Food for Agile Thought #154: Agile’s Many Faces, BAI Report 2018, Product Discovery, User Testing Engineers

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.

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #154: Agile’s Many Faces, BAI Report 2018, Product Discovery, User Testing Engineers
Continue reading Food for Agile Thought #154: Agile’s Many Faces, BAI Report 2018, Product Discovery, User Testing Engineers

Food for Agile Thought #153: Agnostic Agile, #NoCeremonies, #NoProjects, Design and Agile

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.

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #153: Agnostic Agile, #NoCeremonies, #NoProjects, Design and Agile
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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.)

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

Food for Agile Thought #152: Agile Estimates, #NoEstimates, #WhyEstimates, Product Design Tools, Top-Down or What?

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.)

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #152: Agile Estimates, #NoEstimates, #WhyEstimates, Product Design Tools, Top-Down or What?
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Food for Agile Thought #151: Beyond Budgeting, Open Workspace Horror, Product Vision Principles, #mtpcon SF

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #151—shared with 18,292 peers—focuses on beyond budgeting and the emerging business agility trend. We also learn about a study that provides scientific proof for a familiar gut feeling among knowledge workers: open floor plans suck.

We then take a deep dive into product vision principles and why you should look beyond MMRs to differentiators if you want your product to succeed.

Finally, the results of the scrum master survey are in, delivering a benchmark for the all-important question: scrum master, whatchadoing all day?

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #151: Beyond Budgeting, Open Workspace Horror, Product Vision Principles, #mtpcon SF
Continue reading Food for Agile Thought #151: Beyond Budgeting, Open Workspace Horror, Product Vision Principles, #mtpcon SF