Agile Bites

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” and learn about the value behind having the right columns on your board so you can optimize your team's flow.

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 box.

In this episode, learn what we mean by a “flow paradigm” and how it can change the way you plan, monitor, and fund your software efforts.

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 retrofit abstract tasks into user stories and keep your board flowing with deliverable value.

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 make your team better at getting valuable software out the door.

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 dependency isn't significant enough to justify adding a new person to the team.

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 Agile coaches can stay ahead of it by proving and owning real value for their clients.

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 direction is

In this episode, we're talking about how to approach and not just overcome, but USE obstacles to your advantage in finding and implementing the best solutions for your situation.

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 sprint goals that can positively impact your process, get everyone on your team on the same page, and increase the buy-in of stakeholders.