Things to think about before and after a daily stand-up meeting
Daily stand-up meetings are at the core of the Scrum process. They help synchronize the team and quickly escalate impediments. Regardless if you have been participating in those meetings for years or you are just starting today, Mike Griffiths just published two useful posts to help us get more out of this critical activity:
On the road to Competence
How can one improve competency in a software development team? This is a critical question for a software development manager and this video of a presentation given by Jurgen Appelo at the 2010 Norvegian Development Conference provide an insight that attempt to answer this question.
You may also want to view the slides for this presentation.
Agile Anti-Patterns
I believe that Agile is a great tool to help development teams achieve more, improve, and reach their next level in effectiveness, productivity, or creativity. However, like any tool, it can be misused or misapplied. You can shoot yourself in the foot if you are not applying a certain level of discipline or hygiene.
Mike Griffiths posted a short and sweet article on this subject that he entitled Agile anti-patterns. He classifies those anti-patterns as follow:
- Agile as a silver bullet
- Agile as an excuse for no discipline
- Agile without explanation
- Shallow Feedback
Self Improvement: There Is No End State When Transitioning to Agile
I am a strong believer in Self Improvement, constant learning, and continuous improvement. As such I really enjoyed this article from Mike Cohn where he describes how Agile adoption is process with no end state that needs to be tailored to your organization needs.
[via Mike Cohn's Blog]
Kanban – The Next Step in the Agile Evolution?
I am interested in everything that can help improve my teams' productivity and consequently helps us provide better value to our customers. As such, I have started reading about Kanban, a project management methodology that appears to "compete" with Scrum. Scrum is the methodology that I am currently using.
Scrum is an iterative method that provides incremental value to stakeholders at the end of each iteration. The product owner provides requirements at the beginning of each iteration. During the iteration, the team designs, implements, tests, documents, debugs new features based on those requirements. At the end of the iteration, the team demonstrates the new features to the product owner who accept or reject them.
Kanban on the other hand, is not an iterative process. The product owner provides ranked list of requirements. The team pulls requirements from top of the list one at a time. The team designs, implements, tests, documents, debugs new features based on those requirements. The product owner review the new features as soon as they are produced.
Project Management Hut presents an article describing Kanban as the next step in Agile Evolution.