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...
George Lawton, from the ServiceVirtualizaton.com blog asked me for an interview. He was generally interested in KEYS to agile testing maturity. Something Mary Thorn and I have been “yacking” about for quite some time.
I thought it might be interesting to share his questions and my answers. It will even be more interesting to see “what parts” of my answers make it into his blog ;-)
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
My friend Josh Anderson has been studying and following Spotify’s approaches to agile team and organizational structure, both in general and in his leadership role at Dude Solutions. I’ve been interested in what they’re doing as well, but I don’t have the “playground” that Josh has.
I thought I’d consolidate some links to Spotify’s journey here.
To be honest, I’m not as enamored with Spotify as Josh is. It’s not that they aren’t doing really cool things. It’s that quite a few of my peers in the agile community are chasing Spotify’s version of agile scaling and operational dynamics as, dare I say it, a Shiny Object.
There have been 4 mergers in the last few weeks in the agile community that I thought I'd mention:
I thought it was very interesting to see this sort of consolidation in this space. While they're all interesting, the Big Visible + SolutionsIQ move is probably the largest in pure agile coaching and agile training mass.
I’ve written several times on the subject of how coaches and trainers in the Scrum and Agile communities often use “management” as a term implying dysfunction and marginalization. Not always as clearly as that might sound, because they’re often paying the bills, but behind closed doors they’re often complaining about them.
If an agile adoption goes awry, we often blame it on the leadership team –
Clearly our training and coaching of the agile teams was complete. The fact that the adoption is failing or dysfunctional isn’t my problem. It’s those pesky leaders. I tried to invite them to the CSM class…and they didn’t have the time. They only had time for a 1-hour leadership overview and half of them were on their cell phones the entire time.
They keep asking me to do more team training, and I’m doing that. But they really need to get their act together for this agile transformation to work. Sadly, I’m at a loss as to what I can do…
In my last post we explored a situation where a Product Owner had a long-term challenge with their performance that was weighing their team down.
But as I finished that article, I realized that there might be something else going on that I wanted to explore here.
In that situation, the teams’ coach assured me that conversations and escalations had happened between herself, the team, and the Product Owner. She even said she’d escalated things to the PO’s boss. She made it sound like there was a huge amount of clear feedback over the course of two full years.
Given this, they seemed to be at an insurmountable obstacle—a poorly performing Product Owner and nobody willing to do anything to improve the situation. In other words, they were stuck.
I was talking to a fellow coach the other day and she was venting a bit about one of her teams and their Product Owner.
Bob, she said, I have an outstanding agile team. We’ve been working within our product organization for nearly two years. In that time, we’ve delivered an application upgrade that everyone has viewed as simply fantastic. Now we’re onto a building a critical piece of new system functionality for them—so we’ve earned everyone’s confidence in our abilities.
We work hard, we work well together, we deliver high-quality working code, and we have fun doing it.
Ok, I asked. That sounds like a fantastic situation. To be honest, I’m a bit jealous.
About a year ago my podcasting partner Josh Anderson asked me this question. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard the term before he brought it up. It inspired me to write this brief blog post for Velocity Partners.
I was hoping to get some traction on the questions I posed in the post, but I don’t believe anyone responded. This was about a year ago and I recently attended a presentation that made me reflect back on it.
Here’s a link to the original podcast.
We just finished the 2014 Raleigh Scrum Coaching Retreat in Chapel Hill, NC and I was lucky enough to participate. The event sold out months ago and was capped at 75 attendees so we could immerse in some intense working groups and Open Space sessions.
I suggested an Open Space session entitled as this post is. My inspiration was Adam Weisbart’s famous video by the same name, but targeted towards Scrum Masters. In that video, Adam and his band of actors demonstrated all of the things a good Scrum Master should do by demonstrating the things a bad Scrum Master did. He packs a tremendous number of anti-patterns into 3 ½ minutes.
In 2009 I wrote the first edition of Scrum Product Ownership as a way of helping Product Owners understand their roles and responsibilities better. Before that, it was mostly an exercise in guessing and survival. In 2013, I updated the book in a second edition[1]. In both books I took on the topic of Backlog Grooming.
As it turns out the term “grooming” is losing its luster in the community and terms like maintenance and refinement are replacing it. I believe the latest copy of the Scrum Guide uses the term refinement. So I will try to start using Backlog Refinement consistently throughout this article. That being said, I really, really like the implications of the term grooming.
Last week I attended the Agiles Conference in Medellin Colombia. Velocity Partner’s latest office is also in Medellin, so I had the chance to hang out with some colleagues as well.
First let me tell you that this was my first trip to Medellin and Colombia. So I didn’t know what to expect. I was surprised at the altitude, the lush greenery, the cosmopolitan nature of the city, and most pleasantly surprised by the people. They were warm, fun, bright, welcoming, energetic, and engaging.
