The software developers in a well-known Scrum team have undergone a transition from generalists to specialists in former times. They have been responsible for no specific parts of the software system. Every developer was assigned to the next high priority tasks regardless of knowledge and experience. Combined with classical waterfall project management, solo programming, missing code reviews, and missing unit testing, the resulting quality of the system was extremely low. There was a vast lack of knowledge of the old legacy code the team was working with. To compensate that knowledge all parts of the system were assigned to specific developers - a step that turned them from generalists to specialists. Instead of moving out of the waterfall into Scrum and introducing ...
There was heavy "agile fun" in the last months with all the agilists working close with me. We made lots of wordy jokes like "the goal is the goal", "the way is the way" which became things like "way-driven driving" and nonsense like that. Thinking of all these things all the time made me come to the conclusion of a quite meaningful term I'm going to explain: the Drive-Driven Personality. "Say what? Drive-driven personality? Yup, right, c'mon, go away and never come back!" No, really and seriously. It's that easy: Drive-Driven Personality is needed to push changing the world! Many people just live their lives as is, be it private or professionally. These people may be good, valuable, hard-working thinkers with a quality above ...
Everyone getting agile has to read this book! Author: Mike Cohn Title: User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development http://bit.ly/POrak Rating: highly recommended! During any approach to implement agile procedures in an organisation there is a need to explain how management and engineering of requirements should work. Coming from traditional waterfall projects most people do not understand what those User Story stuff is all about. Usually lot of concerns are mentioned... "So, User Stories are Use Cases, right? Why don't you just call it Use Case?" "But we need all requirements at the start of our project. How should that work with User Stories?" "No, we don't need that. We know what the customers want and we know all features of the product. What for should we waste ...
Situation Many organizations do not dare to change themselves although everyone knows that things do not work well. Usually real working employees have a good feeling that things are going wrong. Unfortunately they do not have the power to trigger change but expect middle management to do so. Usually top management expects everyone to do the best job and will ask questions to middle management if things go wrong. Therefor middle management is sandwiched with expectations - this is a hard job to handle and needs explicit skills. People tend to keep an organisational status quo for several reasons: Why change anything? Never change a running system. A change would have impact on many parts of the organisation, we just can't do this. We ...
The major disadvantage of a wall-based personal taskboard is its pure static character. You can't take it with you for travelling or for working on it at home. Here's the solution: the mobile personal taskboard. Side note: this version of the personal taskboard is not used by myself but I like the idea a lot. For me it works to move the 2 most important task from my wall-based board into my paper book. So my paper book is some kind of additional optional external kanban lane. Don't forget: always inspect and adapt! This topic ...
Just a small update on my personal task board: as the open tasks got more and more it was hard to filter and select the next task to pull into WIP (work in progress). Solution: tasks are now sorted by urgency from left to right and by importance from bottom to top. The most upper right task is ready-ready to jump into WIP. To be continued...
