[This topic in German will be part of the upcoming 2nd sipgate book \o/]. We don’t have any middle management at sipgate. In our teams nobody is anybody else’s boss. Hearing this, visitors often assume we’re without leaders. In fact, the opposite is true. (Disclaimer: We do have a hierarchy. It only has 2 levels …
Category Archives: Food for Thought
Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches need an Emergency Fund
Scrum doesn’t fix an organization’s problems. It makes problems glaringly obvious so that they have a chance to fix them. Except that “glaringly obvious” is relative and sometimes you still need someone to point to the steaming pile o’ shit of a problem and say it out loud. Sometimes to someone that has the authority …
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Expect turnover – Agile transitions and changes in the work force
The other day, I’ve had 3 visitors from a large corporation. Since one of them was from HR we talked a lot about these topics and exchanged our hiring processes. One hidden criterium of theirs is that people must be “leidensfähig” to a certain extent. “Leidensfähig” is a beautiful German word that literally translates to …
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What is an Agile Mindset? Six years later
At the end of 2011 I wrote about what makes an agile mindset (in my opinion) and even made a fancy infographic about it: It concentrates on how people think about their colleagues as humans vs. cogs; whether they have a growth vs. a fixed mindset; iterative product development vs. extensive planning and more. These …
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Examples for Swarming beyond the team
When I first learned about Kanban, I also learned about “Swarming”. Swarming is when the whole team pitches in to work on the same thing. That same thing is often a blocking task that WIP limits helped surface. Can’t work on “your” tasks because you reached the WIP limit? Go help clear that blocking task …
How to deliver a project early
At TopConf Linz 2017, Allan Kelly posed a question to the audience: “Have you ever delivered a project early?” Out of 75ish people only 3 raised their hands. That’s not a lot of people. All three handraisers were fellow speakers and agile practioners. I was one of them. Interestingly, I had hesitated to raise my …
How did you introduce pair programming at sipgate?
Recently I’ve been presenting our Work Hacks at a couple of places and talking about pairing up as part of it. Not only do we pair program but we also mob program and pair up across roles: Dev and UX designer, PO and customer support, UX and PO, dev and customer support, dev and … …
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We have it backwards
We don’t go out and do difficult things because we’re confident. We do difficult things and that gives us confidence. We don’t work longer hours and get more done. We work less, sleep enough and get more done. We don’t have more defects in production when we deliver often. We have fewer defects when we …
Agile is about usability. So is Clean Code.
Maybe it’s because usability was such a strong focus of mine for such a long time but I feel like most good ideas boil down to usability. It’s kind of my “grand unifying theory of good practices”. To me, Agile Software Development is about providing good usability to the customer (not necessarily the user). Clean …
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5 more things I learned at Agile on the Beach 2016
From Kat Matfield’s session “User Research in an irrational world”: 1) If at all possible, look at records of what people actually did in the real-world situation, (screen recordings, chat logs, …) instead of putting them into a research situation (in which they will always pay more attention) or asking them to remember (memory is …
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