Category: Agile

The “Overhead” of Agile – Perception vs. Reality

ByAndrew's Agile February 8, 2018 0 Comments
When I first learned* about Scrum, the trainer provided us with some "rules of thumb" for planning our time during a sprint. As we started putting Scrum into practice, we applied these rules of thumb… but also encountered shock and horror from outside the team about how much "overhead" was involved. The arrival of Ken Rubin's recent blog post, How Much Time Should Each Scrum Practice...

Getting to ELD – an Agile Journey

ByAndrew's Agile December 7, 2017 0 Comments
On June 30th, 2017, ISE Fleet Services registered a certified compliant ELD (Electronic Logging Device) with the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration). Our journey to reach this milestone was long and arduous… and was also a series of lessons in applying an Agile mindset. In this blog post, I share what I see as some of the key lessons from our journey… The Context In...

Looking Out for the Whole Enterprise

ByAndrew's Agile November 2, 2017 0 Comments
"Think Globally, Act Locally." I recall first hearing this phrase in my youth, applied to connecting our personal choices to environmental impact. I'm thinking about it today in the context of Agile teams: having the bigger picture in mind is an important piece of our overall success. I've seen this recently with several team interactions…  Cleaning the code I was recently working with...

A Portfolio Approach to Test Automation

ByAndrew's Agile October 5, 2017 0 Comments
At what level should you automate tests? Unit test only? GUI-driven tests? Something else? In this blog post, I reflect on a recent experience with both pain and value, and how I am coming to imagine a portfolio approach to test automation.  Consider an example application or system (such as a web application or a mobile application). When viewed in layers, it might look like this: When I...

How About a Retrospective… On Our Retrospectives?

ByAndrew's Agile September 7, 2017 0 Comments
Are our retrospectives valuable? Are our teams improving? These are two questions that come to mind when I think about comments or articles I've seen about resistance to retrospectives or the time spent in them. I think we can learn a lot by conducting a retrospective… on our retrospectives. Through such a retrospective we seek learning by exploring the following questions: What...

Time to Tinker

ByAndrew's Agile September 11, 2016 0 Comments
I like to tinker. It's part of how I got started in this business… as a 10th grader I remember eagerly awaiting each edition of the electronics hobby magazine I subscribed to, and often buying and assembling projects from kits or components. (There was also the time I ruined my mother's electric frypan - but that's another story…) Recently I've been tinkering with a Raspberry Pi 3, Windows...

Lessons from the fragile

ByAndrew's Agile July 19, 2016 0 Comments
What's the opposite of fragile? Most people's immediate answer is "robust" or "resilient". But consider… if we subject something that is fragile to stress, shock, randomness or volatility, we can expect that it will be harmed. If we do the same to something that is robust or resilient, we can expect that it will resist harm - but won't be any better off than when we started. But what if...

Accountability and Commitment

ByAndrew's Agile June 21, 2016 0 Comments
Accountability and commitment. We hear these words a lot in the business and Agile world, but what do they mean, and how do we do them well? Accountability We've all seen instances of "accountability" in the form of blaming and shaming: ("Whose fault is it?" and "What were you thinking?) These are the forms that accountability takes in a fear-based organization. The blaming and shaming approach...