Agile Weekly Podcast

Derek Neighbors, Roy van de Water and  Llewellyn Falco discuss teaching kids to program: Obtaining feedback Encouraging continuous learning Feedback vs praise Just jump in and do it First Lego League People are people Understanding and detecting patterns Iterating, engaging and stabilization Collaboration for tighter feedback Leadership makes a difference Learning is joyful Layered learning / Video Games References: Mindset by Carol Dweck First Lego League Teaching Kids to Program Lost in Space

Jade Meskill, Roy van de Water, Perry Reinert and Alan Dayley discuss corporate cultures: Inertia against change Leadership matters Self-Organization It's okay to fail People matter during transition Managers tell people what to do.. Any objections? Compliance. Guilt trips Mindless drones Self selection Using games Observe and learn from other teams/organizations

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Derek Neighbors, Jade Meskill and Roy van de Water discuss the pros and cons of physical and digital boards: Benefits of physical vs digital boards How our brain wiring works Visibility instead of hidden data Mind playing tricks on me Visual speaks volumes Don't have to fight tools to try new things It takes a long time update the board Overhead, saving paper, distributed team Historical data Lack of team trust Lines of code and function points Self Organization should rule Working with other teams Serendipity happens Simulate colocation References: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt Forget Why You Walked Into the Room?

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Derek Neighbors, Drew LeSueur and Roy van de Water discuss story sizes, naming your sprints and partial credit:  20, 40, 100 story point sizes  Less accurate as they get bigger  Naming your sprints  Rally point for deliverables  Historical data  Sprint goals  Partial credit for points  Does story size matter  Symptom of a deeper problem  Too focused on velocity  Paycheck advances  The defect board as a debt collector

Roy van de Water, Derek Neighbors, Alan Dayley, Perry Reinert and Jade Meskill discuss their predictions for 2012: Last years reflections Early adopters dig deeper than process Leadership will come into focus Companies will become aware industrial age is behind us Training will have more depth and options Community will fracture further before it gets to good stuff Increased competition will raise the bar for Agile Training for the wrong things This is the year of storming... Alan commits to writing more Perry is going to read 30 books this year Derek is going to explore leadership/systems thinking frameworks Saving the Scrum Alliance Jade is going to champion creative culture creation  

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water and Derek Neighbors take to the twitters to find controversial topics to talk about. Kanban, Agile, Scrum are among top trends of 2011 What do you get a ScrumMaster for Christmas? Getting turned down for a ScrumMaster role because you are too experienced Water-Scrum-Fall and ScrumerFall Scrum is a diet, Kanban is a Mirror When do you use Agile Methodologies and Techniques like Scrum Is it nuts to invest in specialization when Scrum is generalizing the team Are story points a proxy for time?

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Derek Neighbors, Chris Coneybeer and Roy van de Water talk to special guest Howard Sublett from Big Visible to talk about shared resources, multitasking and team members having multiple commitments. Treating people as resources can cause long term problems Specialization can discourage team members from taking ownership of a project Team members complaining of too many meetings is a red flag indicating that developer is probably on too many projects Product Owners are not exempt from suffering in capability and quality from working on two many projects Human beings do not context switch as easily as we pretend to be able to

Jade Meskill, Derek Neighbors, Roy van de Water, Drew LeSueur are joined by Alan Dayley to discuss working with proxy users. How can we encourage customers to participate more? Do we really need customers to participate more? Are there things we can do to mitigate lack of product ownership?

Jade Meskill, Roy van de Water and Chris Coneybeer are joined by special guest Darrin Ladd from Big Visible to discuss management inbreeding. Managers promote people that are most like themselves Both positive/negative traits start to feedback on themselves Innovation decreases as the organization becomes Homogenous Larger organizations have greater inertia so the culture needs to have more disruptive members in order to change It is extremely difficult to try to eliminate inbreeding within an organization from within Reckless attempts can be met with blacklisting

Jade Meskill, Derek Neighbors, Chris Coneybeer and Roy van de Water discuss an article by Todd Landry titled "What is the Right Iteration Length" Is it better to have a shorter iteration and close the feedback loop Is it better to have a longer iteration to decrease the overhead of the Scrum Ceremonies? Sprint Review seems to be the only ceremony not proportionally decreased with sprint length Retrospectives do not have to occur every week, or perhaps have an extended retro every other sprint The cost of deploying is sometimes an argument for longer sprints Deployments and releases should be unhinged from sprints The team agrees that shorter sprints are generally better

Derek Neighbors, Roy van de Water and Chris Coneybeer are joined in studio by Perry Reinert from InfusionSoft and discuss communities in Scrum. The Scrum User group is a monthly meeting of people interested in Scrum Non-Scrum related User groups can also provide lots of value by providing alternative viewpoints XP groups are also available in most locations Agile 2011 had many community building activities Scrum Alliance has "Find a user group in your area" functionality If there is nothing available, start your own Open Spaces force you into interacting with new people

In this video we talk with Sandra Bufford about what got her interested in attending the User Story Class.

Clayton Lengel-Zigich and Roy van de Water are joined by Adam Sroka from Industrial Logic to discuss software craftsmanship. Resources for software craftsmanship have increased in availability Measure the results so you know if you improve Industrial Tourism - exchange program between companies to refresh perspectives Important to be disciplined to work in tiny increments

Alan Dayley interviews Doug Hall after the October 2011 Phoenix Scrum User's Group.

Ainsley Nies joins Jade Meskill, Derek Neighbors and Roy van de Water in discussing the book "Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects", which Ainsley co-authored with Diana Larsen. Formallizing the start of a project or team Chartering a team increases the communication Helps align the team around the project vision