In my professional engagements, I’m a huge evangelist for minimalism in technical communication. So much so, that I’ve spent the past 7 months codifying the first publicly available, detailed methodology for authoring in a pure minimalist style. I’ll be officially rolling out this guide (for free to all) in another month. It’s been mostly finished [...]
Confused about how Google is positioning Wave versus Buzz? Me too, until I found this excellent article: Google Buzz Versus Google Wave. Essentially, Wave is for collaboration, while Buzz is for conversation.
You’ve probably heard the opinion that distributed agile teams experience a significant “drag factor” due to the inability to communicate as efficiently as fully collocated teams that are sitting together in the same physical bullpen. However, empirical data from Microsoft shows that this sentiment is unfounded. I can back up Microsoft’s position with my own empirical observations, and I present a 9-minute screencast that demonstrates the “virtual bullpen” that my scrum team has used for the past nine months that enabled us to have zero “communication drag” regardless of where any member was working from on a given day.
American businesspeople have all encountered staff or planning meetings where the group decision making process feels arduous and slow, and some people dominate the meeting while others are largely silent throughout. This common dynamic lies in the gap between high- and low-context communicators. Agile planning and estimating techniques effectively bridge this gap.
