This update is from the STP conference I’m attending in Denver the week of November 3, 2014. Software Test Professionals is a conference mostly focused towards testing, so the slant of all of the talks is that lens or perspective. That being said, the agile topics are by definition broader and more whole-team centered.
I just attended a session by Jeff Porter where he was exploring agile practices in a talk entitled: Agile – Where the Rubber Hits the Road.
Now let me start by saying that I liked Jeff’s talk. It was very pragmatic and practical. He simply shared what they were doing at FamilySearch.org. Practitioner reports like this one truly enhance the state of practice in the agile community.
Introduction
There are several terms used for it within agile contexts. Sometimes you hear:
- Done
- Definition-of-Done or DoD
- Done-Ness Criteria
- Acceptance Criteria
- Release Criteria
Sometimes you even hear it repeated, as in: This story isn’t complete until its—“Done…Done…Done”.
Apparently the more “done’s” you have, the more emphasis there is on completeness. Although I don’t think I’ve heard more than four “done” used in a row.
A coaching colleague of mine approached me with some questions for a university class he was asked to do on Product Ownership. I got the impression the lecture was for a Software Engineering class that was being introduced to Agile Methods in general and the Scrum Product Owner role specifically.
Here are the five questions and my answers:
I have mixed feelings about Open Space events and I’m not sure why. My personal experience with them is two-fold. Either they are wonderful and powerful or they are terrible. There is sort of nothing in between.
Sometimes I’ve gone and the Marketplace is hardly populated with any topics. So the cupboard is bare and there is little energy and focus towards the Open Space.
At other times, the energy and collaboration is so compelling that the event can be termed a “defining moment” for the theme and group.
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:
- Big Visible (Boston) merged with SolutionsIQ (Portland, OR)
- cPrime (CA) merged with Alten Group (Europe)
- ScrumSense (South Africa) merged with Agile42 (Europe, North America)
- Agile for All (Colorado) merged with Action and Influence (Atlanta)
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.
