Mike Freislich kicks us off with his first article submission to the link page “Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams” – Henrik Kniberg
Henrik Kniberg has a wealth of good Scrum literature behind him. Part of the strength of his writing style is that he keeps it real and practical by pointing out mistakes that he and his teams have made, and what they did to rectify them. He has written a great article focused on version control across multiple teams which really accentuates the importance of “Done” and what could be involved to practically achieve it. A great article even if only a single team.
I recently found an oldy-but-goody on running stand ups: It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings. This is a case of getting the basics right, and Jason Yip of ThoughtWorks has some really good tips. My favourite; if your team is engaging in the ‘Storytelling’ anti-pattern (or smell), make the person speaking do so while standing on one leg.
Jeff Sutherland talks a bit about how organisational change (like scrum adoption) happens. To add to this point have a look at an older article from Mike Vizdos. It contains the rather startling statistic from Ken Schwaber that about 75% of teams fail to successfully implement scrum.
The core of why that is, can probably be down to the reasons presented in this article from Alistair Cockburn. And if you’re not sure, he has a great top 10 list of how to know if you’re not doing agile.
On a less gloomy note: you can find a myriad of cool scrum games at Tasty Cupcakes.
For those with an interest in the debate about whether Scrum is Lean, Dave West’s slightly sensationalist article can be found here. Be sure to check out the debate in the comments.
And lastly, Tom Perry has an interesting idea; using the 360 degree feedback format as preparation for your sprint retrospective. This does move the discussion in the retrospective from a team-based improvement to more personal one, and should be used with caution.
Till next week.
