Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations [Review]

TL;DR: Accelerate

Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim latest book Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations [advertising] describes the factors that drive high-performing tech organizations, derived from the data that has been aggregated with the State of DevOps Report since 2014.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations

“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.

In other words: becoming agile can be data-driven. (A hypothesis that I shared in How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams—The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey earlier.)

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Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results)

TL;DR: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team

Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great scrum master serves only one scrum team — that’s at least a popular narrative in the scrum community. Nevertheless, there is also a loud voice that doubts that approach: what would you do the whole day – with a single team? Aren’t they supposed to become self-organizing over time? And if so, does the scrum then need a scrum master 24/7?

As I worked for years as a product owner on scrum teams without a dedicated scrum master-which was working well-I was curious to learn more about that question, too. Hence I ran a survey in late June and early July 2018, the results of which are presented here.

In total, 261 scrum masters participated in this non-representative survey in the two weeks before July 5th, 2018. 19 participants chose not to provide their consent to Google processing and to store their answers. Hence their contributions were deleted, resulting in a sample size of 242 responses.

Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results) — Age of Product
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Webinar #5: Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns [Video]

TL;DR: Webinar Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns

Webinar Sprint Planning: The purpose of Scrum’s sprint planning is to align the development team and the product owner. Both need to agree on the shippable product increment of the next sprint. The idea is that the development team’s forecast reflects the product owner’s sprint goal. Also, the team needs to come up with a plan on how to accomplish its forecast.

Easier said than done, it appears. Therefore, the fifth Hands-on Agile webinar addresses common sprint planning anti-patterns. Learn how to keep a simple scrum ceremony useful by avoiding typical mistakes, from pushy POs, toying with the definition of ready to obstructing the future flow by pushing utilization to 110%.

Webinar Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns — June 5th, 2018
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