Food for Agile Thought’s issue #208—shared with 23,551 peers—sheds light on the fate of Six Sigma; we introduce the free Zombie Scrum Checker for your Scrum Team, and we address once again the cycle-time/velocity prediction issue.
We also delve into Booking.com’s experimentation culture; we learn which traps to avoid when handling payment in a B2C application, and we enjoy a Twitter rant on the uselessness of timeline roadmaps.
Lastly, we thank Ron Jeffries for pointing at the obvious: you get paid for shipping valuable software every single Sprint. Period.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #207—shared with 23,508 peers—continues its support of Liberating Structures; this time, Barry addresses the Sprint Review. We enjoy the State of DevOps 2019 report, and then we follow up on the Sprint Review with an unconventional suggestion.
We also learn to distinguish between delivery and product teams; we acquire new skills to influence the business side, and we delve into OKR and hypotheses as a means of team alignment.
Lastly, we learn about three obsolete, yet popular mental models of the industrial paradigm impeding transformations.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #206—shared with 23,491 peers—covers Spotify’s approach to breaking hierarchy; we revisit the estimation discussion, and we consider reasons why teams may not be interested in becoming agile.
We also learn how to 10x our experimentation capacity; we discover five machine learning lessons for product managers, and we track value in an agile transformation.
Lastly, we delve into types of agile coaches—from cargo cult to transformative.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #205—shared with 23,482 peers—covers agile principles; we explore the foundation of organization-wide agility, and we embrace the benefits of trunk-based development.
We also have a look at Amazon’s formula for innovation; we learn why abolishing innovation silos is beneficial, and we appreciate a comprehensive workbook on Design Thinking.
Lastly, we ask: is our industry heading for trouble?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #204—shared with 23,376 peers—turns to Scrum TPS to 3-5x quality and value; we learn how to weave strings of Liberating Structures to achieve a Scrum Team’s goals, and we adjust our approach to handling organizational change.
We then kill our product backlogs; we embrace the idea of #nocode MVPs, and we come back again to the question of user story sizing.
Lastly, we ask: how come that so many agile transformations still fail, given the wealth of knowledge accumulated on the topic over recent years?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #203—shared with 23,236 peers—revisits the case for a combined top-down, bottom-up approach to agile transformations; we learn how to identify and deal with Zombie Scrum, and we consider the usefulness of making a Development Team member also the Scrum Master.
We then address how to communicate product changes to customers in a way that they will not freak out; we go Black Mirror with ethic tests, and we consider how to communicate as a product mensch with engineers without making them freak out either.
Lastly, we ask whether it is futile to resist the slow but steady assimilation of coaches into an organization’s culture?
