On Saturday, September 8th I gave a few presentations at Houston TechFest. You can find the slides from those presentations below. If you were able to attend any of the sessions, thanks for coming! In any case, if you have any questions about the material, please contact me or leave a comment!

TFS as a Springboard to Agility
A Tale of 3 Transitions
Why Your Coworkers Hate Agile (and how to change their minds)

Ben Floyd and I recently did a presentation on FXCop and StyleCop. You can get the code here, and the slides here.

Chris Weldon and I have given this presentation a few times. You can get the code here, and here are the slides.

The only thing I’m really an expert on is my own experience. So, I figured I should give a presentation on that. This talk is about some experiences I’ve had with groups transitioning to agile. Hopefully there’s something to be learned from it.
Here are the slides from that talk.

On April 30, 2010 I did a couple of presentations at AgileDotNet 2010 in Dallas. Here are the slides and supporting code samples from those presentations.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about when/why a company should outsource application development. Our Rural Sourcing offering at Improving is a perfect solution for companies looking to outsource custom development, but I wonder if I would be acting in my customer’s best interest if I were to council them to choose outsourcing a large, long-running development project to Improving rather than staffing up internally and executing the project in house. Here is a bit of the conversation I’ve been having with myself:
Outsourcing offers several clear advantages:

No hiring/onboarding …

There are a myriad of methods IT managers use to try and increase their team’s productivity, some are good and some are terrible. One of the best ways to increase productivity is to maximize the team’s sense of personal ownership of its goals.
1) Have the team make its own estimates all the time, and be very careful not to pressure them into modifying those estimates. If you’re curious about the reasoning, ask for elaboration, but never indicate you disagree. If you’re in a position of authority they …

A few years ago I worked with an organization to build computer-based-training modules to teach Java. My team and I worked with a professor from the Education Psychology department at Texas A&M to study how computer-based training could actually be effective. I think these ideas are equally as applicable to instructor-led training.
The challenge was to include content in the course if and only if it added discernible value toward the course’s objectives. To make sure the progress is discernible, we used a method of task-analysis to iteratively define finite activities …

I got my new business cards today.  Our business cards at Improving are unique, they are customized for each person including pretty much whatever text each employee wants.  My cards include a quote from Warren Buffett: “Price is what you pay, Value is what you get.”

I heard this quote a couple years ago and it has really stuck with me.  I know what it means to me, but I decided to google it today, just to see what others had to say about it.  I found a 2003 post from …

I’m continually surprised at how much discussion exists about how to manage releases and development branches in enterprise source code repositories. Many of the smartest, most experienced people I’ve worked with have come to the same conclusions about the best way to manage a source code repository. I suppose I just assume that everyone in the industry has accepted these strategies as a best practice, but maybe I’m wrong! I enjoy working with subversion the most, so my analysis assumes it is the tool being used to …