Bob's Blog
Bob is a prolific blogger who simply enjoys sharing his experiences with colleagues in the Agile Community. Topics revolve around Scrum, XP, Kanban, Project Management, Business Analysis, Testing, Leadership and General Musings.
Check back often as we've always got something to say...
Josh Anderson and I recently published a trifecta of Meta-cast podcasts on FEAR. Consider it our gift to you on Halloween.
I thought I’d provide links to all 3 podcasts here:
Agile Coaches are Scary - I personally resonate with this one ;-)
I hope you enjoy the theme. And as always, we would love your feedback on the episodes and/or please send us ideas for future podcasts!
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
I read an article by Angie Jones the other day entitled - 7 Habits of Highly Effective SDETs. If you know me, you know how enamored I am of Steven Covey and Angie, so I read it with great anticipation.
And indeed, it was a great piece that focused on the evolution of testing and the testers role.
But it also made me think about testers in a different way. A melancholier way. It reminded me of the song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, by Pete Seeger. It’s a very dated folk song written in 1955. A year before my birth ;-)
I had to share this post because I think it hits on two pet peeves of mine.
First, instead of trying to measure employee engagement (morale, happiness, etc.) leaders should instead have face-to-face conversations with their teams to determine it.
We’ve sort of forgotten that old strategy of (management by walking around) which is STILL incredibly effective.
And second, it provides a sound reminder to be careful as to what you try and measure.
In my perfect world, leaders would only measure a handful of things (1-5) that were both qualitative and quantitative. Then stay laser-focused on guiding the organization by them.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
Not that long ago, I wrote a blog post that was inspired by Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor. She had written a very brief note around a leader’s responsibility to receive feedback, as well or better than, they are at giving feedback.
And many leaders, to put it mildly, suck at receiving feedback.
And you want to know another surprise? Most of them are unaware of this blind spot. They think they’re great listeners. But they’re not.
They are simply not self-aware!
Frankly, I’m tired of all of the scaling frameworks. They’re mostly driven by three needs:
Creating revenue for the firms creating them;
From a company or organizational perspective, they’re indicative of lazy, buy agile in-a-box, thinking;
And they feed the “certification happy” nature of our community.
And yes, I too am guilty of falling into the above traps.
I think the introduction of Scrum@Scale has ticked me over the edge and inspired me to write this post. That and reading this article by Neil Perkin, which takes a more reflective view to leveraging useful bits from the various scaling frameworks.
There are individuals who have influenced my professional journey significantly. Sometimes, by working with me directly. Other times, by their writing or position in our software community. And other times, simply as a role model.
I've started a segment on my blog called – My Heroes. I’ll post intermittently, perhaps every 1-2 months. But it serves as a reminder to me to be thoughtful and appreciative of the folks who’ve influenced my growth and skills. And of course, they get none of the credit for my many foibles.
The fifth one up is actually a pair of individuals.
In 1994, close to 25 years ago, Dorothy Graham & Tom Gilb authored a book entitled – Software Inspection. It became the de facto standard guidance for how to conduct artifact and code reviews for software development.
Now that doesn’t mean we “got good” at inspections. No, for decades following the books writing we still basically sucked at it. But it means that we had no good excuses for that. Dorothy and Tom had provided a wonderful recipe that many (most) failed to follow.
My colleague Don MacIntyre invited me to attend and co-teach his Scrum @ Scale Certified Practitioner class in Raleigh, NC last week (September 10-11th, 2018). It was in my hometown so how could I refuse.
It was a 2-day class with ~20 attendees. There was a nice mix of agile and Scrum experience across a spectrum of well-known companies leveraging agile at scale. We even had one gentleman fly in from India for the class.
Don spent most of the time teaching, but I had a few opportunities to teach basic Scrum and contribute to our general coaching conversations. Overall, I think the class went very well.
Hi everyone.
I have a confession to make. I’ve fallen into a trap and I need to get out of it.
Gosh, Bob, what’s wrong? What is it you might ask?
I’ve been saying: “The Scrum Guide says” way too frequently. It’s almost a daily mantra and I suddenly realized that I need to stop it.
The ScrumMaster role is one of those that is simple and complex at the same time. I often speak in terms of doing agile and being agile, and the ScrumMaster role strongly influences their teams in both of those dimensions. Of course, the latter being much more difficult to manage and get right.
The good news in this space is that there are a few really solid books that explore this important role within Scrum.
It’s funny really. One of the key points of the agile methodologies and the manifesto is heavy collaboration, with the best being face-to-face collaboration. But one of the things I see happening in teams all of the time is, how can I say this delicately, over collaboration.
In other words, the teams, ahem, talk too much. There, I said it And I’m referring to open-ended discussion that takes too long if ever to narrow down towards a decision. Folks seem to be talking to hear themselves talk. Often it’s not everyone, with a few heavy talkers dominating discussions and the rest seemingly along for the ride. So it can be quite unbalanced.
In facilitation terms, there are two types of discussions going on when a team is trying to make a decision. There are divergent conversations, where options and ideas are getting put on the table. This is the brainstorming side of the discussion. And then there are convergent discussions, where the team is narrowing down options in order to make a decision.
