Should you choose Scrum or Kanban as your preferred way of working? In a mature team they will look quite similar. It is not an obvious choice and different experts have strong, but different opinions. I am not affiliated with either framework, but have significant experience in both ways of working (roughly 100 teams doing …
I believe too much power to the teams is risky in large scale agile implementations. Some of the reasons I have describe in When to use SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). Another aspect that concerns me is the level of self-organization. I think too much self-organization or team autonomy might be risky. Essentially there are three …
Be careful with self-directed and self-selected teams Read More »
There is a huge debate in the agile community around the SAFe framework. A lot of agilists seem to pretty much hate it. Ken Schwaber for example: unSAFe at any speed. Ken’s main criticism seems to be that consultants and creators will make money from it through training and consulting. Completely unlike Scrum obviously. And …
The organization does not have to be huge to have a need for scaled agile decision making. A while back (before SAFe existed) I was working in a small organization (30 people, 3 Scrum teams, 2 products). We were doing Scrum and XP and one of the founders was CEO and Product Owner for one …
Many companies have decided to keep the Project Manager role more or less intact while adding the new role of Scrum Master. Is this good? Is this what the founders of Scrum intended? In general I think the answer is no and I will elaborate a bit on why I think so. But first of …
Jeff Patton has written an interesting post called Requirements considered harmful to spark a discussion on the use of the word “requirements” in the software industry. He argues that the word “requirements” leads us to the wrong behavior. There is a long tradition where we think about requirements as something that has already been decided …
In teams that are still bit too specialized it can sometimes make sense to do something I call Soft Assign. Soft Assign (as I have defined it in this context – it has other meanings as well) means that in the first part of Sprint Planning members of the team show what Backlog items they …
I recently met a fellow Agile Coach. He had invented an elaborate way of bidding on tasks in a sprint as a way of matching what people wanted to do with what got assigned. It was Excel based and could find an optimal solution (more or less I guess) based on an algorithm. It worked …
Many teams start out with Scrum and over the years they remove stuff – and add WIP limits – and come closer and closer to Kanban. Many teams start out with Kanban and over the time add things like Sprints and Retrospectives and come closer and closer to Scrum. This is all fine and a …
Many agile teams have discovered Planning Poker, which is a well known and proven practice. But there is an interesting alternative to Planning Poker that can work very well under certain conditions. I call it Table Sorting (don’t know the official name – and I am not the inventor). Table Sorting works like this: Prepare …
