Victoria Wiggins

Meet-Scrum A Poster

I’ve just had a look at Travis Birch’s Scrum poster over at Agile Advice: http://www.agileadvice.com/2014/03/20/referenceinformation/new-scrum-diagram-meet-scrum-by-travis-birch-csp/

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Over the last few months my team have been using BDD in our scrum. We have been trying to appreciate the full “conversation” sense as well as defining scenarios for automation. We’re getting a lot of value from 3 amigos sessions in the sprint and have found that this has increased communication and collaboration, as well as assuaging the fear of under refining stories up front.

Liz Keogh posted today about BDD and Cynefin. I thought the practical advice and application was interesting.

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An Agile reading list

I’m a bit of a bookaholic. My reading list is always far too long, (you can see it here if you’re interested) and I’ve generally got about 10 books started. This makes posts like Johanna Rothman’s Minimum Reading List for an Agile Transition catnip for me.

I’m interested in what other people read and what they’d recommend other’s read so I asked around work to see what my colleagues believe to be on an essential agile reading list. Continue reading “An Agile reading list”

Agile delivery when replacing legacy systems

Martin Fowler reposted a good blog post on Strangler Applications a couple of days ago: Strangler Application.

This is a practice of replacing legacy platforms peice by peice rather than all at once in a rewrite. His discussion centers around using this method to in order to mitigate risk, which is of course a massive advantage.

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Lessons leant from Mike Cohn: 2 Times to Play Planning Poker and 1 Time Not To

I read this: 2 Times to Play Planning Poker and 1 Time Not To this morning.

The last part in particular is interesting and has taught me something; I’ve sometimes encouraged teams to validate estimates in sprint planning, but Mike’s point seems solid as to why this is a bit pointless; these estimates are supposed to be rough.

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PO responsibilities depending on team agile maturity

Over the last couple of years I thought about how the Scrum Master role needs to change to reflect the maturity of the team but I’d not previously considered the changes a product owner needs to make over the same period.

Corinna Baldauf had some good point to make on this topic in her blog post The Product Owner’s tasks according to the Dev Team.

Is there a place for non sprint week a quarter?

I’d got a bit behind on some of my agile feeds, but Mike Cohn published an interesting article last month on having a week off once a quarter from the typical scrum framework to let the team do whatever they want for a project/product.

Six Times Two Plus One Equals a Good Project Cadence

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