Inspired by Lesbians and Lawyers. Click the image to see at full size:
If this makes you want to become a scrum master, you can take one of our certification classes. The next one is February 27-28, and includes a free Kindle.
A scrum team has many decisions to make, all the time. Should we focus on usability or new features? Should we fix the bugs that are driving our current customers crazy or develop the new features that will help us land the next big customer? Should we use PHP or Ruby on Rails? There is a lot of pressure to make the best decision, the choice that results in the most valuable result. Something many people miss, is that when we make the decision will often impact the value of the result. Should we make the decision now? Or wait a bit and keep our options open? One of the sessions I led at Agile Open Northwest was titled “When Should We Decide?” and it examined this very question.
We explored the idea, using a simple casino game. Each player places a single $2 bet on the outcome of two coin flips. The choices are: heads-heads, heads-tails, tails-heads, and tails-tails. If the player guesses right, the house pays $8, otherwise the player is paid nothing.
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We hear that the traditional year-one anniversary gift is paper. Does e-ink count? We think so! The Elements of Scrum is a year old, and to celebrate, Agile Learning Labs is giving a Kindle to every student in our Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes this month.
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Last Sunday, several Agile Learning Labs team members became actors for a few hours, turning out to help our brilliant colleague Adam Weisbart film the epic drama saga, Sh*t Bad Scrum Masters Say.
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At last week’s Agile Manager’s Support Group, our very own Laura Powers, goddess of biz dev here at Agile Learning Labs, wowed us all with an exercise in personal goal-setting adapted from the basic framework of scrum. Laura knows a thing or two about meeting goals, having recently completed her first marathon.
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That was 13 minutes’ worth of Chris. If you’d like more, you can read our book, The Elements of Scrum, sign up for a public class, or even hire Chris to ride into your company on a white horse and save the day. Or deliver a brown bag. He can do both.
Thank you for the certified scrum master training last week in Beijing. Your training is very impressive, and I appreciate it a lot. I asked you a lot of questions; may I ask one more? In our company, the automation for regression tests hasn’t been set up, yet. Without automation of the regressions tests, unit test, and pair-programming, how can our scrum team improve the quality of the product?
First, let me encourage you to keep up the work to automate your regression tests. Few things have as big a return on investment. Test automation enables the team to move much faster and make improvements fearlessly. The other practices you mention: unit testing and pair programming, are also great practices, and I encourage your team to try them too.
Having said that, your question was what else could your team do. Additional practices I would recommend your team consider are: code reviews, frequent testing by real users, testing bashes, and whole-team ownership of quality and testing.
If you or a loved one bought this sweater for Christmas, don\’t return it; burn it!
Like most of you, I’ve been in customer service hell this holiday shopping season. I had to resort to the Better Business Bureau to resolve one dispute with a major online retailer that shall go nameless (they made good, once a person with authority actually listened to my complaint, which didn’t happen until the BBB got involved). Then there was the other online retailer who didn’t accept a return because a thin plastic bag that had to be torn to try the product out hadn’t been included in the return box. And the one who explained, when I called after not receiving the package, that “Next day delivery doesn’t mean you get it the next day. It means you get it the day after we send it.” Which could be any old day, apparently.
By contrast, there are companies that practice what the shoe-shopping factions at Agile Learning Labs call “Nordstrom customer service.” What is that? I have a friend who bought a sweater from Nordstrom. And wore it. Several times. For months. Then she saw a picture of herself in it, decided it made her look chunky, and returned it. No questions asked.
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Artist, illustrator and graphic facilitator Elizabeth McClellan is one of my favorite people, proving as she always does that the kind of work we do here at Agile Learning Labs–and what our clients do when they develop software–is as much art as it is business. Last June, as Chris blogged recently, Elizabeth recorded everything that happened in one of our Certified Scrum Master Workshops in her inimitable style. This week, she did the same for our Certified Product Owner course in Redwood City. Click on each image to see it in all its detail and glory.
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Back in June, we were lucky enough to have Elizabeth McClellan record the proceedings of one of our Certified Scrum Master workshops. Elizabeth drew in real-time during the workshop, providing the participants a unique way to remember the experience. Below are the drawings she created. Click on them to get a higher resolution version of each image.
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