If that course fills up, or you are elsewhere in Asia, contact us to schedule a similar course at your office. More info:
http://michaeljames.org/CSM

Post from: Agile Methodology

Two instructor, 3.1 day Certified Scrum Master Plus (CSM+) in Beijing July 16-18

Now….did you agree that there is ‘some stuff’ that needs to be done before sprinting?

No, I didn’t agree with that. Give me a product vision, a small cross-functional self-organizing team, a team room, some Post It notes, and a MacBook and we’ll get you some kind of working, tested product in two weeks. Actually we can borrow the Post Its and MacBook from somewhere. The other stuff (a fully-refined Product Backlog, complete environment set up, release plan, budget projections, market analysis, etc.) is nice to have, but not essential to start learning through empirical feedback. This is true even for “big” products — we’ll learn more about how many teams we might eventually need by starting with one team. Start small does not equal end small, though it’s also possible we’ll learn our one good team in one room gets more done than 20 mediocre geographically dispersed teams would have anyway.

This is unconventional, probably offends PMBOK* enthusiasts. The organizations that learn it sooner will be the quicker ones to discover their users’ real needs.

The organization may say it needs all kinds of project initiation activities, to accommodate people’s comfort, just as my daughter may need me to check under her bed for monsters.** So as a practical matter we may need to appease those people. This doesn’t mean there really were monsters under the bed.

“Project” and “project execution” are 20th Century concepts, perhaps useful for building skyscrapers and stuff with huge startup costs and exponential cost of change curves. But an impediment when it comes to Agile product development.

* The “Guide to the Project Manager’s Body of Knowledge” is a compendium of obsolete management techniques, updated every year by the Project Management Institute with more obsolete techniques.  Agilists know there are really only two misconceptions in “Project Management”: projects, and management.

** Hypothetical analogy. She doesn’t actually have me do this.

Post from: Agile Methodology

Want To Be Agile? Stop Doing “Projects.”

Agile teams generally use relative estimation approaches such as story points, sometimes a Fibonacci scale, sometimes an exponential scale.  To learn how, watch this example of a Backlog Grooming Meeting.  Note that the Scrum team does not pay much attention to the points during the example Sprint Planning Meeting.  They are mostly to help the Product Owner make forecasts.

Post from: Agile Methodology

Effort Estimation and Story Points Demystified

Post from: Agile Methodology

Scrum Reference Card now available in English and Spanish

Post from: Agile Methodology

Playing it SAFe, Can a Large Organization Become Agile Without Changing Anything?

A coding community relies upon the implementation of a community architecture to provide the facilities for data sharing, structured data, and enabling communities to work together in the development and delivery of software applications. Key aspects of the Community include the following:

• The Community must include social forums for ad-hoc collaboration between distributed team members. Such forums might include wiki-based knowledgebase containing a central and searchable repository of comments, code snippets, libraries and other valuable assets
• Team members from any part of the organization can benefit from enhanced visibility and search across the enterprise. Subject to the security constraints of the specific business, the more visibility given to developers, the more access to those valuable IT assets is provided, the more productive those developers can be. Sharing in a safe and controlled environment is a huge boost to productivity.
• Just like any other part of an enterprises’ IT environment, comprehensive governance is a necessity. The community architecture that is put in place to foster re-use must also reflect the governance and security mandates of the individual enterprise.
• To the degree possible, it is often useful to enhance third-party collaboration in the coding community. This extends re-use and cooperation beyond the firewall.

Done well, a development community can help a disparate, fractured and distributed staff in the development organization find common architectural foundations, share best practices, communicate more effectively. Outside of the development organization, a Community Architecture can break down the barriers and bridge the gaps between non-technical business people and the developer community.

Here’s an interesting White Paper on Social Coding.

Post from: Agile Methodology

Community Development – A coding community

I’d be very interested in hearing your views of this video.

The complete series is also available, providing most of the information you need to pass the Certified Scrum Master or Professional Scrum Master exams:

1. Introduction to Scrum
2. Backlog Refinement (Grooming) Meeting
3. Sprint Planning Meeting
4. Daily Scrum (standup) Meeting
5. Sprint Review Meeting
6. Sprint Retrospective Meeting

Here’s a lower-quality version of the first one:

Post from: Agile Methodology

Video – Introduction to Scrum

Judging by the number of questions, the audience was clearly heavily engaged. We had a 15 minute Q&A and did not come close to answering all of the questions, so I’ve listed most of them here and provided a response. I also encourage you to try ScrumWorks Pro for free.

As promised, here’s the follow up to the live audience questions.

Q: How feasible is Agile on Projects & Programs?
A: Agile is typically thought of in the context of individual projects. Companies sometimes fail to scale that paradigm to a program level, where the program is a superset of multiple projects, each running its own lifecycle and release plan. The trick is to weave those separate lines of development (projects) into a coherent and seamless deliverable (program). The complexity comes in gathering meaningful metrics and planning releases that thread the elements together. This is exceedingly difficult to do manually. CollabNet’s ScrumWorks Pro is a tool that can make this manageable. It supports the planning of complex releases that weave in multiple development threads.

Q: Will this process will be feasible for maintenance related projects (Incident handling, less than 8 hours development works, etc.,)?
A: From the PPM perspective, an individual defect is not in and of itself a project and as such, would not be tracked. What might be tracked is a larger group of maintenance items in the form of an Epic. From an Agile perspective, a bug report or defect is just another piece of deliverable business value, like a User Story or any other Product Backlog Item. From a bug report, the product owner and team would create a Product Backlog Item (PBI), along with success criteria (definition of done). It is prioritized against all of the other Product Backlog Item by the product owner. Again, multiple bugs/defects are often grouped in an Epic.

Q: It seems the PPM is geared toward a waterfall process. It appears there is only visibility into the Development phase, but with agile, you could potentially address all phases within a single sprint. Is that just because of the way this implementation was set up or is it there isn’t a true marriage of the agile within PPM?
A: PPM in this scenario is focused on evaluating the ROI of different projects and deciding where to make investments. Agile is focused on execution of the projects that are chosen. That said, the scenario we propose makes the entire organization more Agile, in that the feedback loop is instantaneous. This allows those that are making the investment decisions to adapt and make course corrections that are indicated by that feedback loop. The integration gives all team members the ability to work in a more Agile fashion, and gives Stakeholders and Project managers the ability to benefit from the faster feedback and data generated by the team working this way.

Q: Can the tasks in Scrum WorksPro be connected to tasks, timelines in Source forge?
A: Not with Sourceforge. However this is possible with Collabnet Teamforge, the current commercial version of Sourceforge.

Q: Can you clarify what part of Agile PPM can be done in scrum works pro without need for HP PPM?
A: ScrumWorks Pro is focused on project execution and project management. As such ScrumWorks does a number of things not accomplished in HP PPM. These include PBI tracking and prioritization, Task management sprint planning, release planning, team velocity, forecasting, and many other functions related to the management of an Agile project.

Q: So are you proposing (in the demo) to combine a phase/waterfall planning and design phase, but then execute in an agile framework?
A: Combining HP PPM and ScrumWorks Pro adds to the agility of the entire organization. Feedback loops between the development team and the PMO are enhanced allowing the PMO to make course corrections required. I would not say that as a result the entire enterprise has become agile – only that they’ve become more agile. Generally, we do not see many organizations that practice a pure version of ANY methodology –be it Agile or otherwise. The reality is that organizations have a mix of methodologies, like Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, hybrids, etc. Different teams in large organizations will often build software differently, so the challenge is to roll up the data from those disparate teams. Despite their differences, there are a number of common metrics you can track regardless of project type. These include actual cost versus budgeted cost, scope change, personnel/resource change, delivery dates, and others. Tools like ScrumWorks and HP PPM do a good job in tracking these kinds of numbers.

Q: Continuing from the first question, from a portfolio perspective, having “”open-ended”" project budgets within the Agile/SDLC process is not in the best interest of my customer. How does budget planning and Agile development work together while still having some control over costs?
A: Project prioritization and the associated budgeting/funding are is under the purview of the PPM tools. The agile project management tool tracks the amount of time individuals spend on the project. The integration between the HP PPM tool and the Agile Project Management tool, allows you to easily compare budgets against actuals.

Q: In agile, what are the differences between being adaptive to late changes in requirements within a sprint and scope change?
A: Scope change refers to any added or subtracted scope, typically measured in some form of relative effort unit like Story Points. As such, scope may be added as a team discovers more about an existing requirement. In other words, if the team finds out that a requirement is more complex than was originally envisioned, they may re-estimate the number of story points and this might add scope to a sprint. The opposite could also be true. Whether this occurs because of a discovery inside a sprint or outside of it doesn’t change the nature of how it is tracked or reported upon.

Q: When a committed backlog item could not be completed in a sprint, naturally it holds the top most priority in the following sprint. How does ScrumWorks helps in tracking this item from the beginning to end?
A: An unfinished PBI may or may not be a high enough priority in a future sprint. The determination is made by the product owners. In any event, any activity against that PBI is tracked. Tasks completed that relate to that PBI are tracked, as are those that were uncompleted.

Q: What certification do CollabNet-trained scrum masters receive?
A: Those who attend one of our Certified Scrum Master or Certified Product Owner training are eligible to take the exam deliver by the Scrum Alliance. It should be noted that CollabNet is one of the leaders in ScrumMaster product Owner training. We have more Certified Scrum Trainers on staff than any other vendor, and we’ve trained more than 12,000 ScrumMasters.  We also give away free online Scrum Master training to supplement the certified training.

Q: If an organization wants to be able to report a metric of time to resolution for individual PBIs, what settings are available in this integration to include/exclude a PBI from the current active lists so that a countdown starts appropriately?
A: Forecast reports in ScrumWorks can be filtered on any number of aspects, allowing a user to deliver estimates on individual tasks, Stories, Epics or Themes. By the way, you can try out ScrumWorks Pro either in a hosted environment or as a free download.

Post from: Agile Methodology

Agile and PPM – Q&A

But if you can envision a team that has a great time accomplishing things you didn’t previously consider possible, within a transformed organization — consider being a great ScrumMaster.

Check out the ScrumMaster Checklist written by Michael James. It will help you gauge the progress of your agile teams and help you answer questions like:
• How is my Product Owner doing?
• How is my team doing?
• How are our engineering practices doing?
• How is the organization doing?

To learn about Scrum from entertaining cartoon characters, see the Scrum Training Series.

Michael has also written the Scrum Reference Card, a valuable reference document for anyone practicing Scrum or other Agile disciplines. (http://ScrumReferenceCard.com)

Post from: Agile Methodology

ScrumMaster Checklist and Scrum Reference Card