Food for Agile Thought’s issue #182—shared with 21,278 peers—addresses the agile-industrial complex, the stages of progress in becoming agile—provided your organization belongs to the lucky few—, and the state of Cynefin in 2019.
We also learn more on how to deal with complaints that your user stories are not detailed enough—and why it is worth to get to the ground of this notion—; why strategy maps are essential to building valuable products, and how to Marie Kondo your product backlog.
Lastly, we understand why capability maturity models are unsuited for assessing any form of agility.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #181—shared with 21,092 peers—addresses transparency, the lack thereof and other forms of dark agile. Moreover, we get a backstage view at the Scrum Master Trends Report, and we borrow from Atlassian’s team health tool.
We also get some new ideas about how to create product reviews people like to participate in; we refresh our memory why the traditional governance approach is unsuited for ’agile,’ and embrace the idea that product launches do not have to be a troublesome thing.
Lastly, Ron Jeffries asks what the agile community can do to reach out to those practitioners who haven’t yet experienced the real thing as outlined in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. What are your thoughts?
If technical debt is the plague of our industry, why isn’t the Scrum Guide addressing the question of who is responsibly dealing with it? To make things worse, if the Product Owner’s responsibility is to maximize the value customers derive from the Development Team’s work, and the Development Team’s responsibility is to deliver a product Increment (at least) at the end of the sprint adhering to the definition of “Done,” aren’t those two responsibilities possibly causing a conflict of interest?
This post analyzes the situation by going back to first principles, as laid out in the Scrum Guide to answer a simple question: Who is responsible for keeping technical debt at bay in a Scrum Team?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #180—shared with 21,092 peers—focuses on micromanagement perils and the magic that happens once you leave the industrial paradigm behind you. We also learn about four different approaches on how to scale agile teams, and we revisit the velocity as well as the minimum viable product discussions.
Being dedicated storytellers ourselves, we borrow from Pixar’s rule book on storytelling, and we embrace eight ways how we can focus our product teams on outcome/impact, not output/features.
Lastly, we applaud Mike Cohn for busting more product development myths!
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #179—shared with 20,968 peers—questions agile dogmas, we bust more Scrum myths and learn why innovative cultures are paradoxical.
We also explore how to avoid the building trap or to become a feature factory; we learn how to free ourselves from the shackles of inertia and risk-aversion, and we have our gut feeling confirmed that fixed scope, fixed time projects can go only one way—south.
Lastly, we learn what kings, and queens, and knights, and trolls have to do with agile transitions. (Yub, GoT is coming.)
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #178—shared with 20,783 peers—focuses on learnings from agile transitions failures, how we as agile practitioners volunteered to join probably futile efforts, and why coaching mistakes may have contributed to the mess.
We learn how to support the transition to a product-centric organization; we remind us why (active) listening is a crucial instrument in our toolbox, and how to avoid falling into the “building the wrong thing” trap.
Lastly, we reconsider the idea of not having product managers at all; why not let the engineers do this job, too?
