I used to be a weightlifter. All through college, and for much of my adult life I have been in gyms exercising in one form or another. I’ve had some modest success. The experience of joining a gym goes along some standard lines. You’ve probably done it yourself. You show up and they take you around the facility and orient you to the equipment. They may even go so far as to give you some very basic training. You get an introduction to circuit training and then they slap you on

By now, you’ve probably figured out that I’m laying out all the guidance for using Swarming as a legitimate, full-fledged, Agile method. It looks like this: Swarming Values Principles Roles Team Kickoffs Creating the Context Environments Communication There you have it. A complete method for swarming. Wrap it up and ship it. “But wait!” you say, “You’re not a real methodologist, your just some guy with a blog!” You are absolutely right. What gives me the right to propose a ne

Sometimes I move too fast. Maybe my attention span has been eroded by all of that tweeting and the never ending Facebook updates. I caught myself skimming through a book the other day just so that I could catch “the good parts” or find something that caught my eye. I realized that the book looked pretty good and I would probably enjoy sitting down and reading it. But I put it aside atop my ever growing pile of books I don’t have enough time to read. I’m just too busy right no

Often when people talk about public speaking, they are typically referring to an individual speaker. You don’t see much advice for people who present in pairs. When it works out, it is a beautiful thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When it fails, usually one speaker or the other takes the brunt of the damage. Here are some things that I recommend doing to insure a paired speaking engagement is successful: Keep it simple and let each speaker own a port

When you practice something in a disciplined way on occasion you may experience interruptions in your practice. I’m talking about the usual stuff that happens to everybody: you go on vacation for a week, you get a bad case of the flu and spend a week recovering, you are injured, life happens. So what happens when you return to your practice? I know that in my case there is a very noticeable degradation in my performance. I lose ground and I have to spend time re-attaining the

If you are going to be a leader within an organization, then you need to be able to clearly communicate a compelling vision. The communication part is relatively easy to practice, but the vision part is worth practicing too. There are two primary mechanisms for team communication that we can practice easily: Speech and Writing. We can practice speech by participating in groups like Toastmasters. We can practice our writing by using tools for text analysis and review. Both mec

I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading lately on the topic of deliberate practice. There is a sizable body of literature emerging with a lot of interesting things to say about how we can improve the way we practice. As I’ve mentioned before, in the software development business, we’ve really become quite obsessed with the notion of practices and what they can do for our projects. All good stuff – there is a lot of valuable learning to be had there. However, what is it that

How do you go about memorizing a poem? When I do it, I usually break it down into individual lines or phrases and memorize each one piece by piece. Then I put it all together as I build up a collection of individual lines that I’ve memorized. I suspect it works that way for a lot of things we learn. First we break it down into manageable chunks and then we master the smaller units one at time. One of the things that coaches do in sports is analyze a skill that a player demons

In Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code, he talks about the different ways that people practice that ultimately enable them to achieve extraordinary results. One the things that he mentions is that a key component of deliberate practice is to speed up or slow down the exercise at hand. He gives some great examples of musicians who are asked to play their music so slowly that the tune would not be recognizable by someone listening to them. Alternatively they are asked to play t

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that we practice our profession. It’s probably because my daughter recently started Taekwondo and I watch her practicing her Pumsae or Kata during each class. For her, this practice is very real and disciplined. There is very little ambiguity. I realize that in software development we use the term “practice” pretty loosely compared to a lot of other disciplines. It’s not that we don’t use the term often, in fact we seem to use i