Telerik blogs

Joel Semeniuk

is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Microsoft ALM. You can follow him on twitter @JoelSemeniuk.

 

  • Productivity

    Know Thy Customer

    Sounds simple. Why is it so hard then? First, what do I mean when I say “Know Thy Customer?”  Ultimately I mean that the best teams have customer value at the heart of their software development processes – they truly “Know Thy Customer”.   I’m not saying anything new – however, I do want to talk about how to take this beyond simply “proclaiming” you know your customer or that you have a prioritized backlog down to some ways you can execute and engage. I’ve made many mistakes in my almost 20 years of developing software.  Lots and lots of technical ...
    by Joel Semeniuk
    October 26, 2011
  • Productivity

    Agile is for your WHOLE Business

    I’ve said this very often – and I’ll say it one more time. Agile isn’t just about software development. It can be effective to manage your entire business. I’m a huge believer that many aspects of Agile should be applied to business – especially management and sales approaches. In his book Enterprise Scrum, Ken Schwaber introduces the idea of using Scrum at the enterprise level.  I don’t think we need to stop at Scrum to apply Agile to Business development, sales, or virtually any corporate initiative.  The principles hold true.  This is becoming more and more apparent as I ...
    by Joel Semeniuk
    October 13, 2011
  • Productivity

    A Testament to an Agile Team

    I wrote a number of blog posts on a “behind the scenes look” at how the TeamPulse team works.  You can read all about them here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) As you can see, we truly value and embrace the principles behind Agile and have worked very hard to get the team to where it is today. When I started with Telerik and began to think about how I would form the team, I can’t deny that I hand picked specific people with specific personality and technical traits.  In fact, I will be completely honest ...
    by Joel Semeniuk
    October 13, 2011
  • Productivity

    The Lure of Specialization

    Everyone knows that developers can’t test! Let’s face it – testers should only test. Developers should only develop as they have no clue what test cases look like and can’t be bothered with such mundane and trivial work. Asking a developer to test or to write documentation is like asking Leonardo da Vinci to build his own canvases and clean his own paint brushes. We need business analysts to tell developers exactly what we need to be developed using very detailed models and specifications (I mean.. developers understand code… they need to explicit instructions so that they know how to ...
    by Joel Semeniuk
    October 13, 2011
  • People

    Behind the Scenes with the TeamPulse Team - Part 3

    (This is a continuation of Behind the Scenes with the TeamPulse Team Part 1 and Part 2) Wow.. lots to talk about… here is the 3rd post in the series describing some of the things we do on the TeamPulse team.   Sprint Reviews At the end of each 2 week iteration the teams host a number of sprint reviews. In reality, there were two sprint reviews each sprint – one in Bulgaria and one in Winnipeg. The teams invited everyone they could to these meetings. It is really important for us to directly engage other product teams within ...
    by Joel Semeniuk
    August 30, 2011
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