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Agile Tools

Facilitating Collaborative Meetings In The Age of COVID19

These are crazy times. I’m lucky that during this time I can still do things that are in the vicinity of my comfort zone.

When working with a client or teaching a class I rely pretty heavily on liberating structures, training from the back of the room, innovation games and other facilitation techniques. Can these work in a virtual/remote environment? YES! Luckily, I’ve been working with some 100% distributed companies/organizations in the past so it’s not all new.

Agile

The polarity in the life of a great Scrum Master and every manager- Useful tool for leaders

The complex reality presents many challenges and dilemmas that Scrum Masters and leaders at all levels try to solve using problem-solving techniques. Yet dilemmas are different from problems. While problems have a good answer or solution, dilemmas have more than a single good answer.
We are all familiar with dilemmas like Centralized vs. Decentralized, Cross-functional vs. Professional-focus, Quality vs. Speed, Individual improvement vs. Team improvement, Continuity vs. Transformation, Task-focus vs. relationship-focus, and many more.

Engineering Practices

A Beautiful Day For Unit Tests

Writing unit tests on Legacy Code is an adventure. Today I spent several hours doing that with two developers, Mark and Yelena.

The system has a flow you are used to and when you write code you fit it into this flow. Then you test the entire system.

With unit tests, it works differently. You are required to start the flow from the middle and stop it when your deed was done.

This requires a different level of system understanding. When we started off in the morning we looked at the code and thought “how are we going to harness this?”

Agile Tools

Getting Started with ATDD

It is early afternoon on Friday.

As the week is coming to an end, so is Team Alpha’s Sprint.

The team is rushing to finish the last User Stories in the Sprint. Marion is putting the last touches on the Daily Report User Story. Just a bit more tweaking of the CSS… and… we’re done! Marion shoots Kate, the PO, a WhatsApp message: “Hi Kate, the daily report story is done, can you please check it out and accept it?” A couple of hours pass and Kate is finally done with the grueling series of back-to-back meetings she’s been enduring today.

Agile

5 steps to get unit tests going

Once you start unit testing, you will find significant benefits to your design, throughput, quality, and peace of mind. However, it is not easy to start in an organization that’s not used to it. Here are a number of practical tips:

Per-Topic Reading Lists

SAFe RTE (Release Train Engineer) Post-Class Resources List

Certified SAFe® Release Train Engineer. – Scaled Agile piplanning App Distributed PI Planning – Scaled Agile Framework Agile Processes Demo Board, Online Whiteboard for Visual

Agile Tools

Three tools that can help you become a better web developer

TL;DR
Use git, use eslint, and write unit tests.
Want to know the reasoning behind each tool? Keep reading!
Introduction

Whether you are starting out as a developer or already have some experience, improving your coding skills is an ongoing endeavor. But what does it mean to be a better coder?
While there are many ways to solve a problem with code, some of them are better than others. As Robert Martin wrote:
Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees.

Agile Estimations

A different approach to estimations in SAFe

SAFe™ (The Scaled Agile Framework) uses Story Points throughout the various levels as its estimation currency. This is covered in the “Story” article on the SAFe site. This is a pretty standard practice in organizations scaling agile these days. If you dive a bit deeper into how this is done in SAFe you will see that actually the story points used in SAFe are quite similar to “Ideal Developer Day” as this helps the teams align to a common baseline and support a rational economic ROI discussion at the level of Features/Capabilities that require effort from more than one team or haven’t even been mapped to a specific team yet.

Continuous Deployment

The Sprint Increment Is Dead

The Sprint Increment Got Us Here

If you’re a veteran of the software industry, you probably remember those days when we released to production/GA every couple of months. Heck, many of the companies I meet these days still work that way.

If you’re also an experienced Scrum practitioner, you probably associate the time you started to use Scrum with the time you started to release more frequently. The Sprint Increment that had to be potentially releasable caused you a lot of pain as you were trying to improve your processes and capabilities, implement Continuous Integration, and finally gain the ability to actually have a releasable Increment each Sprint. You were pretty proud.

Agile Leadership

How can HR people make a difference in an Agile transformation?

Transformations naturally start with a change in the process and the tools, which inevitably create tension that is supposed to catalyze a deeper change in other elements of the culture. Many implementations struggle and even get stuck at that stage. This is the hard part since it is mostly about people’s behaviors and habits and it takes time. This is exactly where HR professionals come in! I’m not trying to say that only at this stage HR people start partnering and pushing the transformation, I am only emphasizing their importance at this stage. HR departments are key in leading Agile transformations to long, lasting and truly impactful ones.

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