4 Announcements

We are happy to announce 4 things.

1. New LeanPub Book: Joe’s Agile Release Planning.

Some of you may have seen a prior draft. It is revised now. And published. I expect to have some further revisions.  I seek your feedback.
You can see it here.

2. New Workshop: Story Splitting (Feature Decomposition)

This is a 1/2 day workshop, with David Muldoon. We are doing this workshop first in Toronto, Oct 11, in conjunction with a CSM Course (Oct 8-11).  We will be doing it at other locations soon.  See Courses at LeanAgileTraining.com.  See here for details about the workshop content.

3. New Workshop: Scaling

This is also a 1/2 day workshop, with David Muldoon. We are doing it first in Toronto, Oct 11, in conjunction with a CSM Course (Oct 8-11).  (This and the Story Splitting workshop form a 1 day workshop offering.)   We will be doing it at other locations soon.  See Courses at LeanAgileTraining.com.  See here for details about the workshop content.

4. Lean Agile Training page on LinkedIn

We have started a Lean Agile Training page on LinkedIn, here. Please visit and follow us. And please tell us what you think we should provide there.  What do you like?  What should we add?  What should we subtract?

More success with Scrum - How to get it

Fernando Cuenca has an excellent blog post, here.  He discusses what he learned at Agile 2013.

I will summarize his learnings in my words.

1. The ultimate question is: how to have a better life for yourself, your Team, and your Customers.  And then, specifically at work, using Scrum.
2. Measure velocity. And specifically, look for increases in velocity. Otherwise known as: acceleration.  Measure velocity in Story Points.  But don't become obsessed by a number -- look at the bigger picture.
3. Get the user stories 'ready, ready' before the Sprint Planning Meeting.  It will increase velocity. In part by reducing churn in the sprint.
4. Have a clear DOD.  Definition of Done.  Being ready, ready will help you get to done, done.
5. Do a better Daily Stand-up.  Who knew the Daily Scrum was for the Team to self-organize and self-manage?  (I am teasing all of us -- not teasing Fernando at all.) I like this formulation:  'what did I complete yesterday that helps the Team achieve our sprint goal?'  The Team focus is important.
6. Measure Team happiness. (See Jeff Sutherland's Scrum Log.)  If they aren't happier, you aren't doing Scrum right.
7. Focus on fixing the top impediment.  By the ScrumMaster (who is driving it), by the Team, by people outside the Team. Non-trivial work.  You have a biggest impediment until you are perfect.  And even after you win the Super Bowl, you are not perfect. (20 push-ups for imagining that your Team won the 'Super Bowl of Scrum' when you have never even compared your Team to a 'best in my city' Scrum team.)
8. No bugs (use XP practices, etc). Ok, 'no identified bug survives the sprint'. May seem impossible to some of you, but it is not. (Yes, some few bugs will still be identified in production.)
9. Clean, well-refactored code base. (use XP practices, etc). Makes it almost easy to change.
10. Develop a 'continuous delivery' capability. (By removing impediments over time.) Almost always, this pays tremendous dividends, even if you almost never deploy after each sprint.  At least you will be able to decide when to deploy (when you have a Minimum Marketable Feature Set) and then deploy 'instantly'. One reason: The bad news doesn't get better with age.

This is a great list of 10 'things to do.'

Fernando adds some comments about the cost of implementing the XP practices. To me, these costs seem too high and the benefits are delayed too much.  In my experience, at least.  But, he is right to say that the costs are significant. Still, the benefits are far more significant!

Hope these ideas help you, your Team, your Customers.  You can get a lot better (we all can).

Story Splitting (Feature Decomposition)

We have added a 1 day Workshop to our course in Toronto. And will add this to courses in some other cities.  The one day is composed of 1/2 Day on Story Splitting. And 1/2 Day on Scaling.

What.  Story Splitting is always required. We always need smaller stories in the Sprint. Some experienced Teams do this regularly and quite effectively, but lots of less experienced Teams struggle with this. So, the immediate purpose of the workshop is to move them beyond the 'struggle' stage more quickly.

Value. Story Splitting is not the only factor that can assist your Team to achieve the following benefits, but it is important, and often key.

• More reliability. When they 'commit' to 20 story points, with the smaller stories, they are more likely to hit 20 story points.
• Faster velocity. It seems paradoxical, but by taking the effort to get to smaller stories, the Team can get more done. If they do it professionally and cleverly.  Many reasons for this. One of my favorites is: "The bad news doesn't get better with age."  Also, the Lean community explains this well.
• Fewer and smaller failures. Sometimes a Team will not get a story completed in a Sprint, as they 'committed.'  To some degree, this is normal in innovation work. Unexpected things come up.  If we have small stories, first the likelihood of failure goes down.  Second, the degree of failure is smaller. We don't fail on 50% of the work, but rather on only 13% of the work (as an example).
• Team Morale is better. For the reasons stated above. Sometimes the Team will not at first understand the value of small stories; and it may seem like extra work to them at first. This must be explained. But once they are over that hurdle, Team morale should go up.
• The sense of 'traction' is better. As suggested above. Almost every day we can see a small story being completed.

See here for a fuller description of the Workshop.