The Improvement System Summary All improvement should be connected to business outcomes. Improvement frameworks can be leveraged to ensure alignment between agile initiatives and business objectives. Improvement initiatives can be managed in the same way as the delivery of new product features: Add to Program Backlogs and apply program governance. A small number of KPIs…
On a daily basis, a Scrum Team understands its progress towards achieving the Sprint Goal, and, if necessary, adjusts its plan to maximize the probability of achieving it. This is the purpose of the Daily Scrum. It is a daily event to Inspect and Adapt. During the course of a sprint, the team may discover…
A way to measure the impact of development initiatives on business outcomes A way to measure the value of development initiatives KPI Driver Trees – or Value Driver Trees – are a good way to visualize the linkages between business objectives (Increase Revenue/Decrease Costs/Reduce Risks), the strategy to achieve those objectives (Increase # Visitors/Increase Revenue…
‘Big Room Planning’, or PI Planning, is one of the core events of the Scaled Agile Framework – SAFe. It’s an event where all of the teams on an Agile Release Train (ART), plus stakeholders, get together for 2 days to plan and align on goals for the next production time-box, or Program Increment –…
The Sprint Retrospective What: An opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint. During each Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team plans ways to increase product quality by improving work processes or adapting the definition of “Done”, and also ways to increase velocity by…
The Sprint Review What: Event held at the end of every Sprint to inspect the Increment and adapt the Product Backlog if needed. Who: Scrum Team, Stakeholders. When: At end of each sprint, before sprint planning. Approx. 2 hours for a 2-week sprint. Agenda Product Owner describes the goals for the sprint and associated…
The Daily Scrum The daily scrum (or stand-up) event is primarily for the development team. Others may attend but not interfere with the proceedings. This event is where the team updates themselves on progress in the last 24 hours, and then aligns on a plan for the next 24 hours that they believe keeps them…
Sprint Planning What: Confirm what can be delivered in the upcoming sprint Identify the work needed to deliver the increment Who: Entire Scrum Team: Dev-Team, Product Owner, Scrum Master When: Immediately prior to start of next sprint. Requires approx. 2 hours for a 2-week sprint. Sprint Planning is a Two-Part Event Sprint Planning Part One:…
Backlog Refinement What: Get User Stories ready: who/what/why acceptance criteria small enough to fit – split if necessary dependencies in place Sized in story points Who: Dev. Team, PO, Scrum Master When: Approx. 2 hours per 2-week sprint Agenda PO selects stories to refine PO describes story to team, takes questions, clarifies Add/discuss acceptance…
Scrum was introduced to address the unacceptably high failure rate of software projects. (The annually published CHAOS Report by the Standish Group publishes data on the success rates of IT projects. It was started in 1994 and at that time reported that a startlingly low 16.2% of IT projects are successful). Software development projects can…
The scaled agile framework (SAFe) enables organizations to transform business needs into working software in a consistent, repeatable way, using lean principles. It’s useful to think of this process as one of continuous and progressive refinement of business requirements until discrete items of value can be accepted by delivery teams for implementation. This is accomplished…
“Alan: Now, how to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well, you blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the outside.” – Monty Python Over the weekend I read at least a dozen articles online on the topic of Scrum-Of-Scrums, and I must say I felt like I had been watching that…
In Agile Data Science – Part 1 we reviewed some of the fundamental challenges of doing data science with agility, specifically, how to produce and demonstrate ‘stakeholder value’ within a typical agile time-box of 2-4 weeks. In part 2, we will consider a different approach based on the Data Value Pyramid. The difference in this…
“Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organization’s product and system development practices. The intention of scrum is to make them transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them”. Ken Schwaber. After a couple of months into an agile transformation…
Try this … Get proposed feature list Assign “business value points” using Fibonacci – just relative ranking – use Planning Poker – this is a team exercise with PO’s, Architects, others from the associated delivery team. Complete this step for entire feature list before moving on to step 3. Assign “cost points” (or “size points”,…
“We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action, try to do something? You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures…
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce, Ulysses “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” – Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth “Our own attitude is that…
“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” W. Edwards Deming. The project is underway and I need a feature-level view of where we are. Burn-down charts for user stories are great but do not give me the business-level picture. Burn-down charts calibrated in hours are dangerous – you can burn-down lots of hours…
Ideal Iteration Length – A survey Recently I put the question of the rationale for a max sprint length of 30 days to one of my LinkedIn groups. Here are the responses: The idea is that anything over 30 days is too large to effectively break down and estimate properly and for everyone to keep…
Agile software development has its roots in the lean manufacturing paradigm developed at Toyota – the Toyota Production System (TPS). Lean manufacturing centers on creating more value with less work. One central principle of lean manufacturing is to relentlessly work on identifying and eliminating all sources of waste from the manufacturing process, and also to…