Notes from the Berlin Scrumtish (Oct 5)
Hello again, we were very happy to welcome again roughly 35 participants from local industry and academia at Scrumtish Berlin 5/10/2010 moderated by Andrea Tomasini, CSC
Thomas Bradford
Thom Bradford is a software developer, living and working in Berlin for the world-famous Agile42.
- On
- 12 October 2010
- In
- Scrumtisch Berlin
- Tags
- agile, berlin, scrum, scrumtisch
Topics proposed by attendees tonight were as follows (prefixed. by votes)
- 9 - Sharing knowledge in a cross Functional team
- 15 - How to give management the metrics they need while keeping daily scrum
- 14 - Bottom up awareness? How to change culture
- 7 - How to do interaction design in scrum? Where sit the designer?
- 2 - Two teams, one shrinking. What to do?
- 4 - What to do in back to back sprint downtime to keep momentum
By majority vote we arrived at the prioritized agenda and timeboxed discussions for 2 [+1] items, the first being ... tadaaah:
Management metrics
- Management used to numbers from PMs based on estimations they measure, numbers they know
- risk management and release scheduling
- feeling of certainty with the plan
- management believes numbers
- what do you measure?
- Transparency and short feedback loops increasing "certainty"
- "accuracy factor" as go and see how much the numbers match the reality
- some managers do not trust the "demo" as they have been always cheated with it (facade)
- watch tests results, in agile you are doing much better as you can report E2E test results each iteration.
- focus management on managing the value
- focus on scope
And also:
Bottom up awareness
- imagine a company with a hundred people, big deciding to on all levels to go agile. Having project management consulting developers. From front to back all people coming together and starting to do agile projects. And all having committed to doing agile projects is not enough to do things in the agile way.
- everybody doing agile... Yes, but?
- everyone has done waterfall projects, but only a small percentage have done agile
- no experience, some training
- changing culture is hard, they want to change, but it is not happening
- get good scrum masters?
- do awareness training, scrum master CSM is not enough
- fear to do "something wrong" blocks people to change
- coaching people on a daily basis, show them how to do
- fear to learn something new thus needing a fail-safe environment
- external help to protect the team from bad habits and returning to behavioral/organizational gravity ;)
As we had sufficient time left, we also discussed the third topic:
Sharing knowledge in a cross functional team
- completely diverse skill-sets between team-members
- cross functional is not cross domain. Programmers want to use their technology, not learning a new one
- write end to end stories, this forces/encourages people to code together
- encourage "do what you cannot" behavior, encourage people to do nags in the other technology
- do not enforce people to do what they don't want to, convince them, use empathy
How to get self organization running
- set a vision, a goal that is above the head of every individual
- create time pressure, the sprint
- allow the team to communicate
Well that was some great discussion. Now off for some food. Food is goooood. And a bit of drinks of course.
See you next time! and bring your neighbor
Thom
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