Food for Agile Thought’s issue #155—shared with 18,683 peers—focuses on effective team building, how agile data can support your storytelling during an agile transition, and why the change agent needs to be ahead of the game at any time.
We also have a look at the silent estimation technique and why it may replace planning poker, and why professional product backlogs have the shape of an iceberg.
Lastly, we ask ourselves: is ‘lean startups’ probably nothing more than a failed ideology, a useless tool if your organization is looking to improve its innovation game?
Almost three years into building this community, I believe we might now have achieved the critical mass to organize a great conference — the Hands-on Agile 2019 Conference. Currently, I would target the second quarter of 2019 for the first Hands-on Agile conference. To reduce complexity, I would plan for Berlin as its location although London might be an alternative.
Update 2018-12-11: Join the Agile Camp Berlin 2019: April 26–27, 2019, see below.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #154—shared with 18,591 peers—focuses on agile’s many faces, be it the progress of business agility, mob programming, or descaling the organization to ‘scale agile.’
We also have a look at Scrum.org’s brand-new advanced scrum master class, and share a reading tip — Jez Humble’s recent book on building and scaling high-performance technology organizations is eye-opening.
Lastly, we applaud Peter Casinelli who advocates that developers should conduct user tests, we learn six principles of modern product discovery, and we take to heart that no one is immune to cognitive bias.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #153—shared with 18,517 peers—focuses on agnostic agile as a critical element for successful agile transitions and the havoc a dogmatic use of any of the agile frameworks may cause. Which leads to the question of whether we need all the ceremonies anyway? (There is a Spotify experiment that may help to answer this question.)
We also get back to team building—starting from scratch or starting over—, and we cherish a free book on continuous innovation from InfoQ.
Finally, we address the odd couple again—(UX) design and agile—and try to make things work for everyone.
“Accelerate” [advertising] is a must-read book for anyone involved in building agile organizations and teams. It lays out a path to success based on a statistical analysis of data. It also puts an end to the popular narrative that ’becoming agile’ is somehow a fuzzy process. The data shows that there are patterns at all levels that successful agile organizations share.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #152—shared with 18,406 peers—focuses agile estimates: are they always waste or are there situations where agile estimates are useful? Moreover, in the latter case how to make sure that you provide the right estimates?
We also enjoy a sample chapter from a good book on product design, listing nine critical tools, and shed light on the questions whether infrastructure teams need product management, too.
Finally, John Cutler shares his observations on how coaching engagements often start and also come to an end. (Let’s create a list of these signs — so we can prepare yourselves for next time when it is our turn.)
