My weekly agile links 11-15 Jan 2010

Wow.. A very active week as you can see by the number of links. This prompted me to start doing #my link of the week. So here's my first ever link of the week:

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
3 mins and 31 seconds worth sparing for this video. (WARNING: You may spend the rest of the day rethinking your life)

All weekly links:

Simple Scrum - another good article by Tobias Mayer describing the basic Scrum excluding any software development specific terminology

The extended family of Agile A survey, the results of which we have seen in many presentations, so good to look at the actual data.

Agile Coaching Tips by Rachel Davis - a very very good bunch of techniques and advices

The Agile Coach Manifesto - Jason Little's proposal for Agile coach manifesto

Five Disconnects of Organizational Intelligence Demanding Change - RICHARD VERYAR's blog

Defending Leadership an article by by Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

Creating Useful Measures David Joyce on measures for continuous improvement

Mind your business - Marketing your business (very similar values)

Re-thinking Lean Service Inspirational speech full of truths about services by John Seddon

Mike Cottmeyer on Agile Project Management, Building Effective Teams

BDD & DDD - Dan North presents Behaviour Driven Development and Domain Driven Design

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
[Link of The Week]

“Why Lean and Agile Go Together” on Forbes.com

Theory of constraints for beginners David Draper's blog

Weekly agile links 4-8 Jan 2010

Now that is a hell of a promise ;) I find out that the list of links that I open rarely stays for more than a week so it made sense to me and I am fairly sure in the near future I will have to dump these links somewhere. So here goes:

Mike Cohn's The Role of Leaders on a Self-Organizing Team

A reminder of what retrospectives should be like - A Retrospective Agenda

Scott Berkun's blog - Why do big companies suck?

The F# Survival Guide (I know not really an agile link but still of interest)

A book I am buying - The Beermat Entrepreneur: What You Really Need to Know to Turn a Good Idea into a Great Business

Two simple questions (very much retro style)

That's all I have this week, have a good weekend ;)

Agile links #4

This set I am afraid will be shorter than expected although it comes 2 weeks later than the last one but it was the holiday's period after all ;)

Tobias Mayer's blog - It starts with belief

David Joyce's talk - A Journey to Systemic Improvement

EMC blogs - 100 job search tips

Evolving Excellence Flexibility: A License to Accept Waste

Bruce Eckel - Wrong Correctness

The Content Economy - Did you ever hear anyone shout "culture failure!"?

Fast forward blog - Employee Engagement – a Core Goal of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?

Agile links #3

David Joyce's - A Journey to Systemic Improvement video link here

Mike Cohn - Synchronize Rather Than Overlap Sprints

It’s Not the Recession, You Just Suck

Moon Shots for Management Or Management 2.0 and its grand challenges Pdf link

How GANTT Charts could be built by using LEGO!

"You don't find customers for your products. You find products for your customers."

Agile links #2

Quickly after the first post here comes a second set of links:

Mentoring of candidates for CST many people have asked in the last year how to become a CST and here are the answers. Note that This is NOT an official set of requirements for CST application

Safecracking for the computer scientist Computers & security - by Matt Blaze

This is not like That Another (I am sure) brilliant post by Tobias Mayer which is in fact a repost of Lyssa Adkin's original post.

MANAGER 2.0: THE ROLE OF THE MANAGER IN SCRUM by Pete Deemer

Tester Types A humorous look at the different testing types according to Rob Lambert

Integration Management an interesting post on the PMI Agile Community of Practice Wiki which for some reason links one of my articles.

Agile links #1

There is something about all the links to blog posts, articles, videos, etc. The information these sources have is usually very interesting. At the same time I find it more and more difficult to find enough spare time to read them all. I have tried emailing links to myself, tweeting to myself and many other tactics with mixed success but mainly no success ;). So Now I decided to stock them here on my blog so I have the links without growing my bookmarks to unmanageable level and still am able to access the links later when I find a few spare minutes. So here goes agile links #1:

People Polling @ tasty cupcakes

Systems Thinking: The Fifth Discipline of Learning Organizations By Marty Jacobs

Leadership and systems thinking.

Presentation Tip: How To Tell A Story

5 Secrets to the Hidden Job Market

Abolishing Performance Appraisals - a book I might buy
The Airplane Game - A pratical introduction to Agile/SCRUM

Notes on Starting an Agile User Group

100 Impediments A look at impediments a team may need to address.

That's all I have for now.. I hope this might be useful for someone else as well ;)

DEMING'S RED BEAD Experiment Replayed

I recently became aware of this experiment which Deming used to do in front of large audiences (e.g. 1200 people). Thanks to David and Benjamin the experiment comes to live again. It is worth watching at least the first 50 minutes and see for yourself this amazing story of processes, metrics, management, rewards and people.

http://skillsmatter.com/event/agile-scrum/demings-red-bead-experiment

The Cool Wall Retrospective

Inspired by Mark Summer's post we decided to do a Cool Wall style joint team retrospective at the end of last sprint. These are scrum teams that work on the same project and often have cross team impediments or reasons to be proud.

It worked quite well, team said they liked it so we're doing it again. For more details on the technique check Mark's blog here

CSM course in Bournemouth 23 & 24 November

Geoff Watts will be holding a CSM training course in Bournemouth on the 23/11/2009 and 24/11/2009. For full details see here

Scrum and Agile metrics follow up

While looking at metrics and what is appropriate I finally came across something that made sense to me and to the scrum masters in our department.
The information is from an article by Michael James which doesn't seem to be available any more unfortunately. The title of the article is An Agile ApproAch to “Metrics” and you may try to find it if you're more persistent than myself.

This article suggests to use a combination of 3 or 4 metrics. While I generally like the idea I am not sure all of them would work in our current environment. For example I would avoid using velocity in that sense although I would use it as a trend and not really related to the reports that Senior Management wants to do.

The two things that I reckon make sense are:
1. Delivered business value - i.e. every item has a business value and you count how much is being delivered
2. Running Tested Features which is something Ron Jeffries talks a lot about and we happen to do - e.g. a feature is RTF if it can be demoed from production build and passes automated tests (which should cover the acceptance criteria).

These two in combination make it difficult to game and also guarantee both business value and quality. While I am sure some people can still game them, I believe they represent a reasonable way to resolve the metrics problem.