Archive for category agile

We’re Self Organizing Into… Kanban?

Posted by David Bland in agile, kanban, lean, scrum, scrumban on May 28, 2010

What’s Kanban?

It isn’t a question you’d expect to hear from a team adopting work in progress limits and just in time tasking while only committing to small user stories.

One of my favorite aspects of being a ScrumMaster and Agile Coach is witnessing a team evolve by inspecting and adapting over time. Granted it isn’t a ride for the faint of heart, but it can be an extremely fascinating experience. This is especially true when the team feels empowered enough to mold themselves into a highly functioning unit.

From my experience, this becomes most apparent during iteration retrospectives… [Read More]

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SaMoLo in Retrospectives

Posted by David Bland in agile, extreme programming, retrospectives, scrum on May 11, 2010

SaMoLo, or the Same as, More of, Less of technique, is a fine tuning facilitation exercise with roots in early XP.

‘Same As’ are those traits that you value and don’t want to lose. Many traditional feedback methods end up glossing over these items and as a result the behaviors that should be reinforced, aren’t.

‘More Of’ are those traits that you want to encourage. It may be a newly acquired skill or the beginning of a behavior. Or it may be an area where something is lacking and you want to help ther person find a way of bridging the gap.

‘Less Of’ are those traits that have simply gone too far. They may be great traits, but eventually someone will ‘out Herods, Herod’ and things need to return to normal. – fairlygoodpractices.com

Thanks in part to Jeff Nielsen, I’ve discovered that SaMoLo can also be the sweet spot for easing new teams into iteration retrospectives.

  1. It is easy to remember
  2. More engaging than What worked? What didn’t?
  3. Takes 30 to 40 minutes
  4. Pairs well with other exercises

In a recent iteration retrospective I paired the SaMoLo technique with… [Read More]

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The Daily Standup Trap

Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on April 21, 2010

The 15 minute daily standup, or daily scrum, is one of the more widely adopted artifacts of the iterative software movement. Even companies who only dip their toe into Agile practices typically adopt this since it seems so easy to do.
scrumology.net trap

  1. What did you do yesterday?
  2. What will you do today?
  3. What is blocking progress?

While you can certainly take these questions and use them as the basis for your daily standup, you may be surprised at how your team actually responds to them. Some may find these questions laughable and not take them seriously. Some may become defensive, even if they have no reason to be. Some may clam up and provide almost no detail at all, while others ramble on about every minute of their day… [Read More]

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Top 5 Build Failure Sounds

Posted by David Bland in agile, humor, tools on March 25, 2010

I find continuous integration tools essential to Agile software development. One click CI software helps us seamlessly pair collective code ownership with frequent deployments. Yet as we all know there will come a time when the build fails, and we all must be held accountable. I’m not one to punish individual team members that trigger [...]

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The Evolution of Done

Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, scrum on March 11, 2010

Many of you are probably familiar with the concept of done as it relates to iterative software development. It comes in many flavors, from working lines of code to acceptance criteria, and can change from tasks to features to releases. While I agree as a community we should continually grow the definition of done, only [...]

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