tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76450062011-07-08T10:52:55.660-04:00This is a personal weblog (blog); the opinions expressed here are my own.David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.comBlogger91100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-18976143357653676872008-12-26T08:21:00.057-05:002009-09-06T15:28:20.206-04:00

Since April 2008 I've been a Consultant/QE Architect at Sermo in Cambridge, MA USA on Ruby on Rails agile teams. The first team started as an experiment to prove rapid development of rails applications, composited with the JBoss-based java core community, could work seamlessly. We have continued to successfully add several more rails applications with this approach. We are now undergoing a major

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-56739411831886172852007-12-19T04:49:00.000-05:002007-12-19T05:12:30.543-05:00

I have recently had discussions with several management colleagues about agile and find that most are not really getting far enough to realize the full value of agile. Jeff Sutherland and many other champions for the Scrum model presecribe the Nokia Agile Test as a litmus test to deterimine if a team really is agile. This test was developed by Nokia internally to assess development teams at Nokia

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-67330932002017001912007-12-16T09:52:00.000-05:002007-12-17T08:05:22.091-05:00

Convoq (a.k.a. Applied Messaging, Zingdom Communications) closed it's doors Nov 30, 2007. I feel very fortunate to work with a very talented and skilled group of professionals in these 5 years. I had a tremendous experience in leadership and management roles that fostered career growth for me. For a timeline of this business and a summary of what happened at Convoq read the blog entry "Convoq and

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-23522429512451604052007-12-14T02:43:00.000-05:002007-12-17T08:10:46.995-05:00

I have frequently been asked "how do you go about hiring good Quality Engineers for an Agile team?" I really feel strongly that there are several proficiencies that needed to round out a strong test group for agile teams. These proficiencies can be enbodied in more than one person, but rarely is any one Engineer proficient in all of these disciplines. Domain Knowledge: As with any Quality

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-35369433181698198282007-11-11T12:19:00.000-05:002007-12-14T02:41:00.710-05:00

I attended the Deep Lean conference held at MIT on November 3 & 4 2007. It was an information-packed 2 days with Jeff Sutherland, Mary Poppendieck (with Tim Poppendieck contributing by answering some questions), and Nancy Van Schooenderwoert. Jay Conne (Current President of the Agile Bazaar) hosted and added to discussions. The weekend covered the origins or agile software development (including

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-30086017343938384482007-10-30T08:33:00.001-04:002009-12-28T07:55:06.826-05:00

I finally found a sufficient convergence device to entice me to make the leap and integrate my PDA, GPS, camera, and phone. The AT&T Tilt 9825 (htc Kaiser) is an incredible device that embodies all of these in a similar (smaller) form factor of my aging Palm M130 PDA. It's far smaller than my aging Kodak DC camera (1.2mp) with a 3mp auto-focus and 10x digital zoom sensor. It has a bult-in GPS

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-32488031428532595472007-10-26T07:02:00.001-04:002007-10-27T12:18:47.703-04:00

I attended the Agile Bazaar meeting this month at Tufts University. This was a panel discussion format moderated by Ron Morsicato with an open format including a series of questions crafted by Ron that were geared towards adoption of agile practices. The panelists: Don Roby, Cyrus Innovation. A developer of highly usable solutions with a proven blend of Agile programming techniques,

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-68662421785792173022007-10-24T17:24:00.000-04:002007-10-24T19:22:58.470-04:00

As a long distance track running in high school and college, and later as a Navy Deep Sea Diver (special forces), I've experienced how keeping an aggressive stride goes beyond tiring and gets you into an momentum I call "automatic mode." This is when you achieve peak performance and you can go far beyond what the mind will limit you to otherwise. The military calls this "mind over matter" and is

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7645006.post-55889473743827576362007-10-24T17:12:00.000-04:002007-10-24T17:17:22.104-04:00

I was recently described by a Venture Capital Partner as "scrappy" and that I can add more value to an early start-up than a later stage startup. I was puzzled by what he meant by that and asked a CEO from one of his portfolio companies who knew this VC Partner well over the last 25 years. This CEO said "scrappy is an attribute that means you do what's needed to get the job done, not focused on

David Jellisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17627638042380254341noreply@blogger.com0