Richard Lawrence » video

Screencast: Testing Web Applications in .NET with Cuke4Nuke and WatiN

Richard Lawrence — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:53:41 +0000

Yesterday, I released Cuke4Nuke 0.2.2, which added WatiN compatibility and an example of how to use the two tools together. Here’s a short screencast in which I walk through the example:

Resources from the video:

The Cuke4Nuke Wiki with installation instructions
WatiN
Source code from the example
The new Ruby installer

Short Answers #2: What to Focus on in 2009

Richard Lawrence — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:48:33 +0000

It’s officially a series now. In this Short Answers video, I answer the question, “If my Scrum team could work on one thing in 2009, what should it be?”

Of course, adopting agile engineering practices and getting better at product management are often easier said than done. If you’d like help getting started with some of the practices I mentioned in the video, I’m running a New Year’s training and coaching special with 7 ways to get 2009 started right for less than $2,000.

Books I mentioned in the video:
The Goal by Eli Goldratt
It’s Not Luck by Eli Goldratt

New Benjamin Zander Video – “How Fascinating!”

Richard Lawrence — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:10:40 +0000

There’s a new Benjamin Zander video over at the Pop!Tech conference website. There’s some overlap with the video from TED I posted back in June—most of the content in each video expands on the ideas in The Art of Possibility. Nonetheless, this video is well worth watching even if you’ve seen the few other videos of him on the internet.

In this video, Zander works with a 15-year-old cellist—who, as far as the boy knows, has come simply to perform for the crowd—and over the course of 20 minutes turns a technically sound performance into music, music that touches everyone there.

One moment that connects with me as an agile coach is when he teaches the young cellist how to respond to mistakes in a performance.

The natural response is to grimace, lose energy, become discouraged. (I was terrible about this as a young performing musician.) This launches a downward spiral that affects the rest of your performance and influences your audience’s perception of it. Instead of respond in that way, Zander suggests that the boy throw up his hands, smile, and say, “How fascinating!” That mistake is information. It’s an opportunity to learn and improve. He says in the book, “…it is only when we make mistakes in performance that we can really begin to notice what needs attention.” (p. 31)

The awareness of mistakes is not sufficient to improve. Improvement comes from a willingness to take risks and then to accept the inevitable mistakes as useful feedback. I tell managers that software teams that aren’t allowed to struggle and even fail in their early sprints will still struggle and still may fail…you just won’t know it in time to do anything about it. Your retrospectives may show that your team is a mess, that you struggle just to deliver working software, that there are a million places you could do better. “How fascinating!”

Short Answers #1: When Stories Are Larger Than Planned

Richard Lawrence — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:20:57 +0000

I’m experimenting with video for what is likely become a new series here. In these “Short Answers” posts, I’ll answer an agile question in about a minute. Use the comments to suggest questions you’d like to see in future Short Answers.

In this post, I answer the question, “What should I do when I discover in the middle of a sprint that a story is larger than we planned?” Several people have asked me this, and the answer is not, “Suck it up and work 80 hours to get everything done.”