What: Certified Scrum Master Workshop
When: Saturday and Sunday, September 12 & 13
Where: Redwood City, CA
Who: Jeff McKenna and Chris Sims

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The fourth annual State of Agile survey is open for participation.  The survey is sponsored by VersionOne Software.  Over the past 3 years, the survey has provided some interesting insight into what agile practices are actually being used, and what benefits companies are getting from going agile.

I just wrote about the survey for InfoQ.  Just because you read this blog, you can get a sneak peak.  The rest of the world will have to wait until it hits the InfoQ front page on Monday morning. 

Cheers,

Chris

Tonight, at the North Bay Agile meetup, I facilitated "The Great Requirements Showdown!"  It's an experiential exercise that pits traditional written requirements against the agile alternative: user stories and face-to-face communication. 

During the workshop, participants wrote down their 'Ah Ha!' moments and we shared and talked about them.  Here are they are:

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Here at Agile Learning Labs, we go through almost this many sticky notes every day.  Almost.

BTW, registration for the August Agile Project Management learning lab closes on Monday. Check it out now!

Agile adoptions are hard, in large part because they involve changes to the corporate culture, a task requiring huge effort and significant time. At the Agile Roots conference, I met Israel Gat and he shared a different approach: work with the existing culture; don’t try to change it.

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Tomorrow evening I’ll be at The Bay Area Lean Software Development User Group meetup facilitating a cool simulation that I learned from Steve Bockman.

We’re going to launch a fictitious aerospace company, build and ship product, and track our financials to see how we are doing. We will apply the “Five Focusing Steps” from the Theory of Constraints, as well as other lean and agile practices to evolve and improve our operation and ultimately our
profitability. We’ll explore several approaches to optimizing multi-stage processes and engage in some team problem solving. There will be lots of paper airplanes, and a lot of fun.

The event is free, and hosted by Runa Corporation .  Get all of the details at the group’s meetup page.

Cheers,

Chris

By: Chris Sims

In my research for an upcoming article, I ran across this tidbit that I just couldn’t wait to share. It’s from Challenges of migrating to agile methodologies a paper originally published in Communications of the ACM.

Agile methodologies require a shift from command-and-control management to leadership-and-collaboration. The organizational form that facilitates this shift needs the right blend of autonomy and cooperation to achieve the advantages of synergy while providing flexibility and responsiveness. The project manager’s traditional role of planner and controller must be altered to that of a facilitator who directs and coordinates the collaborative efforts of those involved in development, thus ensuring that the creative ideas of all participants are reflected in the final decision. The biggest challenge here is to get the project manager to relinquish the authority he/she previously enjoyed.

Find out what this really means, and what it feels like to do it, at our upcoming Agile Project Management learning lab, presented in cooperation with the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the Project Management Institute.

Cheers,

Chris

Since this article was first published, The Team Estimation Game, which is what this article descibes, has evolved into something even better: Easy Estimation With Story Points. If you are looking for a fast and effective way to estimate, we recommend going straight to that article. If want to know where Easy Estimation With Story Points came from, keep reading.

I’ve helped several teams adopt the practice of planning poker. It’s a good and useful practice, but it’s about as beginner-friendly as Badugi. The problem is that planning poker is a lot about numbers: “Is this feature a ‘5’ an ‘8’ or maybe a ‘13’?” New teams have no reference for what these values mean, and it leads to confusion. As they try to figure out ‘how big’ a story point is, teams frequently give in to the temptation to map a story point to some unit of time. I’ve heard: “Let’s have our ‘story points’ be the same as days!” or “How many hours should a 3 point story take to complete?”

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By: Chris Sims

Agile evangelists claim that extensive written requirements can be dispensed with in favor of lighter-weight ‘stories’. It sounds easier, certainly, but can it really be as good? Won’t all of the important details get lost?

This Thursday, I’ll be staging a participatory showdown between traditional and agile requirements at the East Bay Innovation Group’s Project Management SIG Meeting. The event is free for eBig members, and $10 for guests with advanced registration.

May the best requirements win!

Scott Ambler, who once wrote ‘Has Hell Frozen Over? An Agile Maturity Model?‘, has started writing about something that he is calling the Agile Process Maturity Model. The discussion around Scott’s model has uncovered another model by the same name, and renewed the debate over the usefulness of a maturity model for agile.

Frankly, I found Professor Juliano Lopes de Oliveira’s Agile Process Maturity Model more interesting than Scott’s. In particular, I like that it is proposed as a starting point for discussion.

You can read the whole article I wrote on InfoQ.

Cheers,

Chris