Group items tagged

Helicopter Managers – who step in too soon to rescue thereby depriving the team to think and solve problems together.

Absentee Managers – who would not step in at all irrespective of whether the team has all the necessary skills to tackle the problem.

If the team has sufficient skills to solve the problem then give them space else ask questions to help them get unstuck. This would help in building the skills eventually.

Does maximum velocity mean maximum productivity? Absolutely not. In an attempt to maximize velocity, a team may in fact achieve the opposite. If asked to maximize velocity, a team may skimp on unit or acceptance testing, reduce customer collaboration, skip fixing bugs, minimize refactoring, or many other key benefits of the various Agile development practices. While potentially offering short-term improvement (if you can call it that), there will be a negative long-term impact. The goal is not maximized velocity, but rather optimal velocity over time, which takes into account many factors including the quality of the end product.

It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.

It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.

Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.

RFPs the Agile Way -- or -- Fear and Loathing in the Procurement Department

Scrum in a nutshell Split your organization into small, cross-functional, self-organizing teams. Split your work into a list of small, concrete deliverables. Assign someone to be responsible for that list and to sort the list by priority. The implementation team estimates the relative size of each item. Split time into short fixed-length iterations (usually 1 – 4 weeks), with potentially shippable code demonstrated after each iteration. Optimize the release plan and update priorities in collaboration with the customer, based on insights gained by inspecting the release after each iteration. Optimize the process by having a retrospective after each iteration. For more details check out “Scrum and XP from the Trenches”. The book is a free read online. I know the author, he’s a nice guy :o) http://www.crisp.se/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.html Kanban in a nutshell Visualize the workflow Split the work into pieces, write each item on a card and put on the wall Use named columns to illustrate where each item is in the workflow Limit WIP (work in progress) – assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state. Measure the lead time (average time to complete one item, sometimes called “cycle time”), optimize the process to make lead time as small and predictable as possible.