Agile twist-n-turns - "easy process difficult to execute".

This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile .  Agile is easy on process but many of us underesti mate the difficulty of making it work. Once in a while, every team will have some carryover user stories. However, if this happens frequently t he value of the sprint timebox comes into question. As a SM(scrum master) your goal is this does not happen very often.  During sprint planning, it is a good practice to identify the # of story points committed and # of story points as a stretch target. Having a stretch target will push team's imagination for more productive and smarter ways to do things and committed story points can be used by PO(product owner) for better planning.  Committed story points is one key metric for the PO to understand how many sprints it will take to get a feature completed. If the team's velocity is say 20 story points/sprint and the feature is 200 story points ...

This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile .  Agile is easy on process but many of us underesti mate the difficulty of making it work. SM(Scrum Master)'s penultimate goal is to help the team become self-organizing. This means to let the team decide the goal(user stories) and the path to get those done.  SM should enable each team member to have a solid understanding of the vision and the product being build for them to make the right decisions.  Many a time SM begins speaking for the team. This should "not" be the case especially when team members are present in the discussion. This happens mainly because of the traditional practices where managers or team leads are responsible and accountable for solutions, tasks, and next steps. A mature SM should take a step back and allow the team to work "together". It is a hard pattern because of the multi-year habits of following the tradi...

This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile .  Agile is easy on process but many of us underesti mate the difficulty of making it work. The retrospective is one of the most important events in the sprint. This is the only time team is focusing to improve itself.  Some anti-patterns in a retrospective are :  1) No one is willing to speak up (either good or bad)  2) Team members forget the feedback and looking forward to the next sprint  3) Team members think their feedback is not important and nothing will change  4) Team members are worried about retribution   5) Tone of the meeting (complaint meeting)  6) Style of recording the feedback  Recommendation for SM(Scrum Master):   1) Come up with your own list of observations to facilitate the dialog. Specific instance/s where the team worked together to handle a surprise and instance/s where the te...

This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile .  Agile is easy on process but many of us underesti mate the difficulty of making it work. DSM = Daily scrum meeting when done the wrong way can bring down the productivity of the entire scrum team and frustrated team members.  Some common reasons for these frustrations:  1) Time - How long is the DSM? anything more than 15 min is not healthy 2) Schedule- Does the scheduled time of DSM change very often?  3) Quality of update - Team member stated that he/she worked on US(UserStory)#1234 and today he will work on US#4567, for other team members it was absolutely no(n)sense  4) Tone of the DSM - Is this meeting a status meeting for SM/PO? 5) Many side conversations leading to "can you pls repeat"  6) Team members give the same/similar update every day 7) Team members share too many details 8) Team members perception of DSM...

This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile . Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work. There is a  possibility that one or many of the team members can come back to SM(Scrum Master) or to the management suggesting to go back to waterfall. Instead of passing the buck to the management(it is the management that wants us to do Agile) try to have a meaningful conversation with the team to understand why they think agile is not working.  On a lighter note SM can always say OK, let's go back to writing a 100-page spec document and many more meetings to review them 🤣 Some of the most common reasons are:  1) Lack of appropriate training of Agile methodology 2) Lack of hands-on training on tools JIRA, scrum boards, etc.  3) Moving away from comfort zone(the waterfall)  4) Pressure from management to deliver  5) Skillset gap...

This  blog is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing Agile . Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work Many times user stories are not validated before the sprint complete date. Following are the main reasons 1) There is a "mini-waterfall" within the sprint:  Developers and tester work in silos and a couple of days before the sprint complete starts the interaction. The interaction is transactional like a hand-off process to initiate validation. This is the same as a waterfall!  2) No one understands the ask clearly: The acceptance criteria are ambiguous(Product owner), the design approach is not clear (Developer) and the test criteria is now known (Tester)  3) User story size: The user story is too big and is not broken into the right size to make it testable within the sprint.   Recommendations for Scrum master:  1) Watch the interaction in daily...