Category: Agile in Business
-
Thoughts on Estimation
Is estimation a waste of time as a number of posts and discussions would have us believe? Or is estimation a core need because otherwise how can we explore or plan? Is there more to this? Let’s investigate. First a little research into #noestimates yields the following bullet points Looking at an intro, an excellent…
-
Risky Business
What could possibly go wrong? You have your visions, plans, roadmaps and a great programme board backed up with lots of exhilarating dialogue. The risks have been ROAMed and everything is under control. In the words of Captain Picard “Make it So”. And so you begin. I go back now to past experiences with risk…
-
Agile Values and continuous flow
I was asked recently “How do I summarise the Agile Values as defined in the manifesto?” My feeling about this and why do we have these values is because software is about people, not things. It is about We, not ME. For example We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and…
-
Citizenship
I have recently read the book by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde: Large Scale Scrum: More with LeSS The book is an excellent source for ideas and stories, however the idea that teams are empowered to rejected group decisions because a team has full autonomy should be examined. For example if two teams are working…
-
Shifting Right
We have all heard about the technique of Shift Left, where test activity is brought to the earlier stages of the life cycle. This is a great way to improve product development as it moves testing activities to the left, which removes ambiguity from the development team. This is enhanced with activities such as TDD,…
-
Join The Dots
Joining the dots up is a way to suggest that everything is connected. For example the simplest model we can draw is. But the reality is more like this: Warning, this is a simplified view! The reality is that in both cases the most important measurements are the simple ones that apply to figure 1.…
-
But is it Science?
The world of software is a science? An Engineering disciple? A world of freelancers and hackers? Or something else? Is it a science? The Scientific Method (Condensed from Wikipedia) The scientific method seeks to objectively explain events in a reproducible way. A hypothesis is put forward (If we do this, then we get that) and…
-
Beginners Mind for Execs
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. Shunryu Suzuki For a number of reasons, the world of Agile borrows thinking from the world of Martial Arts. An example is Shu-Ha-Ri, the phases of learning called copy, adapt and master. While this is an approach to learning, there…
-
Estimations, a blog from the past
As part of my previous work at HP, I had been working at defining the approach to preparing and estimating features and user stories in one of my client’s projects. Here these stories are prepared through the early discovery events and progress through demand to the development teams. This post describes the estimations that were…
-
A Pilot to see where we are going
When looking to setting up an Agile pilot we need to do some end-to-end thinking. Agile trials are often small teams set up to test the Agile principles, the purpose of which is to provide evidence that Agile should be considered for a larger roll-out. So we take a group of people and train them,…