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 They just build what is written in outdated requirements.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.