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No more Single Wringable Neck

So as noted earlier in, Why you (might) need a good Product Owner, I expressed reservations about the Product Owner role.

It’s risky to have it all rest on one person.  It could also be unfair.  It could halt the delivery of value and of learning.  Instead of ironing out behavioural issues that may arise from the person focused role could we consider another view.

Here’s the view from Kanban…

Coach as ‘Pair of Hands’

What happens if you acquiesce to being an extra ‘pair of hands’ on your coaching assignment by agreeing to do things for the coaching client.

What might it look like if you resist doing ‘staff augmentation’?

Here’s what it may look like with various scenarios plotted, passage of time horizontally and performance level (you choose the metric e.g. throughput, cycle time, quality) vertically.

Note:…

Attention to Quality gets Results

Most managers I encounter shudder when the subject of quality comes up.  They think quality hampers delivery.   In some ways they are right, you do want to achieve balance, avoiding polishing too much because it can cause being late in delivery  (in mission critical projects it may be better to over polish if the cost of failure is high).

Some managers may shudder because, ooops I may have been…

Design Thinking and it’s Relevance to Agile Testing

  Here I present a review of Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value at the same time connecting to Agile Testing.  Quotations are from the book unless explicitly mentioned otherwise.  Good news, Agile Testing and the Quality mindset has an important part to play.  Let’s see how.

Many things that model Agile Testing map to Design Thinking.  The techniques are…

Keeping up Technical Chops

Good asked to do this for a Coaching job.  It was nice to do.

There is an important and underestimated place for technical excellence.  Heck, it’s a principle!  Combine it with the others 🙂  Standing on the shoulders, Thanks Beck, Rainsberger, Meszaros,  Fowler, Wake, Prag Programmers and  many more unnamed.  It has 36 commits to demonstrate the process.  Feel free to take a look at it.  #agile…

Right Size First, Then Split

There is a hell of a lot going on in Agile Space on Story Splitting.  On the internet and I hear it in interviews and conversations.  It’s as if the only solution to smaller batches is to split ad infinitum.

Now don’t get me wrong, big batches are not good.  They hurt feedback mechanisms, create silos and delay delivery of value.

And there is the point, delivery of value.  Getting value to the…

What makes you Fit for Purpose?

Can someone answer this question?   Well yes, I can help.  In short it’s what you do, be that individually but mostly in a team, to ensure anyone you serve receives the service you provide in a reasonable time frame with appropriate quality.

Where does that start?

It starts with understanding who your customer is.   Taking steps to learn about the customer and what satisfies them.  There are some…

Webinar: Case Study Agile Testing

I recorded a webinar for CodeGenesys on a case study on Agile Testing involving my Australian Client called AgWorld.

Hopefully it conveys that quality is owned by everyone and quality starts well before a line of code is written.

This carries on right through the software development life cycle with the aid of automation tools to increase the delivery rate of completed software.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SHARED PURPOSE

My latest blog is actually one of written for my employer here in the United States, Code Genesys.

You can take a look at it here and is on the importance of shared purpose.  Keep practicing that because it’s hard for first timers and anyone whose experienced for that matter.  Well worth the investment in time :)

Is the Nassi-Schneidermann Still Used

Thinking back to when I was learning programming in the 1980’s the instructors taught us about program creation by a visualization technique called Nassi-Schneidermann diagrams. Here’s a nice summary from breezetree.com.

I thought it was an excellent way to visualize program flow for a novice. It’s only needed for a short time and learners can quickly move to pseudo code. Most programmers can…

The language is reminiscent of the time and the practices that were in place then, but it was ground breaking in that it talks a lot about what we call Agile Values today.  In fact Tom Gilb invented his ‘Agile’ and ‘Iterative’ EVO methodology in the early 1970s.  It’s mentioned in the book as well.  This was well before Agile became what it is today – a business.   Tom was so ahead of his time, I remember back then that Iterative development was never ever mentioned in schools and in the workplace.

And therefore, I think this Bill of Rights still holds relevancy.  I made the challenge on twitter and some thought point 9 was not relevant, rather a relic of the past.  I tend to think it’s misinterpreted in the twitter response.  Here’s the link to the twitter feed and a snap shot below.

  There is power in this for the worker here, even on performance.  Leaders can use this to create an ethos of transparency.  Looking back to look forward.

In keeping with the custom started last year in the blog, Best Posts for 2014, here’s a reflection on year 2015.

Not as many posts as the previous year with just 36.  However the blog received more views that the previous year.

The Most Popular

Again, my reviewof L.David Marquet’s book Turn the Ship Around was the most popular.  Seems like a popular book and the author regularly recommends…

Where’s the teamwork when we can’t see each other

I’m an Australian working in the USA coaching highly distributed teams. We speak English but even then there are slight differences, like Australian English and American English and even within America like from South to North.

We find it’s hard to get people to use video cameras. They are cheap however the culture tends to not encourage use of them. It’s always hard to collaborate at the best of…

The Ladder of Leadership and Kanban

Here’s a comparison of David Marquet’s Ladder of Leadership derives from his work as a nuclear submarine captain and writing his book Turn the Ship Around and then subsequent workshops and writings.

The Kanban Method says start where you are.  Other frameworks require a more explicit transformation to new roles and ceremonies.  The Kanban Method also says Improve Collaboratively and Evolve…

Avoid the Workflow Masquerade

Here’s a tip for scrum teams.  You are almost certainly using a task board.  If not start today.

That task board typically consists of the standard TODO, Doing, Done style.  Sometimes you will see the Doing column divided up even further – some mature teams realise that but a lot don’t so here comes the tip.

In doing sprint planning or planning for a User Story the team identifies a number of…

Scrum Shortcuts the Video Series from Ilan Goldstein

Aussie Scrum expert Ilan Goldstein has made the perfect accompaniment to his handy book of scrum tips called Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners.  It’s very handy reference to anyone wanting to get through those tough episodes we all experience in product development with its slant clearly on Scrum – I find the tips to have a universal appeal as well.  Here’s a bit of a summary and teaser for…

Gaming of Weighted Lead Time

I think this highlights important points about metrics. I favour fewer of course, however this one looks like it’s very useful.