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Engineering Practices

Peer Code Review – Benefits and Statistics

Benefits and statistics of embedding peer code review into your software development process.

As a Lean-Agile coach, I regularly talk with software development groups about the benefits of adding code review to their development process. Some easily embrace it and some require a little bit of persuasion, but usually, I find enough internal allies to initiate the change. Lately, I encountered a whole group that completely rejected this essential practice as a luxury they can not afford. Explaining that they will see immediate ROI within a sprint or two was not enough to convince them. So, I sat to compose the following list and sent it to the group. Luckily I had a sympathetic ear with the general manager of the business unit who embraced it and made it easier for the team to experiment with the practice. All’s well that ends well… here is the list, shared with you too.

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Feature teams

Team Storming and Compost

A team I am working with is in the storming stage of its development.

Finally.

It’s been some time that they have been forming, carefully learning each other, sometimes from afar. Each person was doing their own stuff, limiting their interaction to consultations. Every person to their own.

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DevOps

In Progress vs. Dev, QA

When we build the team’s board for the first time there’s many times the question of how to represent work in progress, how to show what’s going on between “Ready/Committed” (The backlog of the sprint, items ready to be developed) and “Done”.

There are usually two main options.

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Agile Marketing

What Is Agile Marketing

This ISN’T Agile Marketing

First, a couple of clarifications and myth-busting. Agile Marketing isn’t reactive marketing. Agile Marketing isn’t about how you react in a Marketing/PR crisis (ask United about those) or real-time opportunity (you can ask Oreo about those). I don’t mean that you can not/shouldn’t deal with those when you’re doing Agile Marketing, but it isn’t what Agile Marketing is about.

Agile Marketing also isn’t “We just get things done without any real process.” Being super-responsive and saying “yes we can” all the time isn’t Agile Marketing. (Especially if it means unsustainable pace).

Finally, Agile Marketing also isn’t Scrum, Daily Scrums/Standups, Sprints, Scrum Masters, Kanban Boards. It

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Agile Mindset

Keeping The PI Planning Momentum

In his book, “Confessions of a Public Speaker,” Scott Berkun tells us that when speaking, once the lights go out, you have everyone’s attention. Then you need to fight to avoid attrition.

In a similar fashion, at the end of the SAFe PI Planning event you have the entire organization’s attention (read more about it in a small post I published some time ago called “PI Planning Magic!”), and as time passes you start losing it.

The question is how do you keep this attention and energy, climaxed at the final confidence vote where everyone raises their hands to indicate their belief in the plan, throughout the Program Increment (PI).

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Agile Leadership

Experiencing Self-Selection of feature teams

Lately I had the opportunity and pleasure to facilitate a process of designing cross-functional feature teams in a self-selection process. Self-selection is a facilitated way to let people choose which team to work in. It is surprising how rare this practice is sometimes even considered eccentric while practically it is a simple and fast and produces such great results – well-formed teams with more involved and engaged people.

Why teams self-selection?

It’s a fast engaging process that creates the best conditions for a team to reach high performance.

It’s based on the assumption that with the appropriate context, people will choose to work in a team that they feel will make them be most productive, taking into account the personal relationships with the other team members, the complementary skills they bring and their aspirations for personal and professional development.

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Insights

PI Planning Magic!

Earlier this month I was helping a software organization in an Israeli defense organization (that’s why there are no pictures) run their first PI Planning event. The day after I told my colleagues at Agilesparks that this is one event I will try to remember whenever I get into difficult times doing coaching, something that happens from time to time, coaching being what it is. I will try to remember that day because of the magic that happened somewhere around noon. And I want to tell you all about it.

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Feature teams

Comparing Estimation Techniques

Which Estimation Units Should Your Teams Use For Work Items? 

Why estimate in the first place?

At the feature level, you want estimates so you can figure ROI (Return On Investment), so the business and product owners can prioritize one feature against another
At the roadmap & backlog level, most organizations want to be able to forecast, be it at the feature level or release level, so you need to be able to understand what is your organization’s capacity, and translate it into plans with dates and deliverables, milestones etc.
At the finer-grained, work-item level (typically User Story),  you want to help teams understand their capacity so they can take on the right amount. In particular in teams that use a frequent planning cadence, such as that prescribed by Scrum
Still at the team level, team members setting expectations on the amount of work they plan to complete can surprise themselves, learn, and improve.
At the team level, you want to understand whether a work item is small enough, might want teams to discuss estimates as part of creating a common understanding about work and align their views

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Agile Tools

5 pitfalls when using Atlassian Jira

Jira Atlassian is a great ALM tool for managing your Agile environment. It provides a friendly work space for Agile teams and has some informative out-of-the-box reports that allow teams to easily apply root cause analysis.

At the program level, there are several easy ways to achieve aggregated data reports and epic progress boards. The relatively new Jira portfolio also has some interesting features that enable larger organizations to manage their program, including shared planning, shared releases, progress, and mitigation plans.

Visiting many organizations that use Jira as their main tool for their Agile environment, I decided to summarize 5 common pitfalls it is best to avoid.

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