7 Ways to Humanize the Distributed Team Experience

Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on August 17, 2010

Team Members Are Not ResourcesIf you are involved in a distributed software team, chances are you know just how difficult it is to create personal connections. This is especially true in larger organizations where team members are geographically dispersed around the world and rarely (if ever) meet face to face in person.

I placed the emphasis this problem recently during my talk on distributed agile. My audience received, perhaps unexpectedly, a heavy dose of organizational culture from me instead of “here’s the 1000 different tools you can use” speech.

My message was simple, team members are not resources or metrics, and we should not treat them as such.

I felt the need to build upon that talk. As a result, here are my 7 tips for a sustainable and healthy distributed team experience:… [Read More]

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A Mirror for the Team

Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, retrospectives, scrum on July 20, 2010

ScrumMaster Lego MirrorAlistair Cockburn once stated that Scrum is a mirror, and that organizations need to look into the Scrum mirror no matter how difficult it may be.

I would take that a step further and say that the ScrumMaster is the mirror for the team.

A team often unintentionally falls back into situations in which they’ve previously committed to improving.

For example, let’s say that in the last iteration retrospective the team decided that they need to expand the ownership of each story. The last iteration was a success, yet it seemed as though they were not collaborating effectively. Each user story had one developer doing most, if not all of the assigned tasks… [Read More]

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Consuming Iteration Demo Feedback

Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on July 14, 2010

You are nearing the end of your potentially shippable product demonstration and now you are faced with consuming stakeholder feedback before they leave the room.

Iteration Feedback

So where do you begin?

Step 1: Soliciting Feedback

An empty whiteboard should haunt your dreams!

If you are allowing stakeholders, internal or external, to leave the room without providing feedback then you are neglecting a very important aspect to your software development cycle.

Issues are either being left unspoken or your customers are not engaged at the level they need to be for your team to succeed.

  • Simply ask them.
  • Avoid analysis paralysis.
  • If they have scheduling conflicts send them an interactive demo link.

Tip: Be creative in soliciting feedback and do not take stakeholder avoidance lying down.

… [Read More]

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10 More Agile Gurus to Follow on Twitter

Posted by David Bland in agile, twitter on July 7, 2010

Twitter LogoA little over a year ago I wrote a rather popular post on how you can use Twitter as your inside track for networking with agile software development mentors.

For those to lazy to read the previous article, the ones I listed were:

Michele Sliger
Esther Derby
Jeff Sutherland
Ron Jeffries
Kent Beck
Ward Cunningham
Mike Cottmeyer
Scrum Alliance
Martin Fowler
David Alfaro

Twitter was somewhat less popular then, but I found that the combination of the pay it forward vibe of the agile community and the open medium of Twitter allowed you to forge online relationships prior to meeting people in person
… [Read More]

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Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on July 5, 2010

I’ve finally come to the realization that the terminology is divisive and needs to be deprecated.

Divisive Scrum

I shudder to think of the newly trained ScrumMasters or Product Owners that return from their courses to label their fellow coworkers as chickens or pigs. How is that in any way going to help foster adoption? You can try to dismiss the scenario, and I’ve listened to CST’s reason through how their trainees could never be that dense. I’ve heard the argument “Well we only use it as an introduction…” however I’m growing tired of us introducing the framework using a joke… [Read More]

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