Personal Kanban Tools. Transforming the World of Work. Coding Horror: Are You Creating Micromanagement Zombies? Do you manage other programmers, in any capacity? Then take Kathy Sierra's quiz: Do you pride yourself on being "on top of" the projects or your direct reports? Do you have a solid grasp of the details of every project?
Do you believe that you could perform most of the tasks of your direct reports, and potentially do a better job? Do you pride yourself on frequent communication with your employees? Does that communication include asking them for detailed status reports and updates? Do you believe that being a manager means that you have more knowledge and skills than your employees, and thus are better equipped to make decisions? A "yes" to any of these -- even a half-hearted "maybe" -- means you might be creating Micromanagement Zombies. That's right, Zombies. Beyond that, who the heck wants to work with zombies anyway? Building teams is like building software. Wondering what number one encompasses? In the end, isn't trust what this is about? The SCRUM Blog: 5 Big Issues When Scaling Scrum. I think it's a safe bet to say that if you're reading this blog then there is a good chance that you're at least interested in Scrum.
The problem is that for many organizations, even the basic concepts in Scrum begin to break down as we scale it up to the entire organization. Imagine a daily stand-up when the development team consists of hundreds of developers and even more testers. These problems are not small and very often can mean the difference between a successful project or a horrific failure. So what are some of the bigger issues at hand? Glad you asked. 1) Testing is done outside of the Scrum Team: I'm not talking about unit testing (although those should be part of your definition of done). 2) Team size is too large: Amazon has a rule that any team that can eat more than two pizzas for lunch is too large. 4) Nobody can get ahold of the product owner: What happens when the Scrum team is working on a story and discovers that they don't know what a form should look like?
Agile 101: Getting Started | VersionOne. Scrum of Scrum: Team Size, Frequency and More. How to Scale the Scrum Product Owner. The product owner is the person in charge of the product. For products of modest complexity and small projects, it may be feasible to have one individual playing the product owner role. But how do we deal with product ownership on large Scrum projects that develop complex products? The Chief Product Owner A large agile project consists of many small teams. This puts us in a dilemma, as it conflicts with the Highlander Principle, which states that there should only be one product owner.
There are two ways to apply the chief product owner role: working with one potentially large and complex product, or breaking up the product into multiple, independent sub products. Option 1: One Product If you develop one cohesive product with lots of functionality, you are likely to end up with a hierarchy of collaborating product owners with a chief product owner at the top, as the following image shows: Option 2: Product Suite Summary. Software Development: Agile, Team Size and Dynamics | shmula. I’ve long ranted about Amazon’s 2-Pizza Team, which is defined as the following: a team where the team size is no larger than 2 pizzas can feed. Amazon realized early on that in order to cut software development time, the solution was *NOT* to put more people on the project.
What is required is a team, where the roles are defined and each member has the right skill for that role, and following a lean, agile, method — all focused on the customer. Agile Methodology Agile is a response to the well known issues in software development: rigid planning and nazi-like fidelity to original software requirements leads to customer needs not being met. Alistair Cockburn, one of the Agile Authors explains Agile this way: Some of Agile Methodology comes from the manufacturing world, specifically the Toyota Production System, but better known as Lean Manufacturing. For me, it is equally fascinating to apply the principles of Lean to software. Team Size and Dynamics At Amazon, there were six roles.
Scrum cheat sheet. Video : Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - Introduction to Agile. In Scrum, product features are known as user stories, and they are written from the perspective of the end-user. The product backlog contains the wish list of all the user stories that would make the product great. The product owner represents the users and customers of the product and decides which user stories or items make it into the product backlog. The goal of a given release is to deliver a subset of the product backlog, known as the release backlog. After identifying which user stories will go into a particular release, the user stories become part of a release backlog, which is then prioritized by the development team, who also estimates the amount of time involved in completing each item. Each sprint (or short duration milestone) takes a manageable chunk of the release backlog and gets it to a ship-ready state! The progress of the team is monitored using a burndown chart—one of the best project visibility tools.
Scrum.org | The home of Scrum > Home. The Hacker Chick Blog: Agile Leadership: Methodology Ain't Enough. A lot of people say you can’t be a good software manager without really understanding software development. But, let’s face it, people who understand software development are a dime a dozen in our industry. What we really need are people who understand leadership & management.
I mean… you know the drill – when was the last time a software project failed for technical reasons? And so, it was very cool to hear David Spann share his research on Finding and Developing Agile Leader’s at last week’s ScrumClub. It’s simply not enough to know the latest agile practices. Now, I don’t want to mislead – David isn’t saying agile leaders don’t have to know anything about software development. David identified 5 underlying beliefs that a successful agile leader should hold.How many of these do you hold? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. David identified the behaviors that make agile leaders successful and from that came two very interesting observations: Strategic.
Tactical. Innovative. Excitement. Communication. New!