Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
Why being a Scrum Master is a full time job
“An adequate Scrum Master can handle two or three teams at the time; a great one can only handle one”. (Michael James - An Example Scrum Master’s checklist) I found that organisations, teams and new Scrum Masters (even freshly certified ones) often aren’t sure what the Scrum Master role entails a...
Should we choose Iterative or Agile?
One of my current clients, a large government agency, have recognised that their current monothilitic waterfall approach doesn’t work all that well and are trying to decide whether to change their delivery approach to Agile or “just” Iterative (mini-waterfall style). Management have recognised that...
Interview with a developer turned Agile
Following last week’s interview with a newly-minted Scrum Master this week I have had a conversation with developer Mateusz Udowski. We talked about how SilverStripe’s adoption of Agile and Scrum have affected him and why he thinks SilverStripe is now more intelligent as a whole than it was before....
Interview with a newly-minted Scrum Master
Six months ago SilverStripe, an open-source Content Management System provider and Wellington web agency approached me to help them improve the way in which they deliver client and open source projects, increase employee happiness and, in general, just do the best possible job. To achieve this, we d...
Flexing your Agile muscle - agile technical practices explained
Last week I presented to Flex and Cold Fusion Developers at cfObjective in Melbourne about Agile technical practices. As several other presentations dealt with practices such as TDD and unit testing I chose to focus on two areas I have become very passionate about during the last year: Acceptance Te...
Utilisation, Teams and "Resources"
In many companies, especially those who provide services to external clients, the main focus from a project management perspective seems to be on resource allocation and utilisation. People are viewed as individual “resources” and an important goal is to maximise people’s utilisation (Before you say...
When the coach needs to go
“When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go.” — Nanny McPhee (via Lyssa Adkins) I am an Agile coach and the goal of my job is to put myself out of a job. My mission is to teach people Agile and to make sure they understand and c...
Checklists
Checklists have a somewhat bad reputation in the Agile world, probably because they “smell” of too little self-organisation and too much process. I find this reputation is entirely undeserved as they can be extremely useful as a memory aid, or to visualize a workflow. Checklists play an important r...
A template for the sprint review
Conducting an interesting and engaging end-of-sprint review is an often overlooked art: Not only do we want to show what we have built during the last sprint and collect feedback and good ideas for what to build next; we also want to give our audience a good experience. At my workplace we always in...
Visual Workspaces: Kanban for one
One of the things that immediately caught on when we started our journey towards being Agile at Snapper was the use of visual workspaces. The team loved the sense of achievement of moving a task from "In Progress" to "Done" and found the board helped them stay focused and co-ordinated. Everyone from...
A Scrum Product Owner checklist
After my last post on the role of the Scrum Master I have been asked if I could write a similar role description for the Scrum Product Owner. Here’s my view of the role: The Product Owner The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision. The product o...
A 5-why root cause analysis retrospective
The idea For quite a while I have been waiting for an opportunity to try a 5-why root cause analysis in a sprint retrospective. The 5-why analysis has its origins within Toyota and lean manufacturing and is used to find the root cause of a problem through identifying a symptom and then repeating th...
10 ways to fail with Agile
Last week I presented at WebDU in Sydney. The conference was excellently organised by Geoff and the Daemon guys and I met lots of interesting people. And I love Sydney! In short I had a blast. Apart from a workshop on user stories I presented on 10 ways to fail with Agile. Judging by the Twitter str...
Agile undercover - when customers don't collaborate
The other night I attended Rashina Hoda’s totally awesome presentation “Agile Undercover: When Customers don’t collaborate” at the Wellington Agile Professionals Network. Rashina presented the research she had conducted on the basis of interviewing 30 people across 16 organisations in New Zealand an...
Acceptance Criteria and the Definition of Done
Recently some of the teams I’m coaching found it difficult to distinguish between acceptance criteria for user stories and the definition of done. Here’s my attempt to make the distinction clear: For a user story or feature to be "potentially shippable" it needs to meet the expectations of the Prod...
On Acceptance criteria for user stories
One of the teams I have recently coached quickly got a grasp of how to phrase user stories but found it hard to relate to the concept of acceptance criteria. I wrote this short FAQ as an attempt to make it easier for my team to work with acceptance criteria and hope that other teams might find this...