Archive for category scrum
7 Ways to Humanize the Distributed Team Experience
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on August 17, 2010
If 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]
A Mirror for the Team
Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, retrospectives, scrum on July 20, 2010
Alistair 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]
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.
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.
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.
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]
How to Create a Virtual Story Wall in Google Docs
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum, tools on June 21, 2010
Google recently released an enhancement to Google Docs called Google Drawings. While you can use this is a kind of collaborative work space for wireframes as you might with Visio or Omnigraffle, I’ve found another use for it…
As a virtual story wall for distributed teams.
It only takes a Google Account, a few minutes of your spare time, and most of all it’s free.
Create a Google Drawing
… [Read More]
