I was recently coaching an Agile Release Train where when they were doing the confidence vote during PI Planning the managers sat around a table and had the teams each sequentially vote on the confidence in their plans. The confidence vote in PI Planning is to capture the entire Agile Release Train’s confidence in the … Continue reading Confidence Vote: The Whole Train Votes
Month: September 2016
What is Commitment?
Commitment is a huge concept in agile. So many teams are so used to treating commitments as if they are really the ‘good ole’ college try’ and can you blame them? When a couple smart guys get into a room and come up with some Ludacris plan and sign the whole team up for it … Continue reading What is Commitment?
Checkbox Scrum Roles
Recently I was coaching an Agile Release Train where they were struggling with the concept of a Product Owner. The teams were organized with a Scrum Master and a Product Owner each. This organization’s product management team was very resource constrained so one technique employed was the use of “Product Owner Proxies”. Product Owner Proxies … Continue reading Checkbox Scrum Roles
Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part III
In Part II, we discussed how we measure people impacts the dynamic of the team. We channeled some W. Edwards Deming and recognized the fact that we need to establish measurements that optimize the whole and discourage individual success at the expense of the success of the entire team. The idea sounds great in principle … Continue reading Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part III
Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part II
So in Part I, we started the conversation about taking a siloed team each with its own individual objectives and forming a single team out of it. We overcame some key hurdles such as overcoming latency in hardware fabrication and high levels of specialization within the team and think we have a plan that will … Continue reading Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part II
Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part I
I had a really interesting conversation with a customer in Shanghai. In terms of taking on an agile transformation, let’s just say that they’re on the edge. They know what they are doing now isn’t making them competitive in the marketplace but they are concerned. They’re concerned about how things will change. Will they be … Continue reading Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part I
Plan in the Same Room
I recently facilitated a PI Planning workshop where we had, well, let’s just say—erm—less than optimal facilities. To be fair, the Release Train Engineer (RTE) did the best they could given other constraints. Our train was conducting it’s planning somewhere in Europe (I know, I know, I sound like a secret agent). If you’ve been … Continue reading Plan in the Same Room
Minimize Team Churn
One behavior pattern I have observed in traditional management structures is the idea that human beings are essentially replaceable parts. You take one cog in the machine and if its about the right size you can jam it somewhere else to make the system move faster. The reality is much different. Even the smallest change … Continue reading Minimize Team Churn
Static Content Hosting Pattern: Part I
Brief Synopsis When designing for the cloud it’s important that we take into consideration cost. In the cloud, there are a wide variety of services; some cost more than others. The resource that you will probably spend the most money on (in most scenarios) is compute. Therefore, its advantageous to offload as much responsibility from … Continue reading Static Content Hosting Pattern: Part I
Cache Aside Pattern: Part I
Brief Synopsis The idea here is simple; we’ve been doing it for ages. After retrieving some data from a durable store you store it into a high speed cache to improve the performance of future reads. The Upside You get extremely low latency reads. In a public cloud environment, you get the added benefit of … Continue reading Cache Aside Pattern: Part I
Sky Cliffs 