• 28 Feb 11

  The Certification Experiment

  When listening to what clients are requesting, it is not always sufficient to simply offer what they ask for...

• 30 Oct 09

  I Don’t Want To Be Motivated By Anyone But Myself

  This week a tough topic emerged from working with my new team: motivation.

• 08 May 09

  The Magic Suitcase

  The metaphor of the suitcase has helped many teams improve their processes and increase their results.

• 19 Nov 08

  The Agile Fear

  "Teams who embrace agile methods gain immediate advantages but they don't realize that they're 'working the same way they used to work'." Here you can find Francesco's thought on this.

• 25 Sep 08

  When a Pair Goes Pear Shaped

  Pair programming somtimes goes pear shaped. Such a case may come up when the pair is grappling with technological issues. It happened with a team I'm mentoring.

• 04 Jul 08

  Refactoring for Office Interiors

  Organizing the work environment effectively might not be a simple task for an agile team. Often you need to get permission just to move one table. Not to mention what happens sometimes when you ask for a whiteboard or other supplies. Obviously you can overcome anything, despite the external bureaucratic obstacles. The story I’m about to tell you isn’t about external bureaucratic obstacles, but internal ones.

• 27 May 08

  Mamma Programming

  Pair programming can be superficially defined as two programmers working together on a user story: two programmers, one keyboard, one computer. More and more often in teams that I start working with as Mentor, I see pairs of programmers who talk and talk and talk. They talk a lot. The keyboards rest and the monitors wait. The two people talk. Actually, what the keyboards and monitors don’t know is that those two over there are scheming to commit a crime: to kill the code.

• 22 Apr 08

  Keep the Peel and Throw Out the Banana

  A few years ago, in delivering a keynote speech at the Italian Agile Day 2006, Francesco presented the metaphor of the "XP photo": the teams seemed to be stuck on trying to look like an XP team rather than actually living XP values, principles, and practices.

• 26 Mar 08

  Team Anti-Patterns: "Social Pacts"

  There are many factors that can break up the cohesion of the team. Of all these, I consider social pacts that may emerge within the team the most damaging.

• 12 Feb 08

  The Importance of Feedback

  Feedback is one of the values of Extreme Programming, and of Agile Methods in general. Often, though, the importance of feedback is underestimated, even in "mature" agile teams. Over time, feedback sessions can elicit less emotion and more technical discussions. To give feedback, it's not enough to simply chat for one or two pomodoros. That isn’t feedback at all!

• 07 Apr 03

  One to Many

  Emergent Design Workshop I IF IT WORKS FOR ONE IT WILL WORK FOR MANY In Emergent Design the order of increments is proportionately relevant to the effort it takes to deliver a functionality. One of the patterns for choosing the next increment involves cases where the same operation can be...