Would you like to get a feel for what the team thinks of many aspects of the team processes in less than 15 minutes? What does the team really think of your work? Continue reading “Comprehensive Team Health Check”
Comprehensive Team Health Check
How Good are our estimates? Should we care?
Our team decided against estimating stories or tasks in real time (eg hours) during sprint planning. We assign relative points during backlog grooming and may change that number later or during the sprint planning as more information becomes available. I was wondering: How good are our estimates? How do we measure that? How do we improve? Do we care?
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Is your stand up working for you?
Many teams follow the three questions for their stand-ups: “yesterday I did …; today I will do …; I am blocked by …”. Time and again I see the same anti-patterns: It is not a planning meeting but a status report to the PO or PM. The team is not listening to other team members. Continue reading “Is your stand up working for you?”
Book Review: PMI-ACP® Exam Prep
Retrospectives Are Not Only For Teams
Distributed Relative Mass Estimating
Using story points for estimation can get stale after a while. When Kyle Winter mentioned relative mass estimation on our company agile slack channel I was wondering how to implement this with a distributed team. Below are the details and results of our experiment.
Retrospective By Dice Game
GetKanban Game Teaches More Than Kanban Alone
In 2015 Cheryl Hammond introduced me to the GetKanban game. The game is an awesome way for the participants to experience the impact of queues and the decisions you need to make using the Kanban framework. The players simulate 2-3 weeks of development with daily standups where the team decides prioritization and who should work on what. Life is not fair and neither is the game. But we learn through our struggles and this is only a game.
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Which Agile Blogs Should We Read?
We read blogs because we want to learn, expand our horizons and keep up with new developments in the Industry. We write blogs because we are passionate about a topic, want to share some cool ideas and very often to market ourselves. There is an overlap but readers and writers are not always in sync. There is so much to read and so little time. Over the last few months I have looked at about 250 somewhat random blogs. I stumbled upon some excellent articles but the majority was either talking to the absolute beginner audience or plain mediocre.
I have a new project. How long will it take?
How do you estimate a project before it has really started. You have a great idea and want to present it to your CEO. The second question will be how much is this going to cost? You have spent a couple of hours with the customer and they want to know: “Can you do this by the hard deadline we have?” Comparative (story point) estimating works well if you have broken the work down into stories. It is more difficult if the epics are very big and there are a lot of unknowns.
Continue reading “I have a new project. How long will it take?”