If you value agile practices, it is crucial to know if a job offering or a prospective business partner that claims to be “agile” really keeps its promises. Unfortunately, as agility usually cannot be observed directly, and certainly not from the outside of an organization, there is no way of knowing in advance if you will enter an agile environment that serves your own working needs or if a lot of frustration lies ahead of you. Therefore, we ran an extensive survey throughout 2020 and 2021 with more than 1,000 participants from all walks of agility: the Agile Metrics Survey 2021.
With the Agile Metrics Survey 2021, we present the first results and conclude with some thoughts about possible application scenarios of our instrument as well as possible next steps in our research.
TL; DR: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity
Despite decades-long efforts of the whole agile community—books, blogs, conferences, webinars, videos, meetups; you name it—we are still confronted in many supposedly agile organizations with output-metric driven reporting systems. At the heart of these reporting systems, stuck in the industrial age when the management believed it needed to protect the organization from slacking workers, there is typically a performance metric: velocity.
In the hands of an experienced team, velocity might be useful a team-internal metric. But, when combined with some managers’ wrong interpretation of commitment, it becomes a tool of oppression. So when did it all go so wrong?
TL; DR: How to Win with Agile Resistant Teams w/ Scott Weiner — ACB21
In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Scott Weiner shares a case study on how to master an agile transition by creating agile resistant teams based on common sense, team autonomy, and the psychology of metrics.
In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.
As I have observed in practice, many Scrum Teams either limit the data gathering part of the Retrospective, thus lacking vital information. Or they invest too much time doing so, leaving little capacity to analyze the data and come to conclusions on how to best improve as a team.
Read on and learn how you can avoid falling victim to both scenarios by gathering data continuously and asynchronously.
The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of a holistic product creation perspective.
The theses cover the accountabilities of the Scrum Master from product discovery to product delivery in a hands-on practical manner. On the one side, they address typical Scrum events such as Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective. On the other hand, the Scrum Master theses also cover, for example, the relationship with the Product Owner, they deal with agile metrics, and how to kick-off an agile transition, thus moving beyond the original framework of the Scrum Guide.
Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.
At the team level, qualitative agile metrics often work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
