Archive for the 'twitter' Category

15
Feb

Retroflection

By Don Ardonio 0 Comments
Categories: agile, management, product owner, scrum and twitter

I’ve been following retroflection for a while now and I promised myself time and again that I would take some time out to write up an answer. But first of all, let me say thanks to Yves for doing this. I may be a rather quiet follower most of the time, but I have enjoyed many of the retroflections so far and hope that by the end someone is clever enough to put all of them, with comments and reactions, in a single something (I smell a possible book release…)

To the point though. Today’s retroflection: “What made you ashamed of yourself today?”

I’m mostly ashamed of how I let the state of our backlog degrade. We’re mid sprint (2 week sprints, this is the start of week 2) and we have an upcoming backlog grooming/planning session on Wednesday. Today is generally the day where I take time to sit down with our product owner and start pushing him on unknowns in the backlog, getting the priorities right, questioning requirements and in general make sure that the engineers have something they can actually work from by Wednesday. Lately however I’ve largely neglected the backlog (not looking for an excuse) and it’s now grown into an unorganized cancer of stories that have little relevance, even less description and it just looks downright ugly.

So I’ll use today’s retroflection as a reminder to myself that backlog maintenance is a daily task for a scrum master and that I shouldn’t let the backlog get to this point again.

25
Aug

Twitter

By Don Ardonio 1 Comment
Categories: communication and twitter

For those of you who don’t know yet, twitter is a micro blogging platform. Meaning you can post a short message (140 characters) to update people that care enough to follow you of your current ideas, activity, whereabouts or other piece of genius that fits the char limit.

I’ve been on there for some time now and, after a getting started period, must say that it somewhat changed me. I’m not going to make this one of these "10 reasons why I love twitter" type of posts, but let’s just make clear that twitter delivers instant news/headlines in bite size packages.

The people that I follow are carefully selected to keep the signal to noise ratio high. Basically, when they are going wild about something or another, chances are high I will be interested in that subject also. And since it’s only a short blimp of information, I’ll make a snap judgement to invest more time in it or not. The thing is, I got the info at hand (google), and a lot of what’s interesting is pre-filtered through people that deeply care about topics I would otherwise never dig into. So I get a lot of inspiration and topics handed by a variety of people and all I have to do is look at what’s relevant to me. Great, isn’t it :)

There’s 2 evolutions I’m waiting on:

1. Politicians making more active use of twitter. I know some people are trying (Barack Obama, Yves Leterme, Elio Di Rupo, … ) but I’m looking for more activity. Keep us posted on thoughts, ideas, developments in your world, … anything basically. Maybe we’ll catch something that inspires us. Not just during campaign…

2. What I’ll be looking at next is probably a way (yahoo pipes) to filter a bunch of RSS feeds from news sites into a twitter feed. Not because I don’t want to have their RSS feed, but because I want headlines in a centralized place (let’s say, only the soccer news for the Belgian first Division).