Agile Tools
Portfolio for Jira / Advanced Roadmaps / Plans
Introduction Atlassian is in the process of making some big changes to its products for the past year. It started with the acquiring of Agile
Agile
Guidelines for Common sense ☺
Recently in retrospectives of one of the scrum teams, one team member had some strong opinions about guidelines that were defined for code reviews. Besides what to review and how to review, the guidelines also had some instructions on who should review which features/stories’ code. He strongly felt that the reviewers for his stories didn’t add much value, the code reviews waited longer for feedback, and the reviewer didn’t seem to have much context, so didn’t add much value. He felt that his design reviewers or his colleagues working on the same story should have been the peer reviewers!
Agile
Scaling Agile Reading List
Scaling Agile Reading List Dave Snowden “Put brutally SAFe Implementation Roadmap – Scaled Agile Framework Implementing – Scaled Agile Framework portfolio+kanban Here Be Dragons –
Agile
COVID-19 and Agile
A fresh perspective on uncertainty, complexity, empiricism, and flow and what to do about it.
The COVID-19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, and complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.
Agile
Assessing Agile Health Using the Spotify Squad “Health” Check beyond the Squad during the COVID19 pandemic
2020 – The year when we dropped a couple of rungs on Maslow’s ladder when it comes to what health means…
The search for the right Health Check model
Agile
Under Siege
The coronavirus has sent many people that on regular days are working from the office to work from home. This is a big change for many teams that need to establish new ways of working.
Here are some tips for managers that are relevant for these days (which are relevant for regular times as well):
Video calls are highly recommended: they keep people engaged and focused on the meeting, reducing multi-tasking and keeping meetings short and fluent. There should be a very good reason not to have a video call.
Agile Tools
Facilitating Collaborative Meetings In The Age of COVID19
These are crazy times. I’m lucky that during this time I can still do things that are in the vicinity of my comfort zone.
When working with a client or teaching a class I rely pretty heavily on liberating structures, training from the back of the room, innovation games and other facilitation techniques. Can these work in a virtual/remote environment? YES! Luckily, I’ve been working with some 100% distributed companies/organizations in the past so it’s not all new.
Agile
The polarity in the life of a great Scrum Master and every manager- Useful tool for leaders
The complex reality presents many challenges and dilemmas that Scrum Masters and leaders at all levels try to solve using problem-solving techniques. Yet dilemmas are different from problems. While problems have a good answer or solution, dilemmas have more than a single good answer.
We are all familiar with dilemmas like Centralized vs. Decentralized, Cross-functional vs. Professional-focus, Quality vs. Speed, Individual improvement vs. Team improvement, Continuity vs. Transformation, Task-focus vs. relationship-focus, and many more.
Engineering Practices
A Beautiful Day For Unit Tests
Writing unit tests on Legacy Code is an adventure. Today I spent several hours doing that with two developers, Mark and Yelena.
The system has a flow you are used to and when you write code you fit it into this flow. Then you test the entire system.
With unit tests, it works differently. You are required to start the flow from the middle and stop it when your deed was done.
This requires a different level of system understanding. When we started off in the morning we looked at the code and thought “how are we going to harness this?”
Agile Tools
Getting Started with ATDD
It is early afternoon on Friday.
As the week is coming to an end, so is Team Alpha’s Sprint.
The team is rushing to finish the last User Stories in the Sprint. Marion is putting the last touches on the Daily Report User Story. Just a bit more tweaking of the CSS… and… we’re done! Marion shoots Kate, the PO, a WhatsApp message: “Hi Kate, the daily report story is done, can you please check it out and accept it?” A couple of hours pass and Kate is finally done with the grueling series of back-to-back meetings she’s been enduring today.
