Bob Payne

Agile Consultant and Host of the Agile Toolkit Podcast

Bob Payne
Bob is the president of Electroglide Inc., a Washington DC based
consulting and training company specializing in Agile Software
Development, Training and Agile Transitions. He began using Agile Methods
in 1999 and has never looked back. Project sizes range from two people to
working with clients that have over 110 developers on two major projects
in 5 development locations. Regardless of scale his goal is always the
same: deliver high quality software using Agile Methods and make the
people on the teams happier and more effective.

As the host of the Agile Toolkit Podcast, he has brought the voices of
agile experts and practicioners to the masses. He is a dynamic speaker
and the chair of the Live Aid Stage at Agile 2008 in Toronto.


Contact Me:
Bob Payne
Electroglide Inc.
323 7th St Washington DC, 20002
bob (at) electroglide.biz
202-903-6854

Blog

Agile 2009 - Aslak Hellesoy - Cucmber test framework

Posted Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I met Aslak at the Agile 2009 conference for the first time.  In fact this is to date my one and only conversation with him.  I have use more »

Tom Goulet - Cucumber, Ruby and the transition to Generalizing Specialist

Posted Tuesday, October 13, 2009

I have had the pleasure of working with Tom for over a year now.  This podcast was reco more »

Jim Miller - The Product Owner Role and Business Alignmnet

Posted Thursday, September 24, 2009

I have worked with Jim on and off over the past year and he is one one of those people you do not forget working with.  En more »
Read More Blog Entries »

Presentations

Agile Portfolio Management - Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

Managing large portfolios with multiple teams and dependencies can be a nightmare. Balancing simplicity and sufficiency is the key to deriving sustained value and continued adoption of any tool. The Portfolio Alignment Wall (PAW) works well on our projec more »

Jumping the Agile Shark - When good projects go bad.

When the ideas of Agility are used to create a process that seems to have the right "Agile" formula but is just "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong". more »

Real World Agile Automated Acceptance Testing

Need to acceptance test the web front end but tired of the same old selenium scripting or big record and playback solutions. Need to have those tests run in your continuous integration rig. Want testers to help write those tests. more »

Agile Portfolio Management - Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

close

Bob Payne By Bob Payne

Managing large portfolios with multiple teams and dependencies can be a nightmare. Balancing simplicity and sufficiency is the key to deriving sustained value and continued adoption of any tool. The Portfolio Alignment Wall (PAW) works well on our projects and we hope some of these techniques will work for your teams.



The Portfolio Alignment Wall emerged out of my work with an orgainzation the had 4 agile teams working with 17 interdependent projects. We achieved this using index cards, yarn, stickers and a few simple rules.

This workshop will explore the use of a Portfolio Alignment Wall (PAW) to visualize dependencies and track projects for customer facing feature streams.

Participate, learn and never forget to “Talk to the PAW�.

We will begin the workshop with an introduction to Portfolio Alignment Wall and the workshop.

Attendees will break up into 3 agile teams. These teams will be engaged in a simulated development project for Caged Animal Development Inc. This simulation will have multiple releases delivered in an iterative incremental fashion.

We will build a simple Portfolio Alignment Wall in this workshop.
Features and external dependencies will be tracked and managed. We will plan, deliver and report work using the portfolio planning and tracking techniques utilized in the Corporate Internet Solutions group at Nationwide Insurance.

The Portfolio Alignment Wall will be built/maintained by the teams during the workshop.

Learning outcomes

* Multiple techniques for managing and tracking portfolios
* Visualizing and dealing with organizational complexity
* How to reduce the cost of change
* Importance of the physicality of the wall
* Greater appreciation for simplicity

Jumping the Agile Shark - When good projects go bad.

close

Bob Payne By Bob Payne

When the ideas of Agility are used to create a process that seems to have the right "Agile" formula but is just "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong".



I have worked on many Agile teams in many organizations. Many would lead you to believe that creating Agile teams and processes can be reduced to a formula. This leads to people with the best of intentions doing the "Right Thing" at the wrong time or for the wrong reason.

Explore how to implement agile in your organization by exploring the learning from the mistakes I have seen in the field.


Real World Agile Automated Acceptance Testing

close

Bob Payne By Bob Payne

Need to acceptance test the web front end but tired of the same old selenium scripting or big record and playback solutions. Need to have those tests run in your continuous integration rig. Want testers to help write those tests. Review the framework I use called Pickle-Juice.

You are in luck.



Pickle-Juice is an open source "micro framework" that hooks together Celerity (HtmlUnitWatir ish) Cucumber and creates a basic acceptance testing framework.

Imagine writing tests like this and having them be executable.

Feature: Search the web using Google Scenario: Look for Bob Payn Given a Browser And navigating to google.com When entering Bob Payne in text_field with name of q And clicking on button with name of btnG Then page has the text Agile Toolkit Podcast