Development Manager: “Yes we are a self-organizing team. I task out all the activities and then I let the team decide which tasks they want to work on. I don’t assign any of the tasks myself.” Not assigning tasks is a good first step, however, it falls short of what is means to be a self-organizing…
I typically see teams in one of 4 stages when adopting Agile practices. The Multi-Sprint Hand-Off Teams here are working in Sprints. 2 week Sprints. They have a requirements Sprint, a Design Sprint, a Coding Sprint and a Testing Sprint. This might be better than what they were doing before but it is still taking 8…
Developer: “I don’t have much to do. I’m still waiting on the BAs to finish writing the user stories. They always hold us back!” A comment like this highlight siloed thinking among team members. There are only 3 roles in Scrum. A Product Owner, a ScrumMaster, and a Development Team. Note that business analyst, developer, tester,…
Customer interviews are key for validating product ideas early. Here are 5 customer interview rules to follow when conducting problem interviews with customers in order to validate a particular hypothesis. 1. Do the interviews in person, 1 person at a time Doing the interview in person and focused on an individual helps in establishing a connection…
Scrum Master: “Are you sure it’s going to take this long? The product owner wants it done in the next Sprint and I already told her it won’t be a problem.” I have 3 issues with this kind of statement. First, it seems that the Scrum Master is acting as the intermediary between the Product Owner…
Developer: “Last Sprint I delivered 18 story points all on my own!” This post will not be about story points. I will leave the story points are evil discussion for another time. Instead I want to focus on the intent behind such a statement. And by intent, I am referring to the proud declaration and feeling…
Bizarro Scrum is like Bizarro world where everything appears to be the opposite of what it should be. It is about common day to day situations that a lot of Scrum teams experience when they transition to Scrum. In this Tales of the Bizarro Scrum blog series, I’ll highlight statements that team members make that on…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Vienna and at AgileDC 2019 in Washington, DC, I presented on Test Driven Development. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with the presentation slides. AgileDC 2019 Abstract: Have you tried TDD? Do you hate it? Do you have a hard time applying it in practice? Do you…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Austin, TX, I presented on Agile Testing. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with links to the Agile Testing blog series and the presentation slides. 2019 Austin Global Scrum Gathering Abstract: Many teams struggle with fitting in testing activities inside of a Sprint. They end up doing…
To summarize, here are the top 8 things to consider when developing your Agile testing strategy to enable you to continuously deliver a quality working product increment at the end of every Sprint Testing in not a phase 2. Testing is everyone’s responsibility 3. Testing starts on day 1 4. Do automate all scripted tests 5.…