I don’t hire Scrum Masters. I don’t hire Scrum Masters because the role is the wrong shape to fit into my team, with the wrong set of responsibilities, and the people who might apply have insufficient qualifications for the job I need done.
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Five things to do when people don’t to see the value of automation
Not everybody sees the value of automation, specifically test automation. But I believe effective software development demands test automation. What to do?
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Specialists are a Pain
Specialists are very useful. They are also a pain. It is great to have the experts around when we need them. But specialists are also add painful management overhead. I accept I have to do it but I wish I didn’t.
I’m going to look at three situations where I’ve had to deal with specialists and explain what I did:
- Drowning in specialists
- Front / Back end developers
- Part time external specialists
Headphones cut off vital information
Headphones. I hate them. If I wore headphones at work I would be cut off from a lot of vital information about what is really going. It would hamper Management on the Ground. So I never wear them.
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Business Representative or Product Manager. Who is the Product Owner?
I’m often in the situation where I’ve got both business representatives and product managers in my programme team. The big question is: who is the Product Owner?
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What to do when Estimates go up a lot
You start the Sprint confidently but the burn down chart starts going up. Things are a lot harder than expected! Your velocity is lower than you expected. What to do?
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Agile Status Report for Executives: Best, Worst, Throughput
My programme’s Sponsoring Group asked me to send a weekly status report. This was to compensate for the fact they were at a remote site and hence couldn’t see the walls of our informative workspace. They were paying the bills so who was I to argue.
Luckily they don’t want a lot of detail. They want to know three things:
- Throughput
- Best thing this week
- Worst thing this week
Talent not practice: The myth of the 10,000 hours
Common wisdom, and self help books, says that anyone who completes 10,000 hours (10 years) in their chosen discipline will excel. This is part of the rationale for Code Kata and Coding Dojos from the Software Craftsmanship movement. But the 10 years equals expert formula isn’t true.
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Agile Project Manager as Shepherd
I value project managers and see an on-going need for them within a Lean-Agile context. Admittedly the role of the project manager changes when using an Lean-Agile approach, becoming more of a shepherd and less a military officer. In this, the first post of a new series, I thought I’d revisit my definition of the Agile Project Manager.
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Six Things To Do When Agile Newbies Join Your Team
So you are up and running with Lean-Agile but your team is still growing or there is some churn in the team. Either way new people arrive, often without an effective Lean-Agile background. What to do?
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