18 Mar 2010, 3:03pm
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by toni

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again on the story wall… the hold zone

Yesterday I’ve got a nice comment from JK on the previous blog post about the story wall and we talked a bit about our story walls (he’s a the same client but on a different project).

I didn’t realize we both have an hold zone at the bottom of the story wall, for blocked stories/stories on hold.

He pointed out and I totally agree that that is the most dangerous thing you can do.

Stories are prioritized top down, putting them down there it’s like saying that they have no value, low priority.
That horizontal section is also so low that you almost don’t see them.

At that point I’ve realized that we actually had that section, I’m still shocked I didn’t remove it earlier in the project!

So, what is JK doing in his team now? He keeps the stories on hold on the same position as they were, with a visible block-sticker on them.

With that he is avoiding:

a) the mistake of forgetting a story
b) the mistake of change the priority of a story for no reason

He’s achieving more visibility on the blockers in the project and with few blockers on a lane it will be hard to pull more stories there, so you will be naturally forced to solve those blocking issues. (a bit of TOC always helps)

16 Mar 2010, 7:54am
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by toni

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Learn practises and Learn how to live without them

Agile is hard to embrace, agile is hard to teach.

“The problem” (and the strength) of agile development is that it never defines strict rules to follow always and in any occasion.

I can imagine myself being a consultant preaching RUP (IBM I am not impressed with you guys preaching agile), I’ll give to the client the book, I’ll tell them to follow my rules, end of the story.

Now, let’s forget the manifesto, let’s forget all the blog posts, the white papers, the conferences.

What the world agile means? I’ve searched on the Mac Dictionary application

It says:

agile |?aj?l|
adjective
able to move quickly and easily : Ruth was as agile as a monkey | figurative his vague manner concealed an agile mind.

That’s all you need, be agile like a monkey.

Embrace iterations of two weeks? Fine, after some time if you feel like you can go faster without, take them off.

Embrace a retrospective per iteration? Fine, after some time if you feel like they are not making you go faster, take them off.

Embrace the iteration planning meeting? Fine, after some time if you feel like they are not making you go faster, take them off.

And once you took off all the practices, start from scratch, try to understand if re-introducing them will make you go faster, be agile like a monkey in the jungle, don’t follow pre defined paths.

10 Jun 2009, 9:02am
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by toni

3 comments

A very long list of Agile, Lean & C. books

I’ve used to have this list on a Google Spreadsheet, it took me quite a while to sort it (the first 3-5 books for each category are more essential than the others) and place the links, but here it is, more than sixty agile-related books!

Agile Process

Additional Context

Agile Development

Lean

 
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