Scrum is good. It might even be the golden bullet you’ve been looking for. But just like no one medicine is the anti-dote to all illness, so too no one methodology or framework is the solution to every organization’s problems.
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Agile documentation is not that easy. There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to what to document and how. It depends on more variables than what is possible to mention. The team, the project, the client, the organization and the relationships, to name a few.
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Scrum changed the world. But it is a process framework for developers and most problems I see are not building the thing right, but building the right thing. Efficiency is important, but even more important is to know your destination. This post aims to clarify how to include design into the development lifecycle for optimum productivity.
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Some of my best memories involves live music. When a group of talented musicians get together magic happens. But I'm not a musician. My art is the art of software development, which is strikingly similar to the art of making music. But it takes more than talent to create a great team.
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Hybrid work is here to stay. But how do you engage part virtual and part on-site participants in the same meeting? This post introduces an inlusive warmer for your next meeting.
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Software development is often planned as a linear project with a start and an end. Yet, products expand and grow as the users evolve. Seeing it as a spiral rather than a line can be the difference between waterfall and agile. Here's an in-depth explanation of the essence of agility.
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A blueprint to transform enterprise organizations into more agile, self-organizing teams, this book is a practical guide book filled with success stories, alternatives on how to implement such a change, and a bunch of tools.
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If your system under test is too complex or complicated to adequately cover with test cases, or if there are simply too many variables to test within limited timeframes, consider adding playful test to your test strategy. This post looks at a structured approach to playtest complex systems.
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It's easy to get lost in the details when building or designing complex software. The Game Thinking framework combines the progression levels of game design with the lean startup model, agile user stories and the general marketing cycle.
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Agile is an adjective, not a noun. It requires a different way of doing things rather than doing things differently. So many agile advocates get stuck in following the Scrum guide, missing the essence of agility and why it came to be. Read more to find out about a post-agile workplace what's next.
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Through discipline comes freedom. Continuously practicing something - whether it is a task or a mindset - turns it into a subconscious habit. Read more about Improvement Kata as a scientific method to cultive a habit of continuous improvement.
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“Can Quality be built into software?” Ultimately, the level of quality in the software is a reflection of the level of responsibility within the organization. Own it. Don’t wait for someone else. Quality is everyone's responsibility.
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Coffee is coffee. Right? Not quite. You only master a concept when you can apply it in different ways. This post demonstrate 5 ways to play Lean Coffee.
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An ending is that akward space before a new beginning. But how do you end a project without leaving with regrets of what should have been? The best projects have a strong beginning and a strong ending. Here's a few ways to end a project.
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The easiest way to improve productivity at work is by breaking down big goals into more achievable parts and then delivering more value more frequently. This is the foundation of all agile methods and remains the fundamental pre-requisite before anything else will work.
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Most people measure the efficiency of parts of a system in the hope of improvement a system's overall productivity. But what if you're measuring the wrong thing? Here are the three main reasons why productivity improvements don't work.
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Choosing the right tool at the right time can be the difference between success and failure. But which one should I choose? This post explains the difference between the lean startup, lean, and agile methodologies.
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The source of most issues at work and in your personal life comes down to a breakdown in communication. This post aims to highlight how this happens and give some guidelines as to how to get your message acrosss.
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Want to be more creative and fun at work? Use story cubes to prompt a new idea or solve a problem in a novel way. Here's 5 different ways to use it.
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For Kaizen to be successful, it has to become a culture. It’s a continuous focus on getting a little better at what you are doing already, everyday. Kaizen is a step-by-step approach to optimizing the total system where small changes are made continuously, rather than big changes done once a year.
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Scrum changed how most organizations do software development. But what's next? Teal introduces a softer, slower, more whole ecosystem as an evolutionary next step in organizations as we know it.
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Hell yes! The answer, or rather my answer, to Nuno Rafael Gomes question in his post “Shall we dance?”, an essay using dancing the tango as metaphor to explain how he views organizational agility compared to being agile.
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Automation is an insurance policy. First, you have to make sure that you have a product worth insuring before you start investing in the premiums. Here's a leanapproach to automation testing.
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Testing is an art. It's the art of uncovering weaknesses in software. Here's a bullet proof strategy to make sure you're finding meaningful errors while testing software.
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Agile has been around for a few decades now and most companies have adopted it to at least some level. Naturally, it’s time to think of what comes after agile. Here's a curious look at the possibilities.
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Learning is in the pause between the in-breath and the out-breath. The retrospective is when things fall into the right compartments inside your brain that allows you to act differently going forward. Taking the time to contemplate learning and writing this post shed another powerful and obvious insight we all missed during the call.
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An or point of view is a limited viewpoint. Whereas an and point of view allows for more possibilities. That is the essence of an agile mindset — it’s an open mind looking for similarities and how two parts can complement each other, rather than the differences.
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More than anything else, for a team to be agile, they need to work together as a coherent team. Each person has to speak as if from the same voice. Jira doesn’t mean that you’re agile. Using Trello doesn’t mean you have a smooth workflow process. Using Slack doesn’t mean that your team is collaborating.
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The biggest waste in agile is the loss of valuable information as a result of bad communication within teams. Communication is not the same as talking. You don’t communicate with anyone by speaking. You communicate when there is equal speaking and listening.
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The Definition of Done (or DoD for short) is one of the most important aspects that differentiates a successful agile implementation from a less successful one. It can also one of the biggest pitfalls keeping teams from delivering.
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An agile team is one that is in balance, with a steady rhythm. They are an optimized team working at a sustainable pace, investing time in action as well as reflection.
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Self-organizing teams need great technical skills, but even more than that, they need strong shared values. They need trust, respect, and great communication. They also need to be humble, leaving their ego at the door, always focusing on what is best for the team and the customers, rather than what’s best for me.
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The purpose of having a cross-functional team is to increase efficiency, which in turn reduces your cycle time. It is not the only way to increase your efficiency, but it has the potential to radically reduce waiting time, while increasing trust and communication within the team itself.
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The law of small teams is useful because it is the most efficient way of creating a function or a product, without any waste.An agile team combine different and unique perspectives to form a complete picture, with the least amount of waste.
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When you weigh up options as alternatives, you limit your possible solutions. An and mindset, on the other hand, includes rather than excludes. This post looks at the relationship between mindset and tools and then go into a few techniques to practice an inclusive mindset.
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Many people think that when they use Scrum, they are an agile organization. Not wanting to be the bearer of doom, but it couldn’t be further away from the truth. Scrum is only the beginning of becoming more agile. Here's why.
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Training your mind to become agile, is training it to be more flexible. Similarly, an agile organization is a flexible organization. An organization that has rules, but allows for these rules to change dynamically. An organization that values learning and growth more than playing it safe. An organization that courageously acts and responds even when faced with fear.
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To cultivate a flexible mind,you need to get out of your comfort zone. Do something new, learn something new. Push yourself. If it wasn’t for being pushed out of his comfort zone, Richard Branson could still be the shy little boy he used to be. Thanks to embracing the discomfort of new experiences, he is now one of the world’s most successful and most loved business men.
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Scrum works. If it’s not working for you, evaluate whether your implementation is meeting the rules of the game, as outlined in this post. The framework itself is a perfect model for agility. Understanding why Scrum works, makes it possible to fill in the blanks tailor made and suitable to your unique organization.
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Knowing what you want and knowing what you need are not always that obvious or easy to spot. The best question to ask next time you consider adding more, is “Will more speed me up or slow me down?” and “Will this cost me less than the value it will bring me?”.
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Obtaining a degree or certification marks the start of learning. In order to speed up, you first however need to slow down. Effective learning is not about how fast or how much training you complete, but how flexible you are in applying your knowledge to different problems.
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Can one person make a difference? Is it posible to enable change if you're outnumbered? This post looks at five strategies to cope if you're the only agile mind in the team.
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Being agile is about responding to customer needs promptly, and the best way to do this, is to know what those customer needs are. Even though the Product Owner’s primary role is knowing their customer, it’s not possible to view the same thing from two different sides. If you want to be really agile, invest in more manual testing.
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Effective learning is not about how fast or how much training you complete, but how flexible you are in applying your knowledge to different problems.
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Successful gamification design requires thought, a lot of planning, and many iterations to get it right. And once you finally get it right, it’s time to change it to keep it interesting.
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Being agile is about the ability of an organization to respond to the constant changes around them, not about being the fastest individual runner. Being agile is a collaborative team sport, not a solo competition. It is about viewing a user requirement from different perspectives, but delivering a whole.
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