Scattered notes on Agile

18 posts

June 03, 2024

Are customers stakeholders?

Lors d'un récent atelier qui portait sur les rôles et responsabilités autour d'un produit, un groupe qui avait été d'abord identifié comme un client a été requalifié en partie prenante. A cette occasion, je me suis rendu compte que j'avais un doute : les clients sont-ils des parties prenantes ou pas ?

March 09, 2024

L'abus d'un principe Agile

Une équipe se plaint de son directeur qui vient de changer d'avis pour la troisième fois en une semaine à propos du produit qu'elle développe. Quand elle le lui fait remarquer, il répond : « Eh bien, vous êtes agiles, non ? »

February 17, 2024

Talking vs Writing to build shared understanding

Recently, I was coaching a brand new team in a large French bank. Its backlog was almost empty and the Product Owner knew very little about its customers and their expectations. So I proposed to organize a workshop with a person who would be able to answer their questions. The Product Owner told me he would prefer to ask questions by email and get answers in the same way. I had to explain why talking is better than writing in this situation.

March 16, 2023

How to use reporting for better decision making?

Qu'est-ce que les rapports de renseignements sur les armes de destruction massive en Irak peuvent nous apprendre sur la prise de décision ?

January 31, 2023

Peut-on additionner les story points ?

Quand nous disons d'un élément de backlog qu'il vaut "8", cela signifie-t-il qu'il est huit fois plus complexe qu'un autre qui vaut "1" ?

March 10, 2021

Virtual and Real

What differences do I notice between meeting in a virtual way and meeting in a real way?

December 21, 2020

Agile benefits

What are the actual benefits of Agile? What kind of problems is this approach able to solve? We don’t do Agile or Scrum for itself. So why should we do Agile?

December 13, 2020

Splitting is valuing

Teams often find it hard to split large backlog items into smaller ones. And it is even more difficult to split items while preserving value. So it’s important to make clear that splitting has an impact on value.

December 13, 2020

The carrot and the stick

Is the carrot the best way to get the expected behavior from someone? And when our western societies promote this strategy over the stick, is it for good reasons? Is it more ethical to use the carrot than to control people through pain?

December 06, 2020

How to grow accountability?

When we see a team performing badly on a regular basis and it seems they don’t feel responsible for not meeting their objectives — they accept it —, what should we do?

December 03, 2020

Agile Historical Timeline

The word Agile has been coined in 2001. But the principles and practices that we know under this name date as far back as the mid-1950s. This is an historical timeline about Agility.

November 27, 2020

Quantification

Tout peut-il être quantifié ? C’est la question, le défi même, qui a été posé à Tom Gilb, consultant américain, largement connu pour son travail sur les métriques et la quantification.

April 22, 2020

What is the optimal size of a team?

The Scrum Guide currently sets the size of the Development Team from three to nine members, around the number six. Others say seven is the magic team size. What is the rationale for such a number and where does it come from?

February 23, 2020

Représenter l’essence du développement Agile

Est-ce que, comme moi, vous en avez assez de voir des Jocondes et des trottinettes pour vous expliquer l’Agilité ? Oui mais alors, quelle image nous aiderait mieux à saisir l’essence de cette approche du développement logiciel ?

February 10, 2020

Use statistics to measure what we hesitate to disclose

A few days ago, I was participating in an HR workshop and we were designing OKRs for a new onboarding process. The problem was to measure one of the key results: the satisfaction of the new employees. Our concern was that probationary employees would hesitate giving negative feedback on their organization during this trial period. How on earth could we measure their satisfaction?

December 15, 2019

How to measure performance when items are re-estimated?

Is it a good idea to re-estimate stories? When should we re-estimate and when should we avoid to do so? And what is the consequence of re-estimating on the velocity’s consistency and our ability to make reliable projections?

December 11, 2019

What’s the difference between a user story and an epic?

How many times did you hear this question: "Is that an epic or a user story?" Is there a simple rule to answer the question?

November 10, 2019

What’s the difference between a user story and a task?

It is not always easy to determine if something must be created as a task or as a user story. This post explores this question.