Posted by mvanbenthem mid-afternoon: January 27th, 2012
Net als in 2010 heeft Xebia in 2011 het jaarlijks onderzoek naar de de status van Agile in Nederland uitgevoerd. Met ook dit jaar weer opvallende resultaten. Zo zegt bijna 90 procent van de bedrijven die met Agile werken sterk verbeterde resultaten te realiseren bij hun (ICT) projecten. De vraagt die direct bij mij opkomt bij dit soort hoge percentages is waarom niet iedereen met Agile aan de slag gaat.
Daarnaast ervaart 83 procent van de Nederlandse bedrijven die Agile werken hebben geadopteerd, meer werkplezier en 85 procent meer teammotivatie. Dit percentage is aanzienlijk hoger dan vorig jaar, toen gaf driekwart van de respondenten aan meer werkplezier en teammotivatie te ervaren. Dus de mensen die Agile werken varen er wel bij, naar mijn mening een van de belangrijkste redenen voor het succes van Agile. Dit komt ook veelal tot uiting in een lager ziekteverzuim en grotere loyaliteit naar de werkgever toe.
(more…)
Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: January 13th, 2012
Scaling the productowner (PO) role is tricky business. When you scale up too much within the same context, things become cumbersome. We don’t want to bring back the same centralized fear ridden ineffective decision making climate, we tried to kill off in the first place. When people spend so much time and effort to bring back entrepreneurship, they don’t want to create layer over layer of hierarchical PO/CPO relationships.
So if there is this perceived risk of fallback involved, why do we actually want to scale the PO role at all?
(more…)
Posted by Daniel Burm in the late afternoon: December 23rd, 2011
My motto regarding innovation is: being a first mover is a strategic choice, moving fast isn’t. Agile and scrum can help you move fast, so how can it accommodate innovation?
Posted by Daniel Burm in the late evening: December 8th, 2011
A walking skeleton as meant in scrum is not always feasible. That’s the first sentence of one of my previous blogs. This one starts the same but approaches the subject from a different angle. The angle here is that we teach people to make story maps based on personas; the user, administrator and so on, but we don’t actually take into account that the product has to be bought by someone and how that decision actually works. This blog post tries to tie complex buying decisions into story mapping, to find the shortest route to a sellable Frankenstein, rather than a mere bag ‘o bones.
(more…)
Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: November 1st, 2011
A walking skeleton as meant in story-mapping, being the minimal marketable/ shippable feature set, is not always feasible. When working from existing system environments I am quite inclined to argue that in these situations it is often the best route to base your first product slice on risk rather than end-user value, but only if the support is there to enable you.
(more…)
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early morning: September 21st, 2011
Wouldn’t it be sweet if your whole life were perfect? Your wife would fulfill your every wish. Your children would be perfect examples of responsible happy people growing up. At work your colleagues are the nicest people and working with them is always fun. Your team would feel responsible for every action they (proactively) take and the software systems you produce and maintain are flawless and run like well oiled machines?…
You need to wake up! Nothing will ever be perfect and Agile knows it!
(more…)
Posted by Daniel Burm in the early morning: September 16th, 2011
Agile companies that want to create real ownership, have to say goodbye to traditional stakeholdership and embrace “joint company stakeholdership”. Remain to be an old-skool stakeholder in an agile environment and you will possibly act as a “stakekeeper” instead of a “stakesharer”, therefore withholding the company “staketakers” from focus on value and real ownership of results.
(more…)
Posted by Martien van Steenbergen around lunchtime: April 2nd, 2011
Scrum has much ado about Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.
The Definition of Ready for the current phase equals the Definition of Done for the previous. Likewise, the Definition of Done for the current phase equals the Definition of Ready for the next. They are the two sides of the same membrane.
So, why not simplify it and talk about the membrane only?
Posted by Niklas Odding mid-morning: February 28th, 2011
In my last blog I presented an illustration which shows the two primary aspects of the architects’ role. On one side they play a role in strengthening the heartbeat. On the other side, they play a role in envisioning the future.
The focus in this blog is on the solution architect or application architect. The way the Enterprise architect deals with Scrum will be explored more in detail in a later blog. This blog combined with the previous 3 blogs can be also downloaded as a whitepaper from the Xebia website: http://www.xebia.com/architects_scrum
What is the role of the architect?
Last blog I presented the illustration as shown below. In this blog I will focus on the parts of this illustration in which the solution architect / application architect plays a role
Posted by Serge Beaumont in the early morning: February 28th, 2011
Every Agile team has to deal with whatever they’ve put out in the wild next to their “regular” work. How to handle the – by definition – unknown load of production emergencies when you’re trying to achieve a stable pace? You can deal with emergencies by performing triage to either reject, defer or accept. You can set up a buffer to absorb some of the uncertainty, and finally you should make sure that you take the time to reduce the number of emergencies by building quality in. If you find you are mostly doing maintenance, you can consider doing Kanban.
(more…)