Archive for the ‘Scrum’ tag
Growing DONE—How to Make the Definition of Done Work for Your Team
Effective agile teams get things done. They build software day after day that’s not just “code complete” but really shippable. And when their product owner says, “ship it,” they can get their shippable software into production at the drop of a hat.
The Definition of Done can be a powerful tool to make these things happen…If it’s used right.
Most agile teams I see have one of four relationships with a Definition of Done:
- They don’t have one
- They have one but don’t really use it
- They have one but can never satisfy it
- They have one, satisfy it for each story, but still have lots to do at the end of a release
I rarely come across teams who use the Definition of Done to good effect day after day, sprint after sprint. Find out why and how to fix it »
How to Give a Great Sprint Demo
Exciting. Entertaining. Do these words describe your sprint demo meetings? Or are boring and unfocused more accurate?
I can’t believe how many times I’ve come in to coach a team and they’ve been surprised when I actually expected to see a software demo in the sprint demo meeting. As the agile principle says, “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Let’s see some software!
Why are so many agile teams so hesitant to do demos? Why are demos so lifeless? Sometimes, the team’s not actually done. That makes a demo awkward. Other times, they can’t communicate what they did to the Product Owner; they don’t speak “business.” But most often, they simply don’t know how to give a good demo.
So, how do you give a good demo? Read on to find out »
Continuous Deployment
I’ve written before about the amazing financial impact of releasing more often. And I know from personal experience the positive impact that frequent releases have on learning and on product quality and value. So, I enjoyed this post on one company’s experience with continuous releases. Yes, you read that right; they release, on average, 50 times per day.
We call this process continuous deployment because it seemed to us like a natural extension of the continuous integration we were already doing. Our eventual conclusion was that there was no reason to have code that had passed the integration step but was not yet deployed.
Read the whole thing and consider what it would take in your organization to get to continuous deployment. How fast could you go? And what impediments would have to be resolved to make it happen?
7 Tips for a More Effective Daily Scrum
The main purpose of the Daily Scrum is for team members to make and follow-up on commitments to one another that work towards the team’s shared sprint commitment. If your Daily Scrum has become unfocused, too long, or otherwise ineffective, here are seven ways to get it back on track.
Agile Product Management Boot Camp
Bob Hartman and I are offering an Agile Product Management Boot Camp course March 9-10 in Denver. If you’re a product manager, product owner, business analyst or in any other product facing role in an agile (or soon-to-be agile) environment, this intense, hands-on course is a great opportunity for you to ensure that you’re helping your team maximize the value it delivers.
Short Answers #2: What to Focus on in 2009
It’s officially a series now. In this Short Answers video, I answer the question, “If my Scrum team could work on one thing in 2009, what should it be?”
New Benjamin Zander Video – “How Fascinating!”
There’s a new Benjamin Zander video over at the Pop!Tech conference website. There’s some overlap with the video from TED I posted back in June—most of the content in each video expands on the ideas in The Art of Possibility. Nonetheless, this video is well worth watching even if you’ve seen the few other videos of him on the internet.
In this video, Zander works with a 15-year-old cellist—who, as far as the boy knows, has come simply to perform for the crowd—and over the course of 20 minutes turns a technically sound performance into music, music that touches everyone there.
One moment that connects with me as an agile coach is when he teaches the young cellist how to respond to mistakes in a performance.
Short Answers #1: When Stories Are Larger Than Planned
I’m experimenting with video for what is likely become a new series here. In these “Short Answers” posts, I’ll answer an agile question in about a minute. Use the comments to suggest questions you’d like to see in future Short Answers.
In this post, I answer the question, “What should I do when I discover in the middle of a sprint that a story is larger than we planned?” Several people have asked me this, and the answer is not, “Suck it up and work 80 hours to get everything done.”
Are the Product Owner and ScrumMaster’s Interests Opposed?
The Chief Engineer role in the Toyota Product Development System combines parts of the Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and senior technical team member roles from Scrum. In addition to leading the technical design of a new product and facilitating the work of the other engineers, the CE must deeply understand and care about what the customer values—he has ultimate responsibility for delivering value to the customer and for the resulting commercial success or failure of the product.
CEs have gone to amazing lengths to gain that deep understanding of the customer’s needs.
Motivated Individuals
As agile approaches the mainstream, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the core principles, especially this one:
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
If agile is to apply broadly, we can’t reserve it just for those projects that start with motivated individuals. We need to learn how to cultivate them.
