Agile – Page 2 – View from the Potting Shed

Scrum makes one promise only

One of my favourite books on agility is The People’s Scrum (Dymaxicon, 2013) by Tobias Mayer.

A lot of books on agility focus on the mechanics of how it all fits together, who needs to be where doing what with whom in order for the machine to work more effectively.

This book is different. It focuses not on the how, but challenges the why. It is open to critically questioning every aspect of agile with the intention of uncovering the core drivers behind agile practices.

Planning poker

I published this on my work’s internal blog last week.

Next in my short series on supporting agile practices is planning poker (sometimes called the planning game).

Planning poker may be used when estimating the relative size of a user story, during backlog refinement or sprint planning.

Business process modelling at Lean Agile Dundee

Last Thursday evening, I gave a presentation entitled ‘Using business process modelling for creating a definition of ready and definition of done’ at the second Lean Agile Dundee meet-up at SolarWinds.

Shu ha ri—three stages towards agile maturity

“Scrum has its roots in Japanese thought and practice”, Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum, tells us in his book Scrum: the art of doing twice the work in half the time (Random House, 2014), p.38.

One of the ideas that Scrum has drawn on is the Japanese martial art concept of shu ha ri (or shuhari) which outlines three stages of learning towards mastery.

Over the last few years, I have found this a really useful model to bear in mind when working with teams as they embrace and grow towards agility.

Impact mapping at the first Lean Agile Dundee

Group of people having meeting using laptops — Photo by Rawpixel on Unsplash

Last night I attended the first ever Lean Agile Dundee meetup at the offices of SolarWinds MSP, there were six of us—four Solarwinds employees, another chap and me.

Having attended a few Lean Agile Edinburgh events (the next one being next week at the Skyscanner offices), I was excited to learn there was a similar event starting in Dundee which is significantly closer for me.

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