All posts by Markus Gärtner

Imagine…

Imagine a world of work in which we no longer fight about agile or not agile, Scrum or not Scrum, Kanban or not Kanban.

Imagine a team that continuously adds value while providing the needed information for the business to have the company thrive.

Imagine what would be possible in such a world, and what would stop working.

I think at the heart of agile software development once stood this imagination, resulting in all the different things we see in the agile cosmos today.

Unfortunately, this imagination sort of has been replaced by all the discussions we have around this vs. that. To maybe bring back these initial driving thoughts, I send you off to the weekend with your own imagination, hoping that you will bring back that agile essence next week.

Release trains – let’s critique the metaphor

A couple of years back, while I was involved in a group that eventually created the ScALeD principles, we were of course discussing the benefits of the different scaling approaches out there. One of the participants – I think it was Andreas Schliep – mentioned to me that the release train concept in the scaling approach that Mike Beedle always referred to as S_Fe was pretty clever. Since I spent some amount of time on trains in the past twelve years, I tend to disagree. Let’s see how I perceive the release train metaphor based on my experiences in the German train infrastructure.

The only picture I managed to take upon arriving in Bielefeld Hbf. after riding the ICE train called Bielefeld.
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Remembering Jerry Weinberg: More Secrets of Consulting

It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, we continue the topic of consulting as I picked More Secrets of Consulting – The Consultant’s Tool Kit published by Dorset House in 2002.

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Remembering Jerry Weinberg: The Secrets of Consulting

It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, I picked the classic The Secrets of Consulting – A guide to giving & getting advice successfully published by Dorset House in 1985.

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Remembering Jerry Weinberg: The Psychology of Computer Programming

It’s been four years since – sadly – Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg passed away. Ever since then, I struggled with some public mourning about him, until recently I had just the right idea. On a weekly basis, I will publish a review of a book I read that Jerry either wrote himself or is about some of his work. Today, I picked the classic The Psychology of Computer Programming in its Silver Anniversary Edition from 1998, the original being published in 1971.

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Testing and Management Mistakes: The Inner Team

I found this old draft blog entry while going through some older blog entries. Since this has been laying around for many years now, I figured, it should be time to publish it now. Enjoy.

A couple of years ago Michael Bolton started a blog series on testing and management mistakes, to which I contributed four follow-up blog entries with an introduction, replacing blaming with placating, congruent responses, and causes. All of this was based on a single psychological model, or better, my understanding of it after having read through most of Jerry Weinberg’s work.

Recently I started to dive into some topics in psychology. While working through work from Schulz von Thun, I remembered this series when I crossed the idea of the inner team. I decided to revisit the original conversation and discuss it in the light of the inner team.

Schulz von Thun describes the inner team as a collective of personalities that each of us develops and carries with us. In any conversation, we face the struggle of forces for or against an argument. We also have a team leader, which could be stronger developed with some of us, or weaker, thereby yielding to different responses – sometimes even incongruent ones depending on the inner team member that cries the loudest at any given time.

Let’s revisit the conversation of the project manager asking a tester to work over the weekend, and take a closer look at the inner team within this tester.

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