Paul Grenyer

Team leading is hard. It is important not to fool yourself that it will be all about the technology and that you won’t have to deal with the dynamics and personalities within the team. Your team may be made up of highly professional, highly skilled and highly experienced individuals, but fundamentally it is a team of people. Someone, somewhere, maybe even you, has made you the team leader. It may be because you were the first member of the team, because you are the most experienced, because you are the most highly skilled or for some other equally valid reason. Whatever the reason, don’t set yourself above your team. You are still one of the members of your team. Listen to your team and speak to them as another member of the team, Don’t expect people to blindly follow just because you’re the leader. Your team may be full of highly professional people, but don’t assume that means they don’t need to understand the reasons when asked to do something, even by somebody ‘superior’ to them. E...

By Kevlin Henney After reading and reviewing Afterglow several months ago I was delighted when Kevlin Henney asked me to review Remembrance of Things Past . Kevlin writes a lot of what I think is referred to generally as flash fiction and although the links to it always catch my eye on twitter I am sorry to say that I don't always make the time to read it. Being asked directly certainly helped!  My dad introduced me to science fiction. We used to listen to the original radio series of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Charles Chiltern's Space Force and Journey into Space on long car journeys. I still listen to them now in bed at night. I have very clear memories of certain parts of Dr Who and Blakes 7 from my childhood. I grew up with the repeats of Star Trek the original series and, of course, The Next Generation and other spin offs in my teens and twenties. I remember watching and loving 2010 and Dune and then going on to read the books. I got bored with Frank Herbe...

Date: 26 march 2012 Time: 6pm for 6.30pm. Location: The Assembly House , Theatre Street, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 1RQ Sponsors: Smart 421 The next Agile East Anglia meeting will be on Monday 26th March from 6pm at the The Assembly House in Norwich. To allow for better networking and socialising the session will begin in the Sir Edmund Bacon Room at 6pm, which will be setup in an informal manner. The workshop will take place from 6.30pm in the Kent room. This time instead of tea and coffee there will be a free drink (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) for everyone courtesy of our sponsors Smart 421 . To register for the event, please email paul.grenyer@gmail.com . Spaces are limited to 25 on a first come first served basis. Dialogue Sheets for Retrospectives and Discussion Retrospectives are a key tool in the Agile toolkit. But, they aren't easy. Some teams do them regularly - but they can become boring and repetitive. Other teams don't do them - they lack the time, the energy or they...

Birmingham, LG Arena (NEW) I've seen Deathstars quite a few times now. The first was at Bloodstock when there were not well received. No one who saw their performance tonight could be in any doubt that they are a proper metal band. Their songs may not be complex, in fact they're quite simple, but the band are excellent and put on one hell of a show. And they were only the support band tonight! My only complaints are that Cyanide and the amazing Play God were missing from the set. I've also seen Rammstein before. In the same venue. I was only going a second time because my wife wanted to see them. I had clearly forgotten what a spectacular piece of theatre a Rammstein show is! I won't be making that mistake again. I'm not a huge fan of their music. I don't even own any of their albums. Tonight, however, the music played second fiddle to the fire, the set comprising of a bridge that was lowered over the audience to link a podium near the sound desk to the stag...

"RAII is the greatest contribution C++ has made to software development." - Russel Winder Managed and non-managed programming languages have very different ways of approaching resource management. Ever since I created my first resource leak (Windows handles in an MFC application) I have been fascinated by resource and memory management and the ways of preventing leaks. In this article I am going to compare the ways a non-managed programming language like C++ manages resources compared to managed languages like Java and C#. Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation Resource Acquisition is Initialisation which is often abbreviated to RAII, although badly named is as Dr. Winder says the greatest contribution C++ has made to software development. Unlike garbage collected languages memory in C++ is not cleaned up automatically. If you or something you are using allocates memory on the free-store, you or that other something must delete it when it's finished with. In his article ...

Ian Brookes Cake Solutions Today I dialled into a webinar on the financials of Agile given by Ian Brookes of Cake Solutions. A webinar gives you a window in which you can see the slides from the presentation and hear audio from the presentation. I worked quite well, but the audio was flaky at times. I enjoyed the presentation, its content and Ian’s style. Here are some of the things Ian covered. Ian started off by running through what Agile is and pointing out that it doesn’t cost any less than traditional software development processes such as waterfall. The added value is the fact that it delivers what the business needs, in contrast to traditional processes which can (sometimes) deliver on budget and on time, but usually don’t deliver what is required by the business. He also pointed out that Agile excels at delivering the most valuable features, rather than a lot of features that are unlikely to be used. Ian went on to explain how the Agile estimation process works, including plann...

Date: Monday 6 February 2012 Time: 6pm Location: The Assembly House , Theatre Street, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 1RQ Agile developers seek to deliver valuable software early and often. They work closely with customers to figure out what's the most valuable increment of software to build next. In order to tease apart tangled and bulky requirements, agile teams want to understand user stories. Come to this talk to learn how to uncover user stories and underlying acceptance criteria. You'll also hear about some pitfalls to avoid. Rachel Davies , Industrial Logic Europe Ltd. Rachel is co-author of the first " Agile Coaching " book and the UK’s leading expert in coaching agile teams. She is director of Industrial Logic Europe, a company that specialise in Lean/Agile training, coaching, and eLearning. Rachel has over 20 years experience in software development and has been working with agile teams since 2000. This is a free event sponsored by Smart 421 . To register please emai...