This is Mark. He challenges me. He confronts me. He inspires me. I think he is amazing. Mark doesn’t do things because someone like me who claims to know a bit about agile says so. He looks at the world from every perspective. I love this about him because he forces me to think deeper than I’ve ever had to in many areas. He stretches me as a coach and forces me to keep growing.Definition of Done was an area where Mark really inspired me to dig deep. This was his concern …“I hear and see people teaching Definition of Done like it is a checklist of all the things a team has to do in order for a user story to be done. I think this undermines ownership of quality code by the team because the checklist becomes a crutch and an excuse to be mediocre. It causes people to say things like, ‘Well it meets the definition of done,’ when they know that the code still isn’t as good as it could be. It develops the attitude of, ‘Oh well, it wasn’t on the list so I don’t have to do it.'”
Tandem Coaching Blog - Page 21
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Okay, so the truth is that this picture is not me. It’s not even Vermont – where I happen to be working and freezing right now! It’s my cousin Theresa and it’s in Illinois. She is standing on her Dad’s frozen pond and loving it! When I saw her post this picture on Facebook all I could say was, “That is so cool!” But other people who viewed the picture were saying things to her like, “Get off there!” and “Are you nuts!” and “OMG you are scaring me!Experiencing great things in life sometimes means taking risks. Without risk we will never be as innovative as we could be because we’ll always be playing it safe. Some people are afraid of taking risks because with risk comes the possibility of failure. But, mature agile leaders and teams will recognize that failure doesn’t have to be bad. We learn things through failure that we would never know if we hadn’t tried and flopped. We learn what we never want to do again and what changes we can make to create a better team or product in the future.
The Agile Manifesto talks about uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. It goes on to state that through this work and helping others, four consist values have developed. To me, these values go far beyond software development and set a platform for making decisions and forming thought processes.

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