Agile Bites

Every Scrum master's nightmare is their team wanting to switch to Kanban. It's easy to look at a shiny new framework and think that it's going to solve all your problems.    And while we do think that Scrum is not the best fit for most software teams, there are both good and bad reasons to consider before jumping into another framework.   In this episode, get ready to think about some...

True or false: For Kanban, Monte Carlo, and Little's Law to work, your work items have to be a similar size.    When we think about forecasting work, it's easy to think that the best way is to add up the total amount of time it takes to complete something and use that to predict the future. But that's actually not the case.   In this episode, learn how you can let go of worrying about...

Regardless of what Agile strategy or framework a team is using, at the end of the day, one of the biggest questions teams are trying to answer is, “What can we get done in a certain timeframe?”    And some choose to address this by using velocity: adding up the number of story points delivered in a sprint and using that to determine how much can get done in a future sprint. But does that really ma...

So you've found your constraint—what now? (or maybe you haven't found your constraint yet. In that case, scroll back a few episodes and listen to “Finding the Constraint” first!) Your constraint is basically what's controlling the pace of your whole system. So now that you've found it, you need to optimize it so it's working continuously and effectively (notice that we didn&#39...

Just because the “Q” in “QA” stands for “Quality” doesn't mean that this role should be the only one who's responsible for making sure features are up to standards.    Unfortunately, too many QAs spend their limited time just making sure that features WORK, let alone finding edge cases and addressing actual bugs. And then they have to pull the developer back in to fix the feature after the...

When Daniel was learning Karate in The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi had him start by doing tasks over and over without explanation so he could master the basics before actually using the martial art on his own. And this method of mastering a skill is something we see across many disciplines outside martial arts—sometimes it's even applied to learning agility.   But is following and mastering “the ru...

Hopefully, you know by now that limiting your work in progress is the solution to a lot of delivery problems. Both Scrum and Kanban have their own ways of limiting WIP, but there's another way you might not have heard of: Drum-Buffer-Rope scheduling.   In this episode, learn what Drum-Buffer-Rope scheduling is and how it can align the activities of your team and reduce bottlenecks in your flow...

One of the benefits we can get out of Agile and Lean processes is the ability to forecast work based on a team’s metrics. But if you’ve just started tracking your cycle time and running Monte Carlo simulations, and your results are all over the map, this podcast is for you. We’re sharing with you what things need to be in place so that when you do run forecasts or look at your cycle time scatterpl...

Every system, no matter how optimized, has a constraint—the point in the system that has the lowest throughput. But do you know where yours is? And what are you doing about it?    Knowing your constraint means knowing where you can make meaningful improvements to your system. Because if you make improvements to the wrong part of the system, you could actually make your flow worse (*cough, cough* h...

The whole concept behind using the word “flow” in “workflow” is that work keeps moving forward. Sounds nice, right? But we all know it's a little ambiguous in practice. What about those times when cards seem to need to move backward on the board? Like when QA finds a bug—should the card move back to Dev?    To answer that question, we first have to remember why the columns on the Kanban board...

So you like the idea of a Kanban board and you want to set one up. But how do you know how many columns you need? Or what to label each column? These questions can be answered by mapping out your team's value stream: the series of transformations an item has to go through to be converted from its raw form into a deliverable valuable form.   In this episode, go beyond “to-do, doing, and done” a...

The cornerstone of any relationship—at work or elsewhere—is trust. But unfortunately, it's something that many software teams lack, causing a whole slew of problems including dysfunction and inefficiency.   In this episode, we let you in the two biggest ways we build and maintain trust at our organization and how you can do it in yours too.

Ever get the feeling that the traditional “project” paradigm for software isn't quite fitting with agility? That trying to estimate the cost of the project versus the value of the project is just not ever working out the way you thought? Us too. And that's why we're proposing a different way to look at software projects—in a flow paradigm, where software is delivered in a stream, not a...

We know we're supposed to be dividing our work into small, deliverable chunks and reflecting that on our boards. But what should we do with the occasional tasks that don't exactly have a tangible deliverable at the end of them (e.g. research, proof of concept)?  In this episode, we're helping you build a policy for when spikes and research stories come along so you can stop trying to r...

As soon as work begins, the clock starts ticking and work items start aging. But when work sits longer than it needs to, it throws off your flow of value and increases the chances for the work to change. In this episode, learn why should we care about work item age and what you can do about it so that your team delivers a consistent stream of value.

We'll spare you any more suspense after reading this click-bait title—in this episode, we're talking about throughput. Throughput reveals chaos happening on your team, helps you plan, and can show you where to improve. That's why this is one metric you need to track if you aren't already.   Learn how you can easily start tracking your team's throughput and how you can use it to...

Building software requires a lot of bringing lots of different pieces together. But when some of those pieces depend on others outside your team, there's more opportunity for bottlenecks and inefficiencies. But while dependencies are unavoidable, there are ways to avoid it becoming a bigger problem. In this episode, we're going over two ways to handle cross-team efficiencies—even when the dependen...

Agile Coaching as a professional seems to be going through a shift right now. Recent headlines show large companies laying off large numbers of Agile positions. Some Agile coaches are rebranding what they do. It all raises the question: What is the value of an Agile coach and are we as coaches delivering on it? In this episode, we're giving our two cents what we see causing this shift and how Agil...

If you're implementing any new practice (and that includes Agile practices), you're likely to come up against some obstacles. At first, the practice might not work out the way you imagined it to. But an obstacle doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to be doing. In fact, obstacles are often the mechanisms by which we ultimately find success. They can be the signs that help us find what the right direc...

Does your sprint planning include sprint goals? Sprint goals are a “newer” addition to the Scrum Guide (if 2013 counts as newer), yet many Scrum Masters seem unfamiliar with them. Broken down, the sprint goal is an explanation to stakeholders of why this sprint is valuable. It's what guides the decisions on what a team will work on for the next sprint. In this episode, discover how to create good...

Budgeting in an Agile world is difficult. We request money upfront but don’t know what the project contents will be or how it will turn out. This makes it hard for both internal budgeting processes and firms to quote prices. Throughput accounting is a great solution, but not every organization is ready to make that switch. But there is a way to start the transition from big batch, cost-based fundi...

Why do we try to size user stories in software development? And how are we supposed to accurately make guesses about how long our work is going to take? In this episode, we're breaking down a couple of popular approaches to sizing user stories and then talking about how we can forecast projects without doing any sizing at all.

What are user stories supposed to be? And who should write them? Product Owners? BAs? Devs? Users? ChatGPT? Despite the ways many people have convoluted and complicated user stories, the answer is in the name. They are stories that users tell you about the things they need to get done and why it’s important to do them In this episode, we're sharing with you the no-nonsense way to approach user sto...

Blockers are something that almost all of us have to deal with at some point. When, for one reason or another, a work item gets blocked in the middle of the flow, how does your team handle it? In this episode, we're talking about what makes an item "blocked," how to effectively represent them in your workflow, and some helpful tips to create an effective policy for blocked work items in your team....

If your demo has become a meeting just to check off a box and cross your fingers hoping no significant changes get brought up, you're missing out on a lot of value. In this episode, we're sharing with you why we see demos as a time to gather better requirements and build trust with users.