Posts by Mark Barrett

5 posts in total

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Coach don't rescue

I recently attended a fascinating and emotionally-charged talk by Samantha Soma at DareConf 2014 titled 'How to stop rescuing people'. It strongly mirrored my experience of moving into a leadership role and I'd recommend anyone with a spare 30mins to watch it.

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What can I do?

I've noticed recently a lot of content in my social media network is based on the current escalating problems in the Middle East.

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Effective prioritisation

Prioritisation is a huge part of modern life. No. Prioritisation is an ESSENTIAL part of modern life. I'm not talking solely about Agile here either. Yes we plan stories, yes we prioritise them to get them into the backlog but I'm aiming at a higher level. Life lessons that are useful to all of us.

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Coaching style over substance

Have you ever been lucky enough to mentor someone who really got it? Maybe you've had the opposite experience and the session ended up being a failure for both of you?

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Getting Started With SpecRun

We recently switched from writing automated acceptance from Cucumber to SpecFlow... this is no slight on Cucumber it's just that we had a lot of C# developers who wanted to get closer to writing acceptance tests. Worth adding that SpecFlow has also come a long way as a .Net port of Cucumber and is pretty much like for like now.