the ‘bee log

http://www.agileprogrammer.com/dotnetguy/…

Even a nascent Scrum practice is so much better than the straight-up waterfall or hacking/heroic-effort methods. At least you’ve established a short cycle that affords better management visibility and team correction. The daily scrum is a big, big benefit too.

Adding a seasoned coach to the team is quite a luxury. Let’s say you’re not going to get that (which is the case for 90% of small teams), someone with a passion and willingness to learn/read a lot is needed to bring agile practices into the picture.

I’d say if you a) have an early Scrum process and b) no budget for bringing on an agilist (is that a word?), add practices one-by-one. Once you’ve got Scrum mechanics down, master story planning next (IMO)… the Mike Cohn books are fantastic. In our experience that addition has gotten us the most bang for the buck so far.

Also: what’s nice about Scrum is that when you’re running a small ISV, you can use it as a generalized framework for project management across all teams (marketing, sales, development, etc.) The developers can take it and add XP-style practices as they ramp up w/ it…

Karsten Januszewski has a fantastic post on getting up to speed with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in five days over here.

More interesting than the subject — to me — is the structure of the article itself.

Karsten has taken a bunch of links to content authored by other people and put it into a cohesive and editorialized story. Essentially he’s encoded his work/thought stream and shared it to the benefit of his audience. It’s a kind of “putting the pieces together” voice that sits somewhere between an essay style and link log with commentary.

His post is a fine example of content aggregation that adds siginficant value (beyond just discovery); it creates a narrative context for extreme knowledge transfer out of smaller bits of information contributed by outside sources. Cool!