Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

• Fourteen Observations of Good Scrum Practice

  Date: 2012.03.21 | Category: Agile, Certified ScrumMaster, Personal, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  My courses are deliberately designed to exclude PowerPoint presentations and focus on the peer-to-peer interactions, but I recognize that a significant number of students need something physical to take from the class and review later.  In addition, there is no possible way for me to cover every topic the same way in a two-day CSM class, so I needed something for the learners to refer to as a reminder on how to do Scrum well.  As a result, early last year I wrote a book on Scrum – Fourteen Observations of Good Scrum Practice – as teaching aid for my CSM classes.  From the learners I have spoken with, they find the book to be a useful summary of the main concepts in the class, a handy reminder of what we discussed and short introduction to Scrum that they can share with other people at work.  When you attend one of my CSM class, you receive a complementary copy.

  I have a lot of interest in helping the Spanish speaking Scrum community grow and there is\was a complete lack of books on Scrum written in Spanish or English language books that had been translated into Spanish.  Now no more!  Earlier this year I published a Spanish translation – Catorce Observaciones para la Práctica de un Buen Scrum - of my book.  It was a lot of work, but now there is a high-quality book on the subject for Scrum for my Spanish speaking friends.  My translator, Diana Perez, was awesome and did a great job.

  Finally, I want to thank Chris Sims at Agile Learning Labs for inspiring me to write my own book on Scrum plus explaining to me how easy it is to publish a book on your own.  Without Chris’s inspiration, this book would not be widely available.

   

• The Perfection Game

  Date: 2012.03.06 | Category: Agile, Communication, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  I recently came across an awesome and challenging book – Software for Your Head by Jim McCarthy.  There are so many interesting things about this book.  One of the key tools I discovered I can use right away while reading the book was an amazing tool to provide feedback called the Perfection Game.

  The Perfection Game has two main gains.  One, to achieve perfect results by thinking and telling one another what you like and what would make the results perfect.  Two, to give feedback to another that is an affirming learning opportunity.  Since the Perfection Game comes from the Core Protocols, there is a very specific way it is played.  Here are the rules:

  1. The requester asks a responder(s), “Will you play the Perfection Game with me?”
  2. Next, the requester asks, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate [the item, action or event being considered].”
  3. The responder tells the requester what was good, or what they liked, about the requester’s item, activity or action that earned the score in the form of “What I like about it was [a… b… c…].”
  4. Next, the requester ask the responder, “What would have made it perfect?”
  5. The responders then tells the requester what specific actions are needed in the next iteration to make the item, event or activity perfect in the form of “What would have made it perfect for me was [x… y… z…].”
  6. Finally, the requester looks the responder in the eyes and says “Thank you.”
  7. Repeat steps 1 to 6 for all responders.

  As I stated earlier, following the protocol described in the Perfection Game is extremely important.  Purely or partially negative feedback (“constructive criticism”) is not allowed at any point in the Perfection Game.  As a responder, you must give the feedback to the requester verbally – there is no written feedback allowed.  If you cannot think of anything that will help the requester improve, the default score in the Perfection Game is a perfect 10.

  A word about the scale in the Perfection Game – the scale of 1 to 10 is not about dislike to like, where 1 is “completely dislike” and 10 is “completely like”.  Rather, the scale goes from “the object has no value” to “I can’t think of anything that would make it better”.  Keep in mind that as a responders if you give something an 8, you are saying that it is 80% perfect and as the responder you can tell the requester exactly what they need to do in order to gain the missing 20%.

  Finally, Jim and Michelle McCarthy also have a very interesting podcast discussing the origins of The Perfection Game and how they think about it.  Be sure to check it out and start playing the Perfection Game.

• Visit to Auckland Agile

  Date: 2011.10.06 | Category: Agile, Presentations, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  Just finished a trip to New Zealand and had a chance to speak at Auckland Agile on September 29th.  The session was another run of my “Removing Impediments with Drawings” that I have presented numerous times in the past year (the most recent at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City).  I am not sure exactly, but I think we may have had about 40+ people in this session.  A lot less people than Agile 2011 and I thought the outcomes were better.  Glad I had a chance to meet with this group and share some ideas that might not have made it to their part of the world.

  I want to send a special thank you to my hosts for the evening Carolyn Sanders and Stephen Reed (@ScrumMasterNZ).  They completely took care of arranging for the venue, meeting me and taking me out for drinks afterwards.

• Agile 2011

  Date: 2011.08.20 | Category: Agile, Conferences, Presentations, Tools, Travel | Response: 0

  Wow!  Another Agile conference under my belt.  This year was a visit to Salt Lake City and two talks at the conference.  Both of these talks are continuations of my sessions from the Amsterdam Scrum Gathering in 2011.

  1. Powerful Questions – this was one of the largest sessions about Powerful Questions that I ever ran.  I think there were more than 40+ people in the room and people were standing along the walls.  Even though it was a large group, I felt the interaction was good, the main points were communicated and the participants “got it”.  There are two good write-ups on the session from Kenji Haranbe (the stage manager) and Sam Laing.  For more on Powerful Questions check out this really great PDF  from The World Cafe to get you started.
  2. Removing Impediments with Drawings – this session is based on Dan Roam’s visual framework, Back of the Napkin, as a way to share ideas that stick.  This session was HUGE!!  When I walked in the room, I immediately knew I did not have enough materials for my session – I had brought enough materials for 70 and I needed about 50 more!  At some point, I had to tell the proctors that we cannot accept anymore people and I know some people were angry about that.  Since the room was so large with so many people, it was not as interactive as I hoped and the next time I run this session, I would have a co-presenter.  Craig Smith wrote up a really great review with awesome pictures on his blog.  Thanks!!

  Next year, I will remember not to spend so much time with consulting work while at the conference.  I felt like I spent the whole time on conference calls, did my sessions and then went home.  Not that much fun

• Upcoming Conferences

  Date: 2011.05.04 | Category: Agile, Conferences, Innovation Games, Presentations, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  Been really quiet these past months, but I wanted to share some upcoming places where you can see me in action.

  1. PMI San Diego Annual Conference – On May 13th, I will be giving a class on Estimating and Planning.  On May 14th, I will be giving a short tutorial on how to use Innovation Games to prioritize.
  2. San Francisco Agile Conference – my colleague and friend, Angeline Tan (@agilemeister), invited me to be a speaker at this conference she has been working very hard to organize.  On June 16th, I will be presenting Improve Flow Through Prioritization.

  You can still register for both the PMI San Diego Conference and San Francisco Agile Conference.

• Writing Good User Stories

  Date: 2011.02.07 | Category: Agile, Coaching, Communication, Extreme Programming, Lean, Planning, Tools, User Stories | Response: 1

  User stories are tool that originated from Extreme Programming and have become the de facto way Agile teams document and collect their requirements.  There is a lot written on user stories (link, link, link), so I am just going to talk about what I consider important in writing good stories since I see a LOT of really bad ones out there today.

  For those who do not know, stories are a lightweight artifact that allows us to both capture the business’s needs AND plan the work.  They are typically written on index cards (yes…little 3×5 or 4×6 cards) in the language of the business or customer.  With user stories, we only write enough to capture the user’s needs and no more.  We tend to view stories not as complete specification of the requirements, but as placeholders for later conversations between the developers and the business.

  When used properly, a user story’s lack of detail provides us a great deal of utility – we can use the same document to talk about a requirement from a high-level, zoom in on implementation details and jump back out, all in the course of a few sentences.  Then once we are done talking about requirements, we can consider risk, identify dependencies and create a project plan without ever having to put down the index card.  Wow !!  I know of no other requirements artifacts out there allows us such utility.

  Over the years people who are really successful with stories have settled on some commonalities found in all stories:

  • Role: who, or what, is going to use this feature?
  • Feature (or capability): what is the Team going to deliver, or add, after they finished their work?
  • Value: why does the business even want this feature?  What impact to the business will it have?
  • Acceptance Criteria: how will we know if this feature is done?
  • Estimate: how much does the Team think this feature will cost?

  IMO, in order for a story to be considered complete it has to have ALL the characteristics described above.  I find that when people have trouble with defining all the characteristics, the stories are not what I call ripe, i.e. they have not been thought through well enough to be usable by the Team.  In addition to these characteristics, stories also should follow the INVEST criteria (this great article by J.B. Rainsberger talks about INVEST as well).

  Mike Cohn has written a great book on user stories.  Unfortunately, for all the goodness in the book, folks seem to have focused on the one bit of junk in the book – the user story template.  In his book, Mike offers up a template some teams found helpful with writing stories and from there this template has been the source of so many bad stories that I am not going to give it anymore more ink (or bits).  What I object to about the template is that it causes people to stop thinking as they mechanically fill in role, feature and value and omit acceptance criteria and estimate (presumably because they are missing from the template).  When I see people struggle with stories, it is because they are trying to jam their business into some template that helped some unnamed team  (who probably doesn’t even use this template anymore) five or six years ago and – surprise – it doesn’t fit where they are right now.

  There is a thinking process that needs to occur before you write a single story.  The steps I tend to see people completing who are successful writing stories are listed below.  Please keep in mind, while these steps are linear in my post, one can jump back, forward and skip around as it makes sense.  The goal is to have answered these questions by the time you have finished your user story exploration.

  1. What are the roles (or users) that will use your system?
  2. What are their needs?  How does the product help them accomplish that?
  3. What features (or capabilities) do you want to provide these roles?
  4. Why are these features valuable to the business?  What sorts of business outcomes can we expect from these features?
  5. What are the priorities of these features?  Did we make a promise to deliver some already?
  6. How would you know if these features are done?

  Finally, people have a tendency to want to write a lot of details on the front of the story card.  I have two suggestions for these people.  First, use smaller cards – really.  User stories are NOT specifications or requirements documents.  They are just index cards capturing the user’s needs and reminders that we have to capture those implementation details later.  If you are trying to cram more and more onto an index card, that might be sign that you may need specs or some type of design documentation in addition to user stories.  Second, the types of details that people are trying to write down are actually acceptance criteria.  By pushing those details into the test cases, we keep the story in the language of the business and retain the focus on the feature and value your Team is providing.

• Reading a Release Burndown Chart

  Date: 2010.11.08 | Category: Agile, Communication, Planning, Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumMaster, Tools | Response: 1

  In Scrum, we use a lot of easy-to-understand tools to communicate status.  A very common tool is a burndown chart.  In this diagram, I am showing a sample Release Burndown chart for a Team with eight Sprints in their release and will talk about how this is commonly used on a Scrum Team.  At the start of the release, the Team estimated 130 units of work would be delivered in eight Sprints.  At the end of Sprint #1, they delivered twelve units of work (the green bar) and 118 units remained (the red bar).  As the release progressed, a little more of the Product Backlog was delivered by the Team in the next two Sprints.

  In Sprint #4, the scope of the release increased by thirteen units (the yellow bar) and the Team only completed three units of added functionality.  In the figure, one can see the velocity of the Team increased during Sprints #5 and #6, completing twenty and twenty-one units of work, respectively.

  At the end of Sprint #6, it was clear the scope of the release was too large for the Team to complete before the deadline.  The Team’s velocity of twenty-one units per Sprint and the concept of yesterday’s weather, indicated the Team would not burndown all the remaining work before the end of Sprint #8.  As a result of this data, twenty-five units of low business value Product Backlog items were dropped, or descoped, from the release by the Product Owner.  When Sprint #8 was completed, nine units of work remained, but it had marginal business value.

• Scrum Gathering Amsterdam – Nov 15th to Nov 17th

  Date: 2010.11.01 | Category: Conferences, Presentations, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  If you are looking for me in November, you can find me in Amsterdam!  I will be attending the Scrum Gathering and will be leading two really interesting sessions.

  1. Powerful Questions: picking the right question or reframing an issue can introduce a profound shift in the conversation. In this hands-on workshop, we will discuss how to create your own powerful questions and practice this skill. Leave with a practical tool you can use with your Teams today.
  2. Removing Impediments with Drawings: pictures convey ideas more clearly and have a greater impact than a simple conversation. In this hands-on workshop based on Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin, we will learn the six types of diagrams used in business and how select the right picture for your problem. Come ready to draw diagrams that will create a shift in how you visualize your impediments and help remove them from your organization.

• Using a Sprint Burndown Chart

  Date: 2010.10.30 | Category: Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  

  A Sprint Burndown chart is a simple tool used by the Team to provide a measurement on how close they are to meeting the Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint.  Burndown charts are common in Scrum and are simply the trend of work remaining across time in a Sprint, a release, or a product.  The source of raw data for a burndown is the Sprint Backlog, with work remaining tracked on the vertical axis and the time period (days of a Sprint) tracked on the horizontal axis.  The Sprint Backlog is just the collection of tasks which represent the Team’s current understanding of how they plan to achieve the Sprint Goal.

  Sprint Burndown charts are evolving and active artifacts on a Scrum Team.  When a Sprint Backlog item - a single task or deliverable defined and estimated by a Team member - moves from in progress to complete, it’s estimate is removed from the total estimated work remaining in the Sprint.  There is not a lot of value estimating how many hours are remaining – the work is either done or not.  However, as a Team further refines their understanding of what needs to be done, creating new Sprint Backlog and estimates are added to the total estimated work remaining.  It is important that the Sprint Backlog and Sprint Burndown chart stay in sync since the graph gives visibility on the Team’s understanding of the work.

  There are four common patterns in most Sprint Burndown charts.  The sample chart above, based on real Sprint data from a 2010 Scrum Team, displays all of these patterns.

  1. The Sprint Burndown goes flat, as seen on Days #4 and #5.
  2. The projected trend (or slope) has the Team completing the Sprint after the timebox expires, as shown between Days #6 and #7.
  3. New work is added late in the Sprint, as indicated on Day #6.
  4. A large delta between the actual progress of the Team and the predicted progress of the Team (as if they had burned down an equal amount of work each day), as seen between Days #5 to #9.

  In all these cases, these patterns provide an opportunity for the Team to discuss what is really going on and provide an explanation.  If the Team is confident they can still fulfill the Sprint Goal regardless of how the data is displayed in the Sprint Burndown chart, the Product Owner and the ScrumMaster should always respect the judgement of the Team.  Recall, the Team commits to delivering the Sprint Goal at the Sprint Review, not to deliver the Sprint Backlog items.

• New Offering – Innovation Games®

  Date: 2010.09.02 | Category: Agile, Collaboration, Design Excellence, Games, Innovation Games, Product Owner, Scrum, Tools, Voice of the Customer | Response: 1

  On May 6^th and 7^th, I attended an Innovations Games^® consultant’s class hosted by Luke Hohmann.  Innovations Games^® are collaborative games designed to help business people develop and prioritize new product ideas.  In the context of Scrum, these games are tools the Product Owner and product designers can use to engage the customers and different business stakeholders in defining the requirements for a product and thinking about product roadmap and multigenerational release plan.  Not a lot is written about the “fuzzy front-end” for Scrum teams and Innovations Games^® fill that significant gap in way that is consistent with the Scrum values and principles.

  It was quite instructive to hear about the games and how they work from Luke.  From the different case studies discussed, we really illuminated the dynamics involved with selecting the right game for problem.  In addition, a few of my misunderstandings about the purpose of the games and how they are played from reading the book were cleared up as well.  What I liked most about the class was in addition to talking about the games, we played a lot of them in the course of two days.

  1. Remember the Future (played)
  2. Prune the Product Tree (played)
  3. Speed Boat (played)
  4. Product Box (played)
  5. Buy a Feature (played)
  6. 20-20 Vision (played)
  7. Show and Tell (played)
  8. The Apprentice
  9. Start Your Day
  10. Spider Web
  11. Me and My Shadow
  12. Give Them a Hot Tub

  Below are pictures of the Product Box I created for Look Forward Consulting announcing the new service available.  I look forward to using these games more and helping Scrum teams with improving prioritization and collaboration with their customers.