the WaitFor APIs
- Full support for parameterisation and dynamic variables
- Dynamic Tokens which allow you to create dynamic data ( Time, Date, Telephone Numbers etc ) on the fly
- Full support for regular expressions on all APIs
- Shipped with Jetty to provide a test website for offline development
The current production version, 1.3.0, is still support and available for download, 2.0b1 is ideally for experienced Fitnium developers to explore and report issues
Find out more details on FitNium and to download it by clicking here
Recent Features
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Agile from the Trenches - A real world example
My last project was a 12 month greenfield development of a new broadband provisioning platform for a major ISP/Telco in the UK. I was the 2nd person to be recruited as Development/Project manager, the one other recruiter was a developer who was carrying out initial prototype work for the Enterprise Architecture team to prove that what was wanted by the business was actually achievable. The interview, in June 05, was pretty short, basically it went along the lines of "The business want X delivered by 1st Nov and they are not sure what X is, can you do it ?"
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Selling Agile to the Business
Agile can mean many things to many people, and that is often the crux of the issue when trying to sell the benefits of its approach to any business. To some it's a software development methodology, to others it's a way of thinking and to a few it's a religious cult that only the blessed may join.
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Delivery ( and why it matters )
One of the first questions I ask during an interview is "What was the last thing you delivered". It's always an interesting question to get in early during the interview as it tells a lot about a candidate. Firstly it tests whether they understand what is meant by "delivered", it also allows the interview to open up into a discussion of what they delivered, how they delivered and what they did once they had delivered it.
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Testing - A Second Class Career ?
So what makes good software ? Well for me its software that as been designed to meet the requirements of the customer, architected well so its flexible, easy to extend and has a long shelf life. It's also been designed well, using good software engineering practices and tested vigorously.
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CVs - Fact or Fiction ?
So how accurate is you current CV,I know mine is as accurate as my latest role, tailored specifically for the role I was applying for. However there is a difference between tailored CV for specific jobs and total disingenuous information. I have seven or eight CVs designed for specific roles I apply for, all highlighting the major points for the job in hand and playing down those points which are totally unsuitable for the interview. Who cares about my detailed knowledge and experience of java Security APIs when I am applying for a project or development manager role, but boy have I seen some howlers in my time.