This presentation shares a set of stories, representing lessons learned from running an agile project in a waterfall-based telecom culture. What was done differently from the enterprise waterfall-based project management standard? What agile principles and specific practices were applied? What were tangible benefits to the business from the situation where one project team became “outlaws” of the corporate culture.
The last Agile Manifesto principle states that “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” For Scrum teams, the sprint retrospective is therefore a key meeting for continuous improvement. The results are however not always satisfying. In his book “Essential Scrum“, Kenneth Rubin discusses the most common issues in sprint retrospectives that he has noticed in his Agile coaching experience.
This presentation by Grindr VP of Engineering, Lukas Sliwka, focuses on implementing Scrum metrics to drive high performance teams while building strong and innovative software engineering organization.
Let’s challenge some of the commonly accepted patterns for software development teams. High degree of autonomy doesn’t turn into anarchy but rather help to keep intrinsic motivation high. Participatory leadership means that every team member is a leader yet it doesn’t mean competition. Decisions making process has nothing to do with power structures. Culture is paramount and it goes ahead of technical skills. Collaboration is ultimately the factor the whole team optimizes their work for.
Technical debt is a metaphor coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992. This concept refers to the work that needs to be done so that a software development project could be considered as “complete”. Could you try to measure your amount of technical debt? Could you use some tools to do this? These are some of the questions that this article explores.
Story mapping is a technique invented by Jeff Patton that order user stories along two independent dimensions. The “map” arranges user activities along the horizontal axis in rough order of priority. On the vertical axis, it represents increasing sophistication of the implementation. In his blog post, Sunit Parekh explains how you can apply story maps to build your product backlog in a visual way.
In 2001 a group of programmers proposed the word “agile” to describe a set of values they shared. Several of these programmers had already developed methods based on these values. The values are universal, that’s how they were chosen. The methodologies, however, were designed for the technology landscape of the 1990s. Think of all the changes in technology and business practise in the last 25 years. If that seems too daunting just think about the last five years. In taking “Agile” mainstream, we adopt these ancient practises on faith while losing sight of the values that inspired them.
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