Category Archives: Diary
These moments are precious
The moments when excitement builds throughout the whole team at the delight of discovery and creativity are precious. These moments feel like play rather than work and they breed openness and courage. So what conditions must exist for these moments to happen? Here’s some ideas A shared competence – The feeling that the team has […]
The best tools to calculate WIP limits are your eyes and ears
We have a team of 7 developers. We normally work in pairs and we generally have 3 stories on the go at any one time. The 7th dev, picks up any bugs or chores that come through, happily there aren’t always any. Yesterday as the 7th dev I tried picking up a 4th story myself. […]
Avoiding technical debt from bugs – From Scrum to Kanban
One of the challenges of Scrum is being really done when you think you are done. At the end of the sprint our testers often haven’t had the chance to fully test all the stories. Once we are on the next sprint it is disruptive to go back to older stories and fix the bugs, […]
Interiming
At Biomni between releases we have interim periods. We forget about the business and detox our code, replacing tired bits, removing redundant tables, upgrading to latest versions. It’s incredibly cathartic, we mix in a couple of study days to help us keep up to date. We run it like a sprint minus any expectations on […]
I’m Back
Well its 3 years since the heady days of my last post. Things have matured, dare I say settled, a few developers left but the true believers remain, joined by some great new recruits. As a Scrummaster I arrange the various meetings but to be honest there appears to be very little to do. Defects […]
Shrinking your wiki
We’ve just finished our Interim Sprint. Breaking all laws of scrum absolutely no functionality was produced but we all feel a whole lot better. Here’s what we achieved: Removed over 1000 stored Procedures, 300 asp pages, 21 VB Com components, 36 Database Tables and whole database from our product. Created a automated QA deploy Created […]
Organizational Patterns
I wrote this in my notebook 3 weeks ago. I got home to find my wife about to go into labour. 12 hours later we had a baby girl hence I’ve been a bit busy! I’m on my way home after some spur of the moment “There’s no bugs left lets go for a drink” […]
Day 18 – The Hawthorne Effect
Its the penultimate day and whilst there is still a bit more QA to do before release we are pretty much there. Next up is an interim Sprint where we get to focus on some cleaning up and automation ready for the next sprint. The Sprint Goal will be to make changes that will allow […]
Day 15 – Release First
Scrum is all about doing those things early that you normally leave till last. This avoids any nasty surprises when you should be releasing. We have had lots of focus on testing and CI but one of the really frustrating release delays for an ISV can be the building the install pack. So like testing […]
