Scrum
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Why do we have retrospectives?
A retrospective is a tool in Scrum, to make the team look at how the process can be improved.This is done by repeatedly looking at how we do things today and see what we can change. By doing this on a scheduled time after the sprint, the team is not distracted and can relax and focus entirely on the improvement. I have been to a lot of retrospectives that didn’t really provide any use to the team. Sure, it’s nice to get together, especially when most of us work remote. But that’s not why we hold a retrospective. I’ve noticed that so many really doesn’t know why we do them.…
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SCRUM ONLY WORKS IF WE UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE
Scrum teaches us: ”No big bang design!” We’re supposed to discover the design as we keep developing. Sure, that’s probably ok in a small project. It’s like building a small medieval village. Another villager moves in and just patches his house on the outside of the village. And after a while, we have a jumble of streets and houses. Try scaling up that to a big city! As soon as any software starts getting useful… eh… I mean bigger, we have to know what we are constructing. We have to take the time to sit down and think about what we are doing. We have to understand the problem we…
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SCRUM IS A BIG CHECKLIST TO INCREASE QUALITY AND SPEED
Checklists are good. They make us remember things. Especially when it is things we do over and over again, when it is easy to forget one step just because we’ve done it so many times already. I mean, we’re just human. If we look around, many operations where risk is high often use checklists. Like pilots. They are fanatic when it comes to following the pre-flight checklist, because if they miss anything, even the smallest thing, it could end in disaster. Lives are at stake. But few airplanes go down because of pilots skipping this step. I think it’s safe to say that checklists work. They evidently increase the quality…
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ARE ALL BUGS CRITICAL?
Often when you listen to people that report bugs, it sounds as if the world is coming down if it isn’t fixed immediately. But are all bugs really that serious? Is it possible that some of them actually doesn’t have to be fixed right now? That we even could put them into the backlog? There are two kinds of bugs. The ones that has to be fixed right away or the world will burn. And the ones that are annoying, but you can live with them. The first category has to be fixed immediately, obviously. But the other one can safely be added to the backlog and handled like any…
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ROUTINES REDUCE FRICTION AND GETS THINGS DONE
It is always a good idea to remove as much friction as possible. And with friction I mean the resistance to get things done, to start and to keep doing it. There are many ways to do that, and one of them is to have routines. But what does that have to do with Scrum? Routines are learned behaviour. An order of operations that you don’t have to invent every time. You just know what to do next. This speeds up things, and it consumes less energy. Scrum is actually a set of routines that removes friction. Scrum is a well-defined process. It has several pieces that build a pipeline…
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WHEN IS THE USER STORY “MAKE IT BETTER” FINISHED?
We’ve all been told to do the system safer, better looking, faster, or any other vague requirements. So we do what we think solves the problem. But it wasn’t really what the stakeholder wanted. Can we avoid this by quantifying what better means, by putting numbers on it and measure when we are done? The users probably don’t know what they want. Don’t be satisfied with that. Ask questions and clarify the intent. Then make it measurable so you know when you are finished. And yes, you can quantify everything. Why are requirements vague? We don’t know when we arrive if we don’t know where we’re going. A vague requirement…
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WHO IS THIS “USER” THAT SCRUM KEEPS TALKING ABOUT?
When you see an example of a user story it always stars with: “As a USER…” But what hides behind this “user”? Who is s/he? Or what? And does it actually give me any value to start every story with a user? The “user” is way to generic. Instead, you should be specific. Who, or what, makes the request? By identifying the stakeholders up front, you stand a much higher chance of making a system that actually works. So, what is a stakeholder, then? The problem with Scrum, according to Tom Gilb A co-worker woke my interest in what Tom Gilb has to say, a while ago. We were sitting…
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THE SPRINT IS ACTUALLY A SET OF GOALS
People with goals always outperform people without them. I think that this is the main reason to begin setting goals. We all work better if we have a goal. That is, goals that we commit to, make a promise to ourselves that we will finish. A goal without this is not a goal, it is just a waste of time. What’s the point if I set a goal for myself and then just ignore it? We have to hold ourselves accountable. Now, the goals has to be reasonable, you have to be able to finish them, or they are just as useless as not having any. Setting a goal to…
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THE REFINEMENT IS NOT JUST AN HOUR LONG MEETING EVERY SPRINT
User Story Refinement – The activity of understanding what is asked of us, and the decision making of how to do it. There refinement has two parts. The first part is to make sure that we understand what the stakeholders want. What are the problem we’re trying to solve? We have to understand how the story fits into the big picture, we have to understand how the thing we are going to do is going to be used by the stakeholders. Not the stakeholder (singular), because there are of course many stakeholders. Obviously, there is the client. The one we talked to when the story saw the light of day…
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SCRUM – THE BIG MOTIVATOR
When we read about motivation and what makes an organization effective, we often find that the control over one’s work and time is at the very top. We see this in for instance 3Ms 15% rule. Or for that matter, flex-time has the same goal. I even think I heard about a company that had no required work hours at all. Or how about having the possibility to not have to work at the office? This is also one of the big reasons when people start their own business. To take control over their own time. It is not hard to see that if you choose to do something you…
