There I am, discussing a feature with my colleagues, when one of them says the words of scope creep doom: “While we’re at it, we might as well implement that other feature (that belongs in the same component). It would be foolish not to, as it’s so much work putting that component live.” I disagreed, …
Category Archives: Agile / Lean
Is Scrum a Shu-Stage of Agile?
In my filter bubble there is this trend of teams switching to Kanban after they’ve used Scrum for a while. Typically they had been successful with Scrum and switched to Kanban, when they felt they’d taken Scrum as far as possible. After the switch they do even better. I’ve never heard of a team switching …
Quitting as a Scrum Master
About a year ago I felt miserable at work. Being a scrum master felt like repeatedly slamming myself face-first into a brick wall. I researched what happens when scrum masters quit and couldn’t find anything anywhere. There are tales of SMs getting fired – viewed by some as a badge of honour – but there’s …
Four-sides model & the relationship layer
I’ve just spend a lovely weekend at FrOSCon, the “Free and Open Source Software Conference”, in Bonn. One of the talks I attended was “Projektstatus: Nachrichten vom anderen Stern” (“Project status: Messages from a different star”) about communication. I wish I could have listened to this, when I started out as a Scrum master. It …
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Kanban in 5 Steps – Visualization
Just like the last post with a map of Agile & Lean this one contains material for my upcoming talk at the FrOSCon in St. Augustin, near Bonn – August 25th and 26th, 2012. This one is about the 5 steps of Kanban. I’ll zoom around the picture with Prezi. Visualize the workflow -> Board Limit …
Land of Lean & Agile
On Sunday, August 26th (2012), I’ll talk about “Agile & Lean” at the FrOSCon in St. Augustin, near Bonn. I’ve got 45 minutes to give the audience a brief orientation. Ambitious, I know. I’ll base the “slides” (I’m gonna use Prezi) on the following map: There’s still a number of details I’ll add, if I …
Get the wheeled flipchart
Following up on my ode to whiteboards, here’s some very practical advice for people researching what flipchart to buy: Don’t buy one of the 3-legged ones like shown in the image on the left. Maybe it’s just me, but I keep falling over the front legs. Especially when I’m writing while still trying to keep …
Visualize it! – An ode to whiteboards
Two months ago I started a new job. I left nice old colleagues and got nice new colleagues. The companies are the same size. No big diff there. But there is a very visible difference in the respective offices: Old workplace: 200 square metres of whiteboard surface + glass walls – all of them covered …
“so that” is the most important part of a user story
While researching for my brief history of Agile & Lean, I read the following in the Wikipedia entry for “User Story”: User stories generally follow the following template: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>” but the shorter version is commonly used as well: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire>” I was truly …
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Na na na na na na na na Bug Slot!
<Sing title to the melody of the batman theme song> In the company I just left we had a weekly bugslot to stay on top of defects: 2 hours every week during which all developers fixed bugs at the same time. It’s not a perfect solution but solved a number of pressing problems: Discouragingly high …