Scrum
There are 16 entries for the tag
Scrum
In the New Testament in Luke 4:23 Jesus speaks of a proverb, “Physician, Heal Thyself.” What, you may ask, does this have to do with being a good developer or a good ScrumMaster? In my experience, it has quite a bit to do with it, actually, and recently, it’s had far more meaning to me than it used to have in the past. In large part, my own increased awareness has stemmed from reading Lyssa Adkins fantastic book, “Coaching Agile Teams.” My Command and Control Roots My dad owns several independent...
When teams are first introduced to Stand-Ups, many teams will dread them. Their thought is, “Oh great! Yet another meeting to consume a bunch of my time!” I certainly understand this sentiment, and if run incorrectly, stand-ups are certainly painful and can be a waste of time. Stand-ups are fundamentally about coordination between team members and nobody else. To restate that, stand-ups are for the pigs, not the chickens! This post is to help you understand what a good stand-up is and how best to...
Is technical talent more important than Team Dynamic? I don’t think so. Read on and tell me if you agree. The Art of the Interview For my job, I conduct quite a few technical interviews. Rarely will I have a week go by where I’m not digging into someone’s brain trying to find out what they know and how they think. However, understanding their technical knowledge is only part of the challenge. We also must understand whether or not they code quickly, and whether or not they they will be a good fit...
Recently, I gave a presentation on Flow at Agile Executives. It was a fun meeting and a fun topic and lead to several realizations on my part. First, when Alistair Cockburn is in the audience, I get a bit nervous. Second, Lean and Agile aren’t incompatible, they’re complimentary. Let me explain. The Sterility of Lean Lean tends to think of people as nothing more than metrics. Cogs in the grand scheme of things. Little focus is placed on the human aspect of software development when talking about...
He who fails to plan, plans to fail. – unknown In many ways, one of the most dreaded tasks of every iteration is the Sprint Planning Meeting. This meeting is a very important meeting, but many, many things can go wrong and make this meeting a very long and very painful experience. However, this meeting is critical to the success of the team. If the team doesn’t know what they’re doing at the beginning of the iteration, how can they commit to getting the work done? To hopefully help ease the pain...
An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow...
Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However,...
With the start of the new year, I’m starting new responsibilities at Veracity. One responsibility that is staying constant is my love and evangelism of Agile. In fact, I’ll be spending more time ensuring that all Veracity teams are performing agile, Scrum specifically, in a consistent manner so that all of our clients and consultants have a similar experience. Imagine, if you will, working for a consulting company on a project. On that project, the project management style is Waterfall in iterations....
Good Product Owners will help the team be the best that they can be. Bad product owners will mess with the team and won’t care about the team. If you’re a product owner, seek to do good and avoid bad behavior at all costs. Remember, this is for YOUR benefit and you have much power given to you. Use that power wisely. Scope Creep The product owner has several tools at his disposal to inject scope into an iteration. First, the product owner can use defects to inject scope. To do this, they’ll tell...
In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product. Note that I didn’t say about the product itself. Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners. Products only matter in relationship to their customers. If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product....
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult. All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner. Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities. I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers...
In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum. This post details one of those rules. I’ve often heard similar phrases around Scrum that clue me in to someone who doesn’t understand Scrum. The phrases go something like this: “We don’t do Agile because the idea of letting people just do whatever they want is wrong. We believe in a more structured approach.” (i.e. Work is Prison, and I’m the Warden!) “I love Agile. Agile lets us do whatever we want!” (Cowboy Agile?) “We’re Agile, but we use a process...
For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all. It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005. I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it. I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t. I still didn’t understand the concept of a team. I still wanted to tell the team...
So, I was trying to explain to a new team about what an iteration is all about and came up with the following. Basically, this is the template that we use for our iterations. They weren't understanding the spoken and written language well, so I decided to try a different route for them: foreach(day in Iteration) { while(hoursWorked < day.WorkHours) { if (resolveImmediatelyDefectsE... || day.IsDefectDay || !uncompletedStoriesExist) { while (defectsExist) { defect = FindTopUnclaimedDefectInDef...
As a ScrumMaster, these are some of my pet peeves, in no particular order: Come late to meetings. Better yet, don't show up to the meeting, don't let anyone know that you're going to miss the meeting, and then get grumpy when the ScrumMaster asks you to not do it again. After all, the team doesn't really need to know what you're doing. Ignore the priority of stories set by the product owner. He loves not knowing what's going to be completed at the end of the iteration. Have side conversations during...
I'm the Scrum Master on a project at the moment, and sometimes getting people to understand the concept of "Team" is very difficult. We just had a new member added to the team who was also a new hire for the company we're working for. At the beginning of the iteration, he signed up for a full work load, insisting that the holidays wouldn't impact him at all. For the first week, things were o.k. (although he only had 1 day of burn for the five days of work), but then after that, he just disappears!...