This show, in French, is hosted by our very special friend of the show Tim Bourguignon
Scrum nous pousse à travailler en « sprints ». Est-ce vraiment sain de sprinter sur la durée ? Et surtout, est-ce vraiment possible ? Un des 12 principes du manifeste Agile est bien de créer un rythme de développement soutenable indéfiniment. Dans la pratique, il faut bien s’arrêter de sprinter de temps en temps. Dans cet épisode, François Le Rolland nous présente un jeu qu’il utilise avec son équipe pour faire une pause entre deux sprints, et se regrouper avant de repartir à l’attaque.
About François le Rolland and Tim Bourguignon
As a team leader, François organizes and facilitate the daily work of 7 people. His priority is to bring the right tool for the right job.
You can link with François le Rolland on LinkedIn and connect with François le Rolland on Twitter. Or visit François le Rolland’s web site.
Tim is a full time geek, agile developer and BS-hunter. International speaker and avid writer, he is curious- and creative-minded, eager to search, teach and talk... and has been doing this for as long as he remembers. Tim has been working on a project called Developer's Journey (www.devjourney.info) lately, where regularly sharpens his podcasting skills talking to whoever is willing to about what it takes to become a better developer.
You can connect with Tim Bourguignon on twitter or visit Tim Bourguignon’s website to see what he is up to.
The technique that Paolo shares with us in this episode is not only useful to tackle the Friday challenge (understand the system as a whole), but it is a versatile technique that we all should include in our toolbox. It is such an important tool that we end up spending the episode talking about many tools we can use to implement this technique and focus on one specific technique: Event Storming by Alberto Brandolini. Do you want to know what is this technique? Listen in.
About Paolo D’Incau
Paolo is a passionate agile developer. He spent hist first years of "agile" learning the technical practices but with time he understood that people, culture and values always come first.
Paolo practices and recommends the adoption of eXtreme Programming. In the projects he has worked on so far he has experienced the benefits of building small and big systems adopting practices such as Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and infrastructure automation.
You can link with Paolo D’Incau on LinkedIn and connect with Paolo D’Incau on Twitter.
Paolo D’Incau starts the episode by sharing with us what is the best way to describe the impact of a Scrum Master. Then we continue to discuss the 3 benchmarks he uses to check his own success, as well as the guiding principles for improvement. Finally we discuss the one tool that can help Scrum Masters reach their goals.
About Paolo D’Incau
Paolo is a passionate agile developer. He spent hist first years of "agile" learning the technical practices but with time he understood that people, culture and values always come first.
Paolo practices and recommends the adoption of eXtreme Programming. In the projects he has worked on so far he has experienced the benefits of building small and big systems adopting practices such as Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and infrastructure automation.
You can link with Paolo D’Incau on LinkedIn and connect with Paolo D’Incau on Twitter.
It can be hard to help teams understand that there’s life beyond code. So hard, that sometimes teams choose to focus only on the technical excellence, without any regard to the impact they have on the business they are part of and contributors to. In the episode Paolo shares with us his experience with a team that was focused on the technical side, but had no idea how their software contributed to the business they were part of. At the end we also discuss how to break free from this anti-pattern.
In this episode we refer to a few resources for retrospectives. One of them is retromat, a resource for plans and ideas for retrospectives.
In this episode we also refer to the high-performance tree concept from Lyssa Adkins.
Finally, we also refer to the book Maverick! By Ricardo Semler.
About Paolo D’Incau
Paolo is a passionate agile developer. He spent hist first years of "agile" learning the technical practices but with time he understood that people, culture and values always come first.
Paolo practices and recommends the adoption of eXtreme Programming. In the projects he has worked on so far he has experienced the benefits of building small and big systems adopting practices such as Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and infrastructure automation.
You can link with Paolo D’Incau on LinkedIn and connect with Paolo D’Incau on Twitter.
We’ve all been there. A system is running, paying its keep, but creating head-aches everywhere. Soon enough there’s enough people thinking that the system must be re-written and a long, and arduous project starts with the aim of re-writing the system from scratch. We know the features that must be in, so it can’t be that hard, right? Wrong! In this episode we review the many anti-patterns that are triggered when a system re-write project is started.
In this episode we refer to the Promiscuous Pairing paper by Arlo Belshee where he describes the principle of the least qualified implementer.
About Paolo D’Incau
Paolo is a passionate agile developer. He spent hist first years of "agile" learning the technical practices but with time he understood that people, culture and values always come first.
Paolo practices and recommends the adoption of eXtreme Programming. In the projects he has worked on so far he has experienced the benefits of building small and big systems adopting practices such as Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and infrastructure automation.
You can link with Paolo D’Incau on LinkedIn and connect with Paolo D’Incau on Twitter.
Paolo shares the story of a team that was new to Agile methods. The team was stuck in cargo cult, focusing on tools, instead of behaviors. On top of that there a problem: how can we engage business people? Especially business people that have little or no experience with Agile? Listen in to learn about Paolo’s approach to help the team mature, and engage the business side.
About Paolo D’Incau
Paolo is a passionate agile developer. He spent hist first years of "agile" learning the technical practices but with time he understood that people, culture and values always come first.
Paolo practices and recommends the adoption of eXtreme Programming. In the projects he has worked on so far he has experienced the benefits of building small and big systems adopting practices such as Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and infrastructure automation.
You can link with Paolo D’Incau on LinkedIn and connect with Paolo D’Incau on Twitter.
Stefan was a guest on the show and a guest writer in our blog. At that time we briefly spoke about the great work he’s been doing on the recruiting process for Scrum Masters. In the blog he wrote on “Peer Recruiting: How to Hire a Scrum Master in Agile Times” he shared some concrete tips for those of you hiring Scrum Masters for your organizations. However, we - Scrum Masters - also need some guidance on how to get ready for those interviews. Being ready may be the difference between failing or getting to the next step in the recruitment process. So in this episode we focus on what we, as Scrum Masters, need to do to get ready and get that next job we want.
About Stefan Wolpers
Stefan has been working as agile coach and product owner for fast growing, mainly Berlin-based startups for about 10 years. He is writing on hiring agile practitioners, Why agile fails?, and curates Age of Product’s “Food for Agile Thought” newsletter.
You can link with Stefan Wolpers on LinkedIn and connect with Stefan Wolpers on Twitter.
Very large organizations, such as the one that Dimitris describes in this episode, have a dynamic of their own. The same practices that help a smaller organization are not going to work when you need to deal with 100’s of teams and coordinate with waterfall projects. Not all teams or projects move to Agile immediately, let alone the financing and governance processes. Listen in to learn how Dimitris and the rest of the team were able to help a large organization take concrete steps towards Agile, but without ignoring the slower parts of the organization.
About Dimitris Dimitrelos
Dimitris has been practicing, teaching and preaching Agile and Scrum since 2011. He has been working in the software industry for many years as a project manager, a PMO head and an Agile coach. He holds a degree in Computer Science, a PhD in High Performance Computing and an MBA, and has been certified as a PSM-I and PSPO-I by Scrum.org. Dimitris is an active member of the Agile Greece community.
You can link with Dimitris Dimitrelos on LinkedIn and connect with Dimitris Dimitrelos on Twitter.
What if we had a method, a structured way to assess how the system of any organization is setup, and thanks to that learn what are the best first steps for Agile adoption? Well, that’s exactly what Dimitris shares with us in this episode. The 4 aspects to consider as well as some of the methods used for that assessment.
About Dimitris Dimitrelos
Dimitris has been practicing, teaching and preaching Agile and Scrum since 2011. He has been working in the software industry for many years as a project manager, a PMO head and an Agile coach. He holds a degree in Computer Science, a PhD in High Performance Computing and an MBA, and has been certified as a PSM-I and PSPO-I by Scrum.org. Dimitris is an active member of the Agile Greece community.
You can link with Dimitris Dimitrelos on LinkedIn and connect with Dimitris Dimitrelos on Twitter.
Dimitris has had a career both as a Project Manager as well as a Scrum Master in the organizations he’s worked in. As part of that longer personal journey he has defined a set of aspects he comes back to regularly to assess his own success. Listen in to learn what he still applies from his Project Manager journey as well as the new principles he picked up after adopting Agile Software Development.
About Dimitris Dimitrelos
Dimitris has been practicing, teaching and preaching Agile and Scrum since 2011. He has been working in the software industry for many years as a project manager, a PMO head and an Agile coach. He holds a degree in Computer Science, a PhD in High Performance Computing and an MBA, and has been certified as a PSM-I and PSPO-I by Scrum.org. Dimitris is an active member of the Agile Greece community.
You can link with Dimitris Dimitrelos on LinkedIn and connect with Dimitris Dimitrelos on Twitter.
Scrum describes and warns against overcommitment. But how can we recover from that anti-pattern? In this story Dimitris shares what happens to a team that starts well, in their first Scrum project, but soon enough the overcommitment anti-pattern sets in. No matter what they try they are unable to get out of that negative spiral. Until… Listen in to learn what Dimitris helps the team with, leading them out of the anti-pattern of overcommitment.
About Dimitris Dimitrelos
Dimitris has been practicing, teaching and preaching Agile and Scrum since 2011. He has been working in the software industry for many years as a project manager, a PMO head and an Agile coach. He holds a degree in Computer Science, a PhD in High Performance Computing and an MBA, and has been certified as a PSM-I and PSPO-I by Scrum.org. Dimitris is an active member of the Agile Greece community.
You can link with Dimitris Dimitrelos on LinkedIn and connect with Dimitris Dimitrelos on Twitter.
Scrum Masters, especially when working with larger organizations, will be faced with Death March projects. Dimitris shares a story of a 6 month project what was completely off-the-rails. Scope changes by more than 50%, the bank running the project first merged with another bank, and later acquired another 3 banks. You name it. The project was going nowhere, until… Listen in to learn how Dimitris helped this Death March project turn around with the ideas and principles that every Scrum Master should apply, every day!
About Dimitris Dimitrelos
Dimitris has been practicing, teaching and preaching Agile and Scrum since 2011. He has been working in the software industry for many years as a project manager, a PMO head and an Agile coach. He holds a degree in Computer Science, a PhD in High Performance Computing and an MBA, and has been certified as a PSM-I and PSPO-I by Scrum.org. Dimitris is an active member of the Agile Greece community.
You can link with Dimitris Dimitrelos on LinkedIn and connect with Dimitris Dimitrelos on Twitter.
When we see a problem surfacing in the team, we should look outside the team. It is likely that there are system conditions affecting the team’s performance. Can you understand what that is? Tatum shares with us the Missing Conversation, a common cause of deeper problems, and what to do about it.
About Tatum Bisley
Tatum has 15 years of learning sector experience with the last 3 years in development - helping to make the tools that will enable corporate learning in years to come. Currently building a new jobs and skills application - Hiup - and VR, AR and MR applications for immersive learning.
You can link with Tatum Bisley on LinkedIn and connect with Tatum Bisley on Twitter.
Scrum Master success is about helping the team, and Tatum shares his own story and how he used the “Donut technique” to help the team find ways to talk about the real issues they were facing. This simple technique helped Tatum reach his own success, by helping the team. Can you use the same technique? You bet! Listen to Tatum’s story.
About Tatum Bisley
Tatum has 15 years of learning sector experience with the last 3 years in development - helping to make the tools that will enable corporate learning in years to come. Currently building a new jobs and skills application - Hiup - and VR, AR and MR applications for immersive learning.
You can link with Tatum Bisley on LinkedIn and connect with Tatum Bisley on Twitter.
Tatum explains how he applies the John Kotter change steps in his own work, and helps me find an insight I took to work the next day and benefited from! Very actionable episode on change, techniques and steps we need to go through in every change process.
About Tatum Bisley
Tatum has 15 years of learning sector experience with the last 3 years in development - helping to make the tools that will enable corporate learning in years to come. Currently building a new jobs and skills application - Hiup - and VR, AR and MR applications for immersive learning.
You can link with Tatum Bisley on LinkedIn and connect with Tatum Bisley on Twitter.
Saying yes to everything can easily lead to overwhelm. We want to please the business or the customer, and end up taking on much more work than is sustainable. How do we avoid that, and how do we help teams that are in that anti-pattern get out of it? Listen to this episode to learn about the practices that Tatum put in place to avoid that anti-pattern.
About Tatum Bisley
Tatum has 15 years of learning sector experience with the last 3 years in development - helping to make the tools that will enable corporate learning in years to come. Currently building a new jobs and skills application - Hiup - and VR, AR and MR applications for immersive learning.
You can link with Tatum Bisley on LinkedIn and connect with Tatum Bisley on Twitter.
Our teams very often deal with the pressure to “add more”. “Just this one more story” - they say. Well, that can devolve into an anti-pattern, and that is what happened with Tatum.
Listen in to learn how Tatum handled that anti-pattern and how you can avoid it in your teams.
In this episode we refer to the work by Roman Pichler on the role of the Product Owner.
About Tatum Bisley
Tatum has 15 years of learning sector experience with the last 3 years in development - helping to make the tools that will enable corporate learning in years to come. Currently building a new jobs and skills application - Hiup - and VR, AR and MR applications for immersive learning.
You can link with Tatum Bisley on LinkedIn and connect with Tatum Bisley on Twitter.
Understanding the many forces that affect the teams we work with represents a challenge for us as Scrum Masters. We need to learn about different parts of the organization, that we may never have worked with. We need to learn about the impact of the technical environment, which we may not be experts on. And the list goes on. Peter shares with us the power of visualization as a key tool to help understand the environment around the team. In this episode we mention one book recently published by Oikosofy about visual tools that help us understand the system. Head over to Actionable Agile Tools to learn more.
About Peter Gfader
Peter hates shitty software and tries his best to improve the profession of software development. For this reason, he joined scrum.org. The seek for improvement keeps him getting out of bed every day... and the smell of coffee that reminds him of warm sunny Sundays in a beach cafe with sand between his toes.
One day, Peter woke up and realized that software development is not only about code, but also about people: From his teammates till the end user. Some people you just give donuts and some you need to give a little bit more. Peter is on a journey to make everyone happy.
If he is not sitting on a mountain bike or playing the trumpet, you might find him at a local user group to hang out with other geeks!
You can link with Peter Grader on LinkedIn and connect with Peter Gfader on Twitter.
Peter shares his tips on how to establish a shared definition of success with the customer and team that he works with. He also shares some interesting tools to help in that conversation.
In this Episode we refer to the Happiness Index, a tool that Peter uses when assessing his own success as a Scrum Master.
About Peter Gfader
Peter hates shitty software and tries his best to improve the profession of software development. For this reason, he joined scrum.org. The seek for improvement keeps him getting out of bed every day... and the smell of coffee that reminds him of warm sunny Sundays in a beach cafe with sand between his toes.
One day, Peter woke up and realized that software development is not only about code, but also about people: From his teammates till the end user. Some people you just give donuts and some you need to give a little bit more. Peter is on a journey to make everyone happy.
If he is not sitting on a mountain bike or playing the trumpet, you might find him at a local user group to hang out with other geeks!
You can link with Peter Grader on LinkedIn and connect with Peter Gfader on Twitter.
#NoEstimates and #MobProgramming are big trends in the Agile community, but how do we get the benefits and quality of those practices? How do we help teams go from heavy up-front planning to quick, and often planning while still helping each other, raising the quality and feeling like they are working in a real team? Listen to this episode to learn how Peter helped a team reach just that kind of flow! :)
About Peter Gfader
Peter hates shitty software and tries his best to improve the profession of software development. For this reason, he joined scrum.org. The seek for improvement keeps him getting out of bed every day... and the smell of coffee that reminds him of warm sunny Sundays in a beach cafe with sand between his toes.
One day, Peter woke up and realized that software development is not only about code, but also about people: From his teammates till the end user. Some people you just give donuts and some you need to give a little bit more. Peter is on a journey to make everyone happy.
If he is not sitting on a mountain bike or playing the trumpet, you might find him at a local user group to hang out with other geeks!
You can link with Peter Grader on LinkedIn and connect with Peter Gfader on Twitter.
Talent is everywhere in the world, and we can’t always find the right people in our city. But having an offshore team presents specific challenges that we must prepare for. In this episode, Peter shares with us a story of an offshore team, and how the context he missed as a Scrum Master for an offshore team was so critical. In this Episode we also play a fun game that Peter explains in the following blog post: Can you find the 3 smells in “I added a Refactoring Story for the next Cleanup Sprint”?
About Peter Gfader
Peter hates shitty software and tries his best to improve the profession of software development. For this reason, he joined scrum.org. The seek for improvement keeps him getting out of bed every day... and the smell of coffee that reminds him of warm sunny Sundays in a beach cafe with sand between his toes.
One day, Peter woke up and realized that software development is not only about code, but also about people: From his teammates till the end user. Some people you just give donuts and some you need to give a little bit more. Peter is on a journey to make everyone happy.
If he is not sitting on a mountain bike or playing the trumpet, you might find him at a local user group to hang out with other geeks!
You can link with Peter Grader on LinkedIn and connect with Peter Gfader on Twitter.
Peter started working with a team. An XP team. His role and assignment was to help the team, but he was early on told that he should not focus, or “spend” time with people outside the team. What followed next was entirely predictable. Listen in to learn how focusing on the team alone can negatively affect your work as a Scrum Master.
About Peter Gfader
Peter hates shitty software and tries his best to improve the profession of software development. For this reason, he joined scrum.org. The seek for improvement keeps him getting out of bed every day... and the smell of coffee that reminds him of warm sunny Sundays in a beach cafe with sand between his toes.
One day, Peter woke up and realized that software development is not only about code, but also about people: From his teammates till the end user. Some people you just give donuts and some you need to give a little bit more. Peter is on a journey to make everyone happy.
If he is not sitting on a mountain bike or playing the trumpet, you might find him at a local user group to hang out with other geeks!
You can link with Peter Grader on LinkedIn and connect with Peter Gfader on Twitter.
As Scrum Masters we must spend a considerable amount of time investigating and understanding those system conditions that affect the team, but are outside its control. Jonas has a tool he uses to that effect and shares that with us in today’s episode.
About Jonas Allared
Jonas is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach and he is especially passionate about creating effective teams and healthy organizations. With focus on the human side he enjoys raising both the well-being and productivity of those he works with.
You can link with Jonas Allared on LinkedIn and connect with Jonas Allared on Twitter.
When assessing his own work, Jonas focuses on how dependant the team is on his contribution. The less a team is dependant on him, the better he is providing for the team. But he also has a tool up his sleeve that he uses to help him improve over time. In this episode we also discuss the role of metrics in assessing our work as Scrum Masters.
About Jonas Allared
Jonas is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach and he is especially passionate about creating effective teams and healthy organizations. With focus on the human side he enjoys raising both the well-being and productivity of those he works with.
You can link with Jonas Allared on LinkedIn and connect with Jonas Allared on Twitter.
Working with changing organisations can be frustrating. There are so many obstacles in our way, and we often feel alone in the process of change. Jonas shares his experience and tips on how to avoid that feeling of loneliness and frustration. In this episode we refer to the book Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins and the tool to analyse conversations called “Ladder of Inference”.
About Jonas Allared
Jonas is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach and he is especially passionate about creating effective teams and healthy organizations. With focus on the human side he enjoys raising both the well-being and productivity of those he works with.
You can link with Jonas Allared on LinkedIn and connect with Jonas Allared on Twitter.