Tag Archives: Agile
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 […]
Assumption: Fear causes us to build the wrong thing
The classic tale of a year-long project finally being delivered only to discover it doesn’t meet the needs of the customer sounds ridiculous in the days of short iterations and customer collaboration but I’m guessing we are still a long way from delivering what’s really needed effectively. So what’s stopping us? Is it the fear […]
Assumption: Continous Delivery of Software reduces its cost by 5 times
For me the most fundamental principle in Agile Development is to reduce feedback time in everything you do. This helps us do the right thing more often and waste less time doing the wrong thing. It’s not just the feedback time that matters, it’s the quality of that feedback and when it comes to building the […]
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. […]
Openness
The purpose of a Silo is to protect the contents from being disturbed or damaged from external foreign bodies. Creating a Silo is reasonable if you are the farmer protecting your grain from insects but surely they are not necessary in an organisation where we should be supporting each other? Unfortunately working culture can be […]
We can’t go on living this way
For years I’ve assumed that when Agile principles succeeded at a team level they would naturally spread to other teams in the organisation until eventually the whole organisation would embrace openness and failing fast. I’ve naively been surprised when this doesn’t happen. I’ve probably been a bit slow, or perhaps my bias for optimism has lead […]
Assumptions
When it comes to discovering the best way to develop software or deciding what to build you will be hard pressed to find any certainty. We tend to work with small amounts of data making large assumptions which we test in attempt to gauge their validity. Since every organisation and customer is different, and constantly […]
Agile People
When we create software we try to create something that is better than we are at carrying out a task, whether it is making decisions without bias, remembering large amounts of data, or communicating precise messages. Computers are the tool and we define the process. Defining process can be challenging, it is not something we naturally do, […]
Learning
We live in a world where we are already expected to know, where competence is assumed, but competence disappeared with craftsmanship to be replaced by production lines. Hierarchical management dug the nail in the coffin as the goal became moving up to the next job rather than getting good at the one you’re in. Agile […]
10 drawings about Promiscuous Collaboration
In order to protect our agile teams from interruptions we have unintentionally created a bubble for ourselves. Disconnected from the rest of the organisation we sub-optimise doing things right but without effective collaboration with stakeholders and customers struggle to improve doing the right things. The difficulties in making the Product Owner role effective and being truly cross functional have […]
