I once worked for a company that prided itself of doing distributed agile. The vision was to have one team split across two different country so that work could continue around the clock. They had the development team in Chicago and a testing team in India. Work completed in Chicago at the end of the day, was tested in India overnight … or at least that was the sales pitch.
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Filed under: Planning, Project Management, Scrum , distributed, distributed agile, distributed scrum, distributed software development, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Image by PSD: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/
Someone asked me recently what where the five top reasons why companies adopt Scrum. I had difficulty answering this question, because, without doing a reasonably rigorous survey it’s difficult to provide a comprehensive answer. I do however, have some experience with companies adopting Scrum and I could provide the top five reasons that I’ve personally witnessed.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Organisation Change, Planning, Project Management, Scrum , Agile Software Development, Organisation Change, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Image by Mzelle Biscotte: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biscotte/
Introducting Scrum leads to organization change. The specific details of how an organization changes is different for every organization. There is however a number of changes that most organizations will experience as they migrate to Scrum. These are the top five organizational changes that I’ve seen when implementing Scrum.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Scrum , Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Scrum
Image by Zevotron: http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomurl/
Over the last few years we’ve seen the introduction of Agile software development into the mainstream. In 2006 the Agile Alliance are
claimed that Agile frameworks had
crossed the chasm. Frameworks such as Scrum have been seized upon by management and they are the ones who are now controlling the introduction of Agility.
The reasons for this are quite understandable. Management are simply looking for ways to improve how technology (and especially software) is created. And why shouldn’t they? As a profession we have been spectacular in our failures. We have deliver low quality code, at a cost that’s greater than what was promised, and we’ve delivered it late. We should expect there to be changes to this state of affairs.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Project Management, Scrum, Technology , Agile Software Development, Cultural Change, Organisation Change, Project Management, Scrum, Technology
The Kobayashi Maru is the name of a starship in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and also the name of a simulation of a no-win scenario. Wikipedia has a good outline of the scenario and the dilemma:
… the cadet receives a distress signal, stating that the Kobayashi has struck a “gravitic mine” in the Klingon Neutral Zone and is rapidly losing power, hull integrity and life support. There are no other vessels nearby. The cadet is faced with a decision:
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Filed under: Product Ownership, Project Management, Scrum , Decision Making, Kobayashi Maru, Product Owner, Scrum
It’s been a long while since I’ve posted video links. The reason or this apparent lack of activity is simply because I haven’t seen anything new or news-worth for some time. However, just in the last few days there have been two links that I think are worth passing along. The first video is a talk that Jeff Sutherland gave at Google called “Hyperproductive distributed Scrum teams.” Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht2xcIJrAXo
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Scrum , scrum videos hyperproductive distributed agile squirrel
Update: Since writing this post, I’ve become aware of two other descriptions of Affinity Estimating. Jukka Lindström posted his experiences on ScrumDevelopment, and Chris Sterling has written a great Step-by-step description.
Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
The last session that I’d like to report on is Lowell’s “Affinity Estimating.” Affinity Estimating is a technique many teams use to quickly and easily estimate (in Story Points) a large number of user stories. This is a great technique if you’re just starting a project and have a backlog that hasn’t been estimated yet.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Scrum, Training
Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
This is a continuation of my report from the Trainers gathering. In part 1 I gave an overview of some of the topics discussed and in part 2 I presented Boris’ Ball Point game. In this post I’d like to discuss anther exercise that was presented by Jens Østergaard . His exercise is designed to demonstrate the difficulties encountered when trying to interpret a written specification.
In this team-based exercise, each team is divided into “Developers” and “Spec-writers.” The “Developers” are separated from the “Spec-writers” and only allowed to communicate using written specifications. “Spec-writers” are then presented with a diagram that they need to communicate to the “Developers,” who, in turn, must interpret the written specifications and reproduce the diagram. The exercise is run twice with two different diagrams and a retrospective is held at the end of each run.
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Filed under: Agile Games, Agile Software Development, Scrum, Training
Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
In part 1 of my report on the Trainers Gathering I gave an gave a summary of the events that occurred. In this post I’d like to discuss one of the exercises that was discussed. Boris‘ Ball Point game is a fun and exciting way to explore process flow. The rules are quite simple and the more people you have, the more exiting it can be. We played with about 25 people, but it would be an excellent game for large groups up to approximately 50 people.
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Filed under: Agile Games, Agile Software Development, Scrum, Training
Update: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
About two weeks ago, a Scrum Trainers’ Gathering was held in Boston. About 25 Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs) from all over the world gathered for a great two-day event, discussing training exercises, different approaches to training, and other related issues. There were a number of sessions that I found to be of particular interest and in the next few weeks I will write about three of these sessions including Boris’ Ball Point Game (part 2), Jens’ Written Specification exercise (part 3), and Lowell’s Affinity Estimating (part 4).
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Scrum, Training
The Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course that I run involves a simulation of a Scrum team. It has changed over time so where I originally played the XP game [1], I’m now doing a fully Scrum immersion that involves every part of the Scrum process. During the immersion I ask the team to create a product. Typically, this is one of several different types of brochure, but if the team wants a more difficult exercise they may choose to create a board game.
Apart from advice on the Scrum process, the team need to determine all other aspects of the game. They need to determine the the goal of the game, rules, flow, layout, game pieces and even how to win … and they need to do this in about 1 hour 30 minutes. That’s a lot of work in a very short period of time! The results are often unpolished but contain all the elements necessary for a complete game.
My intention is to share some of the creative, funny and ingenious ideas that teams come up with. To start this off, here’s a board game from my last public training in Bellevue.
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Filed under: Board Games, Scrum, Training
It’s been a busy few months with clients, training and the occasional blog posting. To add to all this activity, I’ve agree to do a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) training tour of Europe. This is going to be exciting because I haven’t been to Europe for over 10 years. It’ll be an interesting contrast after having spent the last 7 years in the US.
I hope to have an opportunity to blog-on-the-road, and will (hopefully) include photos of some of the training courses. Here’s my training schedule:
New York – 7th & 8th March, 2007
Helsinki – 14th & 15th March, 2007
Stockholm – 21st & 22nd March, 2007
Oslo – 28th & 29th March, 2007
Copenhagen – 4th & 5th April, 2007
Vienna – 11th & 12th April, 2007
Munich – 18th & 19th April, 2007
Paris – 2nd & 3rd May, 2007
London – 9th & 10th May, 2007
Edinburgh – 17th & 18th May, 2007
Details on these courses can be found here. Alternatively, if you’re reading this and would like to meet up at any of these locations, I’d love to hear from you. If you leave a comment [to this post], I’ll reply as soon as I can.
Wishing you a Happy New Year!
Kane.
Filed under: About Me, Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum, Training
Here’s another excellent Google TechTalk. This one is given by Mary Poppendieck, author of “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers” and “Implementing Lean Software Development“.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum, Technology
The Enhanced (or Alternative) Release Burndown graph [1],[2] is a great tool and one of my personal favourites. It demonstrates several things very clearly. It demonstrates:
- The rate at which work is being completed by the team
- The rate at which new work is being added to the product backlog
- And, it can be used to determine a date range for completion.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Patterns, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
This first appeared on the ScrumAlliance.org website on October 30th. It is presented here in its original unedited form.
Burndown graphs are commonly used in Scrum projects to give the team an understanding of the amount of work remaining for the Sprint (or iteration). In Ken’s own words:
“As a team works together, it develop its own style of creating and maintaining the Sprint Backlog. It also demonstrates unique work patterns, some working consistently, some in bursts, some at the end of a Sprint. Some seek pressure, while others seek regularity. Across time, the backlog charts of each team develop predictable patterns. They stabilize as the team learns the technology, the business or product domain, and each other. These chart patterns are called Sprint signatures.” – ControlChaos.com [1]
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Patterns, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
Update: Ed Gibbs writes (here) about some of the challenges that he’s facing within his organization. Interesting stuff.
I like two week iterations. The short timeframe ensures quick feedback, and makes the team more responsive to the Product Owners needs. But two week iterations can be very uncomfortable for teams that are familiar with delivery cycles that span months. One of the very first issues that is raised is that the team does not have sufficient time to be “done”.
Typically what this means is that the software will be code complete at the end of an iteration, but will not have been fully tested. It usually gets delivered late and hence there is insufficient time for full and rigorous testing. After the third of forth sprint it’s common for a team to ask me if we can change to three (or four) week iterations to “allow more time for testing.“
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum, Uncategorized
Ken Schwaber[1] recently did a talk at Google and they recorded the session. He provides an overview of Scrum and covers many of the basics. It’s an excellent video and you can find it here.
References
[1] Ken’s Home page
[2] ScrumAlliance
Filed under: Agile Software Development, Project Management, Scrum
This last week I was at the ScrumExchange conference down in Palo Alto. It was an great conference and I especially enjoyed the sessions led by Matt Smith [2]. They were thought provoking and very entertaining … an great foil for some of the other heavy material.
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
This is the second article that I wrote for the Scrum Alliance [3]. It was orginally published on July 24 and can be found here. The article presented below is the original unedited version with all my grammar and spelling mistakes!
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Filed under: Agile Software Development, Patterns, Planning, Project Management, Scrum
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