Category: Agile

We all want to be productive, right? But when does our desire to be productive, and our mental model of what "being productive" looks like, get in the way? It's 8:30 on a Wednesday morning. This particular cross-functional team (representatives from multiple teams across the organization) meets 3 times a week to coordinate activities around an organizational goal. This is a version of...

Many of us work in environments where the question “when will you be done with X?” matters. Some of the examples I have seen recently are: The business team wants a certain set of functional enhancements as well as performance & scalability improvements. Can we get both done? Will one need to take a back seat to the other? A customer has a “deployment window” that we want to hit with...

Today I am reflecting on how difficult it is for individuals and organizations to deal effectively with uncertainty and ambiguity, and how the underlying belief in the possibility of certainty has such a strong hold on us. Examples of that desire for certainty that have appeared on my radar over the last few years include: A customer requested that a project be performed using an agile...

How long should a team spend analyzing something before doing something? A team I work with recently used a "spike" to investigate how to implement a new system capability. The spike was open for two sprints, although I am not sure how much effort was expended over the course of those two sprints. The fact of this spike being open for two sprints made me curious about the trade-offs made…...

I recently found myself in a conversation with a colleague regarding feature teams vs. component teams. The colleague was expressing his frustration with feature teams. In his environment, there are a number of shared infrastructure systems on top of which are built a variety of products and features. His frustrations included: One feature team (for a significant new product) was set up on their...

"I'm implementing a user story and I see a way to improve/refactor the existing code while I am at it. Should I do that?" "I've completed implementing a user story and want to clean up the code I've written. Should I do that?" "I have an idea for a better way to solve this problem. Should I implement it?" "This piece of legacy code is complex and painful. I want to rewrite it. Should I do...

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – attributed to Heraclitus What happens when we come back to Agile training? As part of our commitment to being an Agile organization and supporting the growth of our people, in 2016 we held 2-day training events for our team members. The training was CSM (Certified...

One of the staple technical practices of agile software development is Continuous Integration (CI). A continuous integration environment provides fast feedback on the state of your code. In a typical configuration, the CI tool is configured with a "job" that monitors the source code repository for commits. When a commit is made, the job: Pulls the latest code Performs a build Runs a suite of...

Recently, a friend and I were sharing our love for the movie Groundhog Day. In this movie Phil, a disgruntled, cynical weather reporter (played by Bill Murray) visits a town to report on the emergence of the groundhog and whether this indicated 6 more weeks of winter. Of course, Phil has a terrible day and everything lives up to his cynicism. When he awakens the next morning… it is...

Does your software team feel like it is on a hamster wheel? Maybe delivery pressure has been high for a long while, or there is a constant stream of support work to be done… so it’s just “heads down and keep going”. This way of working can be seductive… after all, we are getting things done and responding to “what’s wanted from us”. After a while, it becomes habit, our familiar...