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?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #177—shared with 20,568 peers—covers Scrum limits, the brand-new Scrum Master Trends Report 2019—a joined venture of Age-of-Product with Scrum.org—and the fallacy of wanting to scale ‘agile’ throughout an organization.
We also learn from the Puppet founder that we are not alone in our skepticism regarding enterprise sales, what the author of ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ has learned about innovation for the last 25 years, and how we can achieve a better understanding for product management among stakeholders.
Lastly, we have a look at what creates an exemplary agile workspace; if only more organizations would join ING in this respect.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #176—shared with 20,343 peers—covers a study on personality traits suited for agile team building; we go through the stages of adopting self-management as an organization, and we listen to the professor who coined the term “psychological safety” to realize why it has become an essential building block for organizational success.
Also, we ask whether the rush to ship a new product as soon as possible to gather feedback has become untenable; we dive into determining product value, and we understand the particularities of product management from a new viewpoint.
Lastly, we learn more about the educational challenges agile coaches face themselves.
