Category Archives: agile

When Should We Decide?

Money Money Money!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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How Can Our Scrum Team Improve Product Quality?

Question

Quality dial turned all the way upThank 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?

 

Answer

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.

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A Tale of Customer Service: Are you Nordstrom or Nerdstrom?

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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Elizabeth McClellan: An artist’s interpretation of scrum

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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Cross Pollination: What can agile practitioners learn from filmmakers like Werner Herzog?

One of Herzog\’s early stars

One of the blessings of having a diverse (some might say schizophrenic) background is that I have friends like Anne Thompson, who has worked for Premiere and Variety and now has her own influential blog, Thompson on Hollywood. Today I read a post there by Sophia Savage about the filmmaker Werner Herzog, discussing some remarks he made as keynote at the Film Independent Forum, including this passage, which I think maps directly onto dilemmas in any kind of agile project environment, including software development using scrum:
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Agile Publishing: Lessons from academia in getting it right

I am always looking for others who are experimenting in the arena of agile publishing, as we are doing with our side venture, Dymaxicon, and I ran across a fascinating article today on a Bryn Mawr college blog called Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education. The article is by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (affectionately nicknamed RPR by her students), a professor of Writing and Publishing at Elon University in North Carolina who learned about scrum from her geek husband and decided to try using it to teach collaboration skills to her students, who would be working on some publishing projects. (Since it’s academia, the blog post is also co-authored by several of her students–apparently publish or perish extends to blogging now.)

I loved the description of how the students viewed “collaboration” before the project:
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