Clean Your Desk and Define New Year Improvements

It is Christmas time. Clean your desk and the content of your workstation. Upgrade your tools and your development environment to the actual version.

It is time to add automated build pipelines, TDD, ATDD, and Docker to your toolbox. Embrace agile approaches.

Work focused and avoid overtime. Prioritize outcomes instead of outputs. Enjoy family life, practice sport, and pursue continuous training.

Why Use Current Software Components?

Often teams discuss if their product should upgrade to the current version of used components, development tools and programming languages.

I have a strong opinion about upgrades. You should always use the current version of all components included in your product. The only discussion is the timely when and never the if. Be realist, if your product is successful, you have to upgrade before the components are obsolete.  Otherwise your product will become a geriatric solution.

Below I show you arguments why you should always update all components in a timely fashion.

Impediment List is of Tremendous Importance

An impediment is any aspect hindering the team or a company to deliver value and higher quality to the customers. An agile organization continuously removes impediments, it is one of her major activities. This activity is ongoing and can never be completed.

Impediments resolution is Kaizen 改善, a key technique to lean, agile and Scrum approaches.  The translation is change for better. Often agile organizations forget to aggressively identify and resolve impediments. We provide hints to improve your Kaizen process.

Agile Approaches and Fix Price Contracts

The difficulty with contracts is that it is about trust. Here lays the roots for success or disaster.

If no trust exists the henceforth dread process is established. After tough negotiations the development team starts but does not collaborate with the customer. They just build what is written in outdated requirements. A subpar product is shipped and the relationship with the customer is deeply damaged.
We can do better. We shall collaborate, trust each other and create an awesome product. This is the essence of "being agile". How shall we be agile and work the lean way in a contractual environment? By contractual I mean no time and material approach.

Your Management Job in an Agile Environment

Introduction

You develop your software products using agile approaches. You are doing Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean, or LeSS. Your collaborators start asking questions about organisation, management roles, and critique the internal processes - e.g. employee yearly evaluation, bonus evaluation - work. You hear strange statements such "Be agile, do not do agile".

You as a manager realise you have to describe your role in an agile environment. What does it mean?

Scrum Masters are not Administrators

Lately I was asked if I was interested to work as Scrum master. The below job description was handed me over. What an experience it was. 

What does a Scrum Master?

What does a Scrum master the whole day? Are you just a fancy administrator or are you actively removing impediments? Do you coach your teams toward mastery?

Too often Scrum masters become Scrum administrators. They schedule meetings, moderate discussions, write progress reports and draw beautiful slides how to improve the organization. Or worst they collect extensive statistics about velocity, planned versus delivered story points or how precise story estimation was.

At the end of the day your job is to mentor your team to be champions and build awesome products. Wake up! You are not a project manager, you shall be a catalyst.

So Called Agile and Scrum Failures

Agile will never guarantee project success. All projects, especially application development, entail risk. If a project was risk free it is unlikely to provide significant benefits or competitive advantages. There are however, a number of ways in which Agile Scrum projects repeatedly fail which are worth examining.

Git Local Repositories for the Impatient

Start using Git

You shall put your source code under a version management system. The actual industrial standard is git, a distributed version control system - DVCS -.

Install git on your development machine. If you are using IntelliJ IDEA configure git in the IDE through the preferences pane.

What is Our Specialty as Agile Coaches at tangly?

Currently you have more agile coaches on the market than sand corns on a regular beach. They all promise the holly grail of agile product development, highly productive teams and perfect applications for internal and external customers.

Why should any sane customer hire us to deploy or perfect their agile approach?

Agile Trends Switzerland 2017: We Won

It is time to throw a big party in Switzerland. More than 60% of all projects are now realised using an agile approach (see Agile Trends Switzerland 2017 by SwissQ), Scrum being the most popular one, Kanban as the second one. What a change in just one year. In 2016 we had 40% of projects being agile, one year later we have 60%. Time to adapt and become agile.

Fun at Workplace

It is Spring in Switzerland. We often have time for small talk because it is cold or rainy outside. Quite a few of the discussions are about job opportunities and how interesting and motivating the current activities are. I selected two articles to help everybody to decide if your software development job is worth the effort. 

Just go through the questions and ask yourself if the current project provides the current settings.

List of Agile and Lean Books for Software Engineers or Students

Purpose

I am regularly asked by practitioners and technical universities which books I shall recommend to learn more about agile developers, agile projects, and agile companies.

Below a selection of books I read and found really interesting. The selection is certainly not exhaustive. The criteria are

• I read the book and learnt something
• I have bought the book to have it as reference, I mean a real reference opened at least monthly
• The book is available as ebook - I only read ebooks and save trees -

Agile Trends Switzerland 2016

What are the main hurdles to introduce agile approaches in Swiss companies. The last five years learn us that

• Introducing agile company-wide is a cultural change process. Such a change takes time and sometimes hurts,
• Without commitment of senior management, the initiative will fail,
• You must teach, coach, support your collaborators through the transition. You need to believe in them and provide an environment where they can safely learn and experiment,
• At the end what matters is collaborator purpose, customer satisfaction,  business value.

Seven Pitfalls with Agile or Scrum Methods

The post describes a presentation I gave at a company internal technical day.  It reflects situations we have seen in a lot of agile projects over the last years.
I assume that the Scrum approach is well introduced in your company. You are already proficient with Scrum, eXtreme Programming, Clean Code, Code Refactoring, how to write stories and story maps, and techniques such as TDD, ATDD.
You are using Scrum well and can laugh about all these posts about Scrum-But(t). Still misunderstandings about Scrum abound.
We will present common pitfalls seen in teams already applying Scrum; meaning teams using Scrum as an empirical process, holding the meetings as described in the Scrum guide, and producing all expected artefacts. We want to increase your awareness and reflect how you can become better Scrum experts. We exhort you to eliminate these misunderstandings in your projects.