- Ariticulate how Agile works in a team
- List the roles in Scrum
- Agile Manifesto What are some/all principles of Agile?
- Agile is not anarchy, and it's not working faster
- It's also not the rituals- it's a philosophy for how to create value efficiently
- Scrum Agile framework, product owner, backlog, dev team, sprint planning, daily scrum, scrum master, product, retro
- Can say what is important, but can't say how to do it
- Interfaces the business with the development team
- Protects the Development Team. 💩☂️ shit-umbrella
- Coordinates the Development Team. Unblocks them
- Helps resolve conflicts.
- Sometimes going out and buying food for the devs is the most valuable thing a scrum master can do.
- Small focussed team
- Self-managed, fully-empowered, have all of the resources they need within the team
- Blurred responsibilities, no hierarchy. Don't be the server guy.
- The team finishes completely functional pieces often and delivers them to the organization
Each table has one "worker", and everyone else is a "customer." The goal is for the worker to write down everyone customer's middle name. There are three rounds, record the best and worst times for each one:
- Each customer yells their middle name over and over again until all of the names are written down.
- This mirrors how prioritization is done at most companies- the loudest names probably got written down first, and the worker was probably stressed
- Each customer tells the worker one letter of their name at a time in a round-robin until all of the names are written down.
- This is an orderly process, but a wasteful one. It represents multitasking and context switching. By trying to serve every customer at the same time, you serve none of them well. This will probably be the slowest process.
- Each customer tells the worker their middle name one at a time.
- This represents delivering complete features one at a time. The customers each get served faster than they did under multitasking, and the worker is less stressed.
This leads into a discussion of the myth of multitasking, and the value of agile methodologies.
- At each table, decide who is the product owner, scrum master, and dev team
- Product Owner creates a backlog of features. A Wishlist
- Development team does sprint planning
- Talk about which features are most important
- Create stories from the wish-list
- Assign a point value to each story
- Using
0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100, size your stories as a team. - You declare the story you will size.
- Everyone holds it up at the same time.
- Any differences need to be justified.
- Repeat until everyone agrees.
- Move to next story.
- For a conflict to exist you need:
- A disagreement
- Scarcity of resources
- Dispute over "property rights"
- ScrumMaster
- Find the shared interest beneath the position
- Win-Win-Wins vs. compromise
- Both parties win and the result is better
- Focus on the work being done instead of utilization ("How busy people are")
- Reflect on the process, and add or drop stuff as needed.
- Team owns the process- allow them to customize it. Use whatever tools are useful.
- Colocation
- Pair programming
- Test work with customer frequently - tight feedback loops
- Frequent communication
- Waste elimination
- Employee engagement
- Quality
- Keeps senior management out of tactics and into strategy
- Routine tasks (use Lean for this)
- Extrinsically or unmotivated team
- In a crisis
- Life-critical operations
- Executives think they understand it and don't
- The teams move too quickly for leadership to casually track
- Interfacing with non-agile teams
These are questions you can ask to see if an Agile framework is being implemented properly:
- Is the tool or process for the way people already work, or for the way you wish they would work?
- Fix people and interactions before automating or imposing processes
- What ratio of planning to doing is happening?
- Planning and documentation generates no value, only work does
- Can the team throw out the existing process without repercussions from management?
- Team has to completely own the process
- How far out do your assumptions have to hold true?
- Long timelines or big upfront planning are very vulnerable to changing conditions or wrong assumptions
- Articulate how Agile works in a team
- List the roles in Scrum