The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Has Agile become Tinder? We need to stop with the mentality that Agile adoption is a fast food menu. We can no longer just swipe left or swipe right without consequence. You would not do this on a dating app, why would you do in on critical projects? Here are 5 Agile non-negotiables:  Begin with a clear vision and strategy Separate the people from the work and align the people into teams that make sense based on the size of the organization and the type of work that you do  Focus on Product Ownership and align the work in such a way that is is easily consumable Limit the amount of Work In Progress Track and measure product, project, and team progress / success

Many moons ago I made an offer to my students. If any of them had an Agile related topic worthy of discussion, I would entertain allowing them to pirate the podcast and take over an episode. My dear friend Preston took me up on this offer. He is a military veteran and his story is quite impressive. Enjoy! 

A recent email from Mike Cohn covers the top 10 mistakes ScrumMasters commonly make:  Trying to facilitate meetings using someone else's style Holding meetings or events at the wrong time Telling people what to do Staying Silent Not asking enough questions Forgoing the usual meetings due to team size Not 'pushing' the team a little harder towards improvements they commit to make Allowing too much solutioning in the Daily Scrum meeting.  Letting a story into a sprint without enough clarity Not letting go of mistakes

Do not rush the retrospective Make the meeting interesting Make the meeting safe Make the meeting mandatory Reflect on and check action items Retrospect the retrospective Make certain EVERYONE has a voice https://medium.com/similarweb-engineering/do-you-feel-your-sprint-retrospective-could-be-a-lot-better-18d683f18380 - Liora Korni

And the TOP 5 are......  I Get Knocked Down But I Get Up Again 5 Tips To Become An Exceptional Product Owner 11 Laws of Agile Estimation What Is A High Performing Team? - Mike Cohn 7 Things You Should Do During Sprint Planning

Join V. Lee Henson, President and Founder of AgileDad as we explore what services teams do and how their ScrumBan Approach helps organizations be successful with Agile. 

We know the goal of using Scrum is to release at least 1 Product Increment per sprint. When releasing a product increment, the entire team must agree and have the same understanding of what the quality standards are for releasing the product. In other words, DOD is a standard requirement documentation created and approved by the SCRUM team to ensure product quality at the time of release. DOD is Lifetime documentation that can be updated by the Scrum Team to ensure the quality of Product increments at each Sprint. There are several companies that have made DOD or minimum DOD as a guideline in the SCRUM team. But the DOD can be updated or added if the SCRUM team feels that something should be added so that the quality of the product increment is better.

The following are few key practices that can help us to cultivate Product mindset: Focusing on the Customer Delivering #Business #Value Continuous #Innovation Shorter time to Market Frequent #feedback #relentless Delivery Actively managing the Requirements with focus on flexibility Value driven metrics over vanity metrics

Story points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. When we estimate with story points, we assign a point value to each item. The raw values we assign are unimportant: Some teams use a modified fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13); others use a doubling sequence (1, 2, 4, 8, 16). What matters are the relative values. A user story that is assigned two story points should be twice as much effort as a one-point story. It should also be two-thirds the effort of a story that is estimated as three story points. Instead of assigning 1, 2 and 3, that team could instead have assigned 100, 200 and 300. Or 1 million, 2 million and 3 million. It is the ratios that matter, not the actual numbers. One of the main reasons story points are so valuable is that they allow team members with different skill levels to communicate about and agree on an estimate. Instead of arguing about how long it might take each team member personally to do something, teams instead can quickly say that this user story is about twice or three times as much effort as that user story. With story points, it’s all relative.

Merry Christmas!