In my previous post, we defined technical debt and saw how not all technical debt is bad. Just like in the financial world, some type of debt is considered ok as long as it is paid back. Consider a house loan or a car loan for example. Those are generally considered acceptable types of debt in…
In my previous posts we looked at symptoms of bad code and reasons we write bad code. And bad code leads to technical debt. Ward Cunningham introduced the Technical Debt metaphor by stating: “Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with…
In my previous post, I discussed symptoms of bad code. Here I’m going to look into some of the reasons we end up writing bad code: Deadlines - You’ll hear excuses like we have a deadline to meet so we don’t have time to test or to make the necessary design change.Broken Window Theory - Another…
Bad code tends to creep up on us over and over again. We’ve all been there. We kick off a project, things start a little slow, but then things quickly pick up and a lot of features are getting developed and delivered. We have an excited team and a happy customer. However, soon things start to…
At the 2017 Global Scrum Gathering in San Diego, CA, I presented on Fostering Self-Organizing Team. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with links to the Fostering Self-Organizing Team blog series and the presentation slides. 2017 San Diego Global Scrum Gathering Abstract: One of the 12 principles of the Agile manifesto states that “The…
Earlier when we discussed the ScrumMaster's role is fostering a self-organizing team, I mentioned that the ScrumMaster needs to be self aware of her individual skills development journey and understand at what level of expertise she is at and work on moving to the higher levels so she can effectively help the team as a whole.…
We’ve seen how individuals acquire skills; how teams go through different development stages; how leaders need to adjust their leadership style based on the skills of their followers and the stage of their team to establish the necessary attributes to foster a high performing self-organizing team. A good tool to use to help in fostering this…
A self-organizing team needs to have these 7 attributes to be successful. Supportive Context: The team needs to have some basic foundations like Infrastructure including a physical space suitable for team collaboration along with modern technical tools and infrastructure to perform the needed work.Information including access to necessary people and data to better understand the work…
So what's the ScrumMaster's role in getting a team to a high performing state? There are two parts to it. First, the ScrumMaster herself needs to be self aware of her individual skills development journey and understand at what level of expertise she is at and work on moving to the higher levels so she can…
Allan Drexler and David Sibbet developed a team performance model framework for understanding team development that has similar concepts to those covered by Tuckman. In the Drexler/Sibbet model, there is a concept of a bouncing ball where team building begins with a lot of freedom of imagination, openness and aspirations and then slowly becomes more and…