This year I decided to attend the workshop day the day before the conference which was a great decision as there were some very interesting and useful sessions on leadership, process patterns for improving Agile development and a heap more.
I wrote a heap of notes and have collated them below into, things to try, suggested reading, things to look up (ie new concepts) and interesting quotes and questions.
Things to try
- Develop a definition of Ready (as opposed to "done"), this helps to have a story ready for the development team before they get started on the coding
- Waste bucket for stories started but not finish
- Grooming, time 2 mins for each card to estimate
- Mark stories with a state of where they are at eg Discover, ready for dev etc
- Investigate Sonar to convert technical debt into terms of $
- Reduce batch size (ie dont have 13 point stories, only have up to 5 or 8)
- INVEST Model (http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/vaibhav/good-user-story-invest)
- Have the team change avatar's each iteration and vote on the best one
- Get metrics on old features to make sure it is worth rebuilding them into a new system
- Get working software out to the end user as quickly as possible, perhaps use BETA sites to achieve this
- Walk a mile in her shoes, get people to "experience" other roles (ie dev and tester, marketing and dev)
- Exercise - "Wouldnt it be great if ...."
- Drive (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594484805/ref=cm_li_v_cd_d)
- Specification by example (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617290084/ref=cm_li_v_cd_d)
- Fearless change (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201741571/ref=cm_li_v_cu_net)
- My Personal MBA (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843529/ref=cm_li_v_cu_net)
- W.E Demming (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0911379002/ref=cm_li_v_cu_net)
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787960756/ref=cm_li_v_cu_net)
- Who - the A method of hiring (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345504194/ref=cm_li_v_cu_net)
- Software craftsmanship
- Systems thinking
- Complexity theory
- Minimal viable change
- Batch and queue size
- How to effectively measure cycle time for stories
- Stop starting, start finishing (ie mitigate switching costs)
- What are some insightful questions?
- Kaisen board, visualising technical debt, limit technical debt
- Infinity circles
- Rule of Three
- Cognitive walk through (PO signoff)
- Card sorting (to do with UX)
Quotes
- "Strategies can be distilled into patterns if you can use them multiple times"
- "Family trouble in the team is ok"
- "Just ask for small chunks of money"
- "Quality is fit for purpose, strive for perfection later"
Questions
- How do you deliver valuable chunks for an existing feature?
