I have a question for you: Have you come across team whose first attempt at Agile adoption resulted in conflicts, pain, or just fell short of expectations? I’ve met plenty of teams like that. I’ve heard statements like “nobody knew what they were doing”, “management still dictated an impossible deadline” and “those sprints became small […]
Summary: If you’ve been tasked with creating an agile team, first consider what differentiates an agile team from a non-agile team. In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman highlights six behaviors of people on successful agile teams that candidates for an agile team should possess. Are agile team members different from people on other teams? Yes
Rant on. There’s a flame-fest on the scrumdevelopment list about the use of “resources” or “people” to describe the human beings on projects. I like “humans” or “human beings” or “people.” And, I actually prefer “resources” to “man-hours.” I can live with “people-hours,” and prefer that to “resource.” I bet you’re a little surprised. I’ve
A client recently asked me how many people should be on his agile team. “I have a two-person project here, and a 23-person project there. Do I want two teams, one of 2 and one of 23? Oh, and how many testers do I really need?” I can believe there’s a small and short project
I’ve been working with several management teams recently. They realize they need to change how they are organized in order to really make the agile teams even more productive. For example, what good is a functional manager? If functional managers don’t need to assign tasks and check on how the work is going (the team
Last Tuesday, I had a blast at Boston SPIN. I led a roundtable about transitioning to agile, and discovered that not everyone takes the feedback the timebox gives them. In this case, people weren’t finishing what they “attempted to commit to” in the timebox, but they extended the timebox. I suggested that was not such
Merlin, via 43 Folders Clips has a video of Eric Idle, on John Cleese’s Approach to Writing. Aside from John Cleese’s specificity, Idle talks about how he had trouble finding collaborators until he started working with John Dupre (I don’t know how his name is spelled). Collaborating with other writers for natural language writing is
I spoke recently with a (new) Scrum Master with a team who’s new to Scrum. One of the team members is a little stuck. He doesn’t feel comfortable going to the task board to take a task when he’s done. He wants to wait until someone else is ready and then work with that person.
If you’ve never been a victim of Medieval software project management, wow, I’m impressed. You don’t have to read the rest of this post. But if you’ve ever tried to break free of a legacy product/project, and haven’t been able to, you are not alone. The problem is we can’t create a knowledge management system
Via Jack Vinson, I found this gem: Stop doing half-actions. All of you who are separating your developers from your testers? You are doing half-actions. Separating the writers from the developers and testers? Half actions there, too. Even when you define architecture and implement across the architecture, instead of by feature, that’s a half-action. A