A Space to Think...

I was lucky enough to get a ping through my rss reader to look into this article by Jay Fields. As I was reading through I got an intense sense of deja vu, which is hardly surprising since many of these techniques are exactly what Dan and I advocated in Head First Software Development.

Not to take anything anway from Jay, this is a great summary of really useful user story estimation techniques and I love the fact that each one is simply explained without any apologies for not being "the way everyone might do it". Jay's first line says it all:

"One of the great things about working as a consultant is the ability to try out many different ideas and adapting your personal favorite process to include things that work. This article gives the details about user story estimation techniques that I've found effective."

 Always good to see the word getting spread. My personal favourites from Jay's selection are:

• Vote independently
• Take the largest estimate
  

and of course

• Bribes :)

An idea that I've been playing with for some time finally managed to get out of my head and onto the web in this blog posting on Head First labs. Enjoy!

Just wanted to post a quick congratulations to my brother, Richie Miles, for bagging a great new role with MTV UK and Ireland.

This job is well deserved payback as Rich has been paying his dues as a runner and working hard as a writer for while now. Nice one Rich!

A few weeks back both Dan and I were interviewed by Meera from JavaLobby.

 I've spent some really enjoyable hours in the past with Meera and the folks at JavaLobby on book reviews and this was a fun chance to talk about our own book and some of the work behind producing a Head First title.

I've now finished my initial set of postings to the Head First blogs:

• At the heart of great software are great people
• Software Consultants Care Too (well, great ones do)
• 'Commit' like your life depends on it
  

While this is the end of the beginning, it's not the end of the end so I'll be posting more in the future, both here and on the Head First blogs.