RGalen casual 3Hi everyone, I’m Bob Galen.

It is with great excitement and a little nervousness that I write my first blog post for Velocity Partners. I’ve been a customer, collaborator, and colleague with V-P since around 2009. For the past 10+ years, I’ve been an independent agile coach and author. I’ve published two books on agile related topics and I’ve been a fairly regular blogger and podcaster.  V-P cross-posted several of my blogs posts recently on their own blog.

A couple of weeks ago the folks at Velocity Partners approached me about establishing a more permanent “partnership” and joining their team—contributing content, representing them at agile events, and helping coach and mentor both internal teams and clients towards agile excellence. To be honest, I jumped at the chance to work with this great team.

I only hope I can add sufficient value to the company, our nearshore teams, and our clients.

Why listen to me?

Well I make no promises that I’m going to give you “Silver Bullets” or “Best Practices”. I don’t think any good agile coach or practitioner should do that. But what do I promise you?

  • I’ll try to keep it balanced and real; talking about agile in the ”real world”;
  • I’ll try to share stories so that you understand the context surrounding our discussions;
  • Everything I’ll share is from my direct experience as a practitioner and coach. While you may not like what I say, the examples will be true;
  • I’d like to think that experience means something. I’ve got 35 years of software development experience and 10+ years of active agile experience. Hopefully, I’ve learned a few things along the way;
  • And finally, I’m open to discussion. So instead of one-way advice or opinions, over time, I’d like to establish a dialogue with our Velocity Partners blog “customers”.  I welcome all feedback, even if it implies that I was wrong or foolish.

In fact, I’m looking forward to the first time I admit that I was wrong. It means, among other things, that I’m learning with you.

What will be my focus?

One of the things that make me relatively unique in the agile community is the breadth of my experience. As I said earlier, I’ve been making software for nearly 35 years. I’ve been leading software organizations, teams, and projects for over 20 of those years. I was an incredibly early adopter of agile methodologies and have been practicing them and lean principles for over 12 years.

I’ve led development, architecture, business analysis, testing, and project management groups. I understand that Waterfall isn’t necessarily always bad AND that quite a lot of the practices applied in Waterfall contexts apply in agile contexts.

In fact, most everything I discuss will be from a context-based perspective; so very few edicts on “Best Practices”. All of that being said, I will be focusing on two key areas:

  1. Sharing generally valuable Agile experience
  2. Sharing offshore, nearshore and distributed team Agile experiences

My goal is to simply share information to help you grow and excel in your agile journey. So we’ll explore:

  • Agile Requirements, User Stories & Backlogs
  • Agile Scalability
  • Facilitation & Coaching
  • Agile Assessments
  • Agile Planning (from iteration/sprint to Release)
  • Agile Testing
  • Agile / Tooling, CI and CD
  • Scrum, XP, Kanban
  • Team Dynamics and Distributed Teams
  • Agile Automation, TDD – BDD – ATDD
  • Agile Project Management (yes, I did say that)
  • Agile Estimation
  • Role of Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Team
  • Role of Leadership in Agile Contexts
  • Lean Startup
  • Agile Architecture & Design

and anything else you can think of…

Wrapping Up

As I said, I’m incredibly blessed to be here. As we gain momentum, please send in your feedback – I’ll try to adapt to what “I’m hearing” from my “customers” and tailor my writing accordingly.

Stay agile my friends,

Bob Galen.