Posts by Jan Beaver
When Should You Start a Sprint? When Should You Finish?
Starting. It’s on all of our minds as we work through the first week of the new year. The concept of starting brings to mind one of the most frequently asked questions I receive when I am both training and coaching. When should you start a Sprint? And, the question’s inevitable counterpart, when should you finish a Sprint?
Read MoreIs it a Group or a Team?
This question often occurs to me when I’m on training or coaching assignments. The provocation is usually a statement similar to the following: “We have a Development Team of 250 highly skilled engineers….”
Read MoreThe Agile Team as Organism: Part II Why Highly Specialized Teams Must Evolve
Last week in the blog, The Agile Team as Organism: Part I, I wrote about Scrum Teams operating as organisms within an ecosystem. Some Teams find their environmental niche very cozy, so much so that they specialize to a degree that can make them vulnerable to changes in the broader ecosystem. As we all know software companies and software operations within other types of companies both operate in notoriously changeable business and technological environments…
Read MoreThe Agile Team as Organism: Part 1
In his brilliant book Agile Software Development (2002)[1], Alistair Cockburn describes Agile Teams as ecosystems. He talks about how Teams create their own internal ecosystem, with certain Team members frequently having a disproportionate influence on how the Team develops and, more importantly, how the Team learns to work in its broader environment. Recently the thought struck me that Agile Teams are actually much more like an organism living in a broader ecosystem, rather than the ecosystem itself…
Read MoreThe Rise and Fall of Insurgent Scrum
Back in January, I identified three originators of an organization’s move to Scrum: a top-down initiative, a move from the middle outward, or a bottom-up approach called Organic Scrum. I laid out 3 organizational requirements for Organic Scrum to thrive. There is, however, another way in which Scrum can get started in an organization…
Read MoreThe 3 Key Ingredients to Successfully Grow Organic Scrum
Whenever I step into a coaching engagement, one of the first pieces of information I track down is where the initiative for the move to Scrum originated.
Read MoreThe Trouble with Agile
As our thoughts turn towards closing out the year, I am struck by the reoccurring theme that rose to the surface during several of my Agile/Scrum training engagements. Every one of these engagements began with one or more standard Agile/Scrum training courses, which is always a good thing. The disturbing part was the degree to which the training revealed…
Read More8 Reasons Why You Should Stand For Your Daily StandUp
Why stand during the Daily StandUp? (Or Daily Scrum, as it is also commonly known.) I’ve been asked this question surprisingly often in recent training classes and coaching engagements. The easy answer is that standing with your Teammates for a few minutes every day is a part of Scrum.
“You’ll have to do better than that….”
Okay, let’s do better then.
Read MoreLeadership And The Law Of Unintended Consequences
This is a big topic, but today I want to talk about just one small aspect: the unintended consequence of top-down control work environments. There is a persistent myth in the software business that runs something like this…
Read More4 Reasons Why It’s The Estimating That Matters, Not The Estimates
It seems like there is always some sort of controversy or at least discussion swirling around the merits of estimating User Stories and tasks.
Read More7 Signs Your Team Needs an Outside Coach
As a Coach called into an organization to do something very specific, say, help get teams over the hump on continuous deployment or test-driven development or acceptance test-driven development or something like that, a conversation with the sponsor frequently goes something like this…
Read MoreThe Real Reason Agile Companies Thrive
When Agile Practitioners talk about the reasons to adopt an Agile approach, whether Scrum, XP, Kanban, or any of several others, we typically focus on benefits to products, customers, and the bottom line.
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