Agile Development Blog

Last Thursday, Ben Carey kicked-off our latest and largest webinar on the topic “How Teams Succeed with Agile Quality and Testing.”

Thank you everyone for the great compliments; a majority of the compliments should go to Ben, Jessica, Bob and the folks from SQE for the quality effort.  Thanks to these great folks, it was technically perfect, visually pleasing, entertaining, impacting and backed up by great supporting content.  If you missed it, you can see the video reply to this webinar.  You can find the supporting content under the Learn Agile part of the Rally web site.

Following that webinar, I saw a twitter post from one of our customers about the meeting they had following our webinar. This “Lunch and Learn” session allowed the team to reflect on what the heard immediately following the webinar.

“Having a post-webinar discussion with our SQA group on the #rallydev seminar. Nicely done @RallyOn & @BenCarey”

This is a great example of self educating on this topic.  It is the first of four steps that we recommend in the webinar:

1. Self-educate and discuss to set the context
2. Find an external driver for your change to keep from having drifting goals (customer, competitor, benchmark)
3. Make a commitment as a team to move forward
4. Find your first practice to adjust and adjust just that one only

If you liked the webinar and content, I encourage you to set up a lunch and learn to view and discus these topics on your team or program.  If you are interested in more depth, you might consider our next webinar in the series, Pulling Quality Forward: Agile Testing and Tooling for Embedded Software Development. The live presentation will take place on Wednesday, September 30th at Noon MDT with Zach Nies, VP of Product Development at Rally and Paul Henderson from WindRiver/Intel .  You can register on-line and learn more about the details.

I have found the quality topic to be great for team lunches.  It is can be a sticking point especially for functionally divided teams and quality has to be owned by the whole team.  I encourage you to take advantage of either of these webinars to hold a “lunch and learn” topic for your team. Maybe after your next demo and before your next retrospective.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a fly-fisherman, founding board member of Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Here at Rally, we’ve been working hard over the last several months to bring our Agile course materials and presentations into the New Age. We want to have what you might call “truly Agile” course materials and presentations.

What does that look like? Well, it started like this.

Thanks to some folks in marketing, we each took the Bert Decker course “Communicate to Influence” on presentation skills. (”Jean, you really have to learn to keep your hands at your sides; you’re all over the place!”) What a phenomenal 2 days of on-your-feet guidance about connecting with your audience!

Two books have been our guide on dramatically reducing the clutter on our slides.

Then thanks  to my colleagues Chris Spagnuolo and Ben Carey, we Rally Agile Coaches began reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. We’ve also worked to reduce the number of slides. We’ve become more cognizant of the aesthetic of each slide.  So, notice in the slide here about defects, we no longer have a bulleted-list of all the issues around defects and what might cause them to be increased. The slide is no longer the story; it is the backdrop to the story that the trainer/presenter tells.