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Rachel Davies
London
Coach at Unruly
Interests: Hiking, Gamelan, Yoga.
Recent Activity
I've moved my blog over to...
I've moved my blog over to http://rachelcdavies.github.io/ Continue reading
Posted Feb 7, 2015 at Agile Coaching
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Beyond Coding
Software development on anything more than a pet projects is a collaborative activity. To enable a group of developers to make any headway, some details inevitably need to be hammered out together. However, you probably find that getting agreement within a group of opinionated developers can be difficult at the best of times. Most software developers haven't had training in "soft skills" and you may find it hard to know where to start when a difficult question needs to be thrashed out. Here are some pointers to areas that you might want to explore beyond the realm of programming languages,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 17, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Workplace Design: Creating a Home from Home
Posted Jul 23, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Yes, I agree with you and was thinking of writing a post about ways to make our workplaces more humane. There are lots of small touches that help people feel more comfortable.
Broadening Developer Horizons
XP is an approach that helps us to deliver valuable software iteratively, to apply it we need to setup our teams to make releasing change to customers as easy as possible. We avoid waiting around for individual team members to make changes, by applying classic XP practices -- Collective Code Own...
Broadening Developer Horizons
Posted Jul 17, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Good Enough Software Design? Try Testing DX of your Code
Posted Jun 27, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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The Folly of Scaling Agile
I’m jotting down a few notes on Scaling Agile software development as Bucharest Agile group invited me to talk about doing this. I have already warned them that I am very skeptical about attempts to apply agile practices on large endeavours. While preparing for our conversation, I thought it might be helpful for me to blog about the reasons why I’m not a fan of Scaling Agile as this may make our conversation easier to follow and help the group to come up with some questions. When we apply Agile principles, we strip away process so that software developers can... Continue reading
Posted Jun 19, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Conference Club
Posted May 27, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Developer Exchange
Posted May 12, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Retrospectives: Appreciations & Commiserations
A common technique for retrospectives is to invite Appreciations from the group, which provides an opportunity to acknowledge individual efforts have not gone unnoticed by their teammates. Appreciations are described by starting with the person's name followed by a short description of what they did which you appreciated. When inviting appreciations, I ask the team to write a post-it note for each team member and list one helpful/useful thing that you personally appreciated.
However, sometimes developers can find it uncomfortable to work in postive-mode as they normally prefer problem solving. I think it makes Appreciations easier when you couple them with surfacing some Commiserations. Where a commiseration is "one thing that a person in the team did that you wish could be avoided".
Inviting the team to call out commiserations is a practical way to connect heroic efforts with areas for potential improvements. You can then use the commiserations as a stepping stone into identfying areas to discuss how they might be avoided in future. Continue reading
Posted Apr 28, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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No Magic Words
I gave a talk at Agile Coaches Exchange meet up yesterday and someone emailed afterwards saying: "Rachel mentioned about few questions that she uses during one on one. Those set of questions could help me a lot because I am terrible to start and flow the conversation with my team." So I thought it might be handy to do a quick write-up of what questions I tend use in individual coaching sessions. Continue reading
Posted Apr 17, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Calculating Velocity FAQ
Sometimes people get confused about velocity and edge cases of what gets counted or not. It doesn't matter greatly except it helps to do this consistently over time. I wrote a FAQ for our teams because these edge cases come up infrequently and developers often don't remember what rule to apply. I'm sharing a slightly abbreviated version of our Velcoty FAQ as an illustration of working agreements around this. Your team might choose to do this differently and that's okay. Continue reading
Posted Apr 9, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Estimates Considered Useful
Posted Apr 7, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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No Sprint Demo Needed
Posted Mar 6, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Dot Counting
Posted Mar 3, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Future Topics for Extreme Programmers Meetup
Posted Feb 25, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Gold Cards and Viking Helmet
Posted Feb 25, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Evolving Extreme Programming Practice
Posted Feb 15, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Taking an Iterative Approach to Meandering
Posted Feb 11, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Sprint v Iteration
Chris Oldwood asked me about the difference (as I see it) between the Scrum concept of Sprint and Iteration in XP. Although the terms “Sprint” and “Iteration” are often bandied around as synonyms in Agile world with the basic meaning of a time boxed planning cycle used by a software development team, these terms started out with quite different meanings. Continue reading
Posted Feb 3, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Software Archaeology, Do You Dig It?
Posted Feb 2, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Musings on the Implications of Conway’s Law
Posted Jan 29, 2014 at Agile Coaching
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Hierarchy of Developer Needs
Posted Nov 4, 2013 at Agile Coaching
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The Art of Embracing Change
Posted Oct 20, 2013 at Agile Coaching
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Evolving Estimation Process
Posted Oct 15, 2013 at Agile Coaching
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