Hello World

I was about to start recording some observations on Agile in a word document to transpose later into a company blog, when I realised I might just be better off doing it here. So this 'Hello World' post is really to get me over the dreaded first post phase.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using an agile storyboard as a scale of certainty

Image
As per my previous post, In my current team we have started using a 'Just in Time' (see how I feel weird about saying Kanban, not sure why yet) approach to doing various activities around development. Mostly this is around planning, but in that sense, we are also doing as much Just inTime as possible in giving an estimate. Scene setting We are a team that does 2 week sprints, but we also don't do a major release at the end of each sprint. We tend to wait for 5 sprints to pass before we do releases, there are a number of organisational reasons for that, but suffice to say, thats the way we do it around these parts. Our story wall (in ugly table form) The table below is a basic representation of our Story wall. As you can see, for the story wall, we deliberately do not just focus on the current 2 week sprint. We also have columns heading beyond the current sprint to encapsulate the entire release timeline (in this case the team have already completed two sprints so their are...
Read more

An idea for a release Retro

An idea for a release Retro Simon Bristow, my fellow engineering manager, and I sat down yesterday to brainstorm how to run a cross-organisational retro for a major release. This release was 8 development sprints and 2 Regression sprints long, a total of 20 weeks. Here is what we dreamt up, I'll follow up with a post on how it all went: Who: Representatives from the various areas of the organization (no more than say 25 in total) – Suggestions of key people welcomed, but at a minimum: Prod Ops, at least one member of each Sprint team, COPS (Client operations), Helpdesk, Triage, Marketing, UX Themes Rather than asking the groups to come up with Themes, we propose that S, H and I look through related Retro notes, information on the Sprint notes (from our Wiki) and canvass you other people in the organisation for Themes to pre-populate on the day. We’ll discuss and get say 8-10 themes for the day and place them around the room on butchers paper prior to folk coming in. These themes sh...
Read more

A survey on release processes with organisations that 'sef-identify' as folowing agile practises.

Image
Earlier this year I ran a survey around ‘release processes’ specifically with companies that follow agile practices. I promised that I would publish the results and apologies for the delay, I have collated the responses below. Thanks to everyone that participated, really appreciate your time and energy. At iflix we're always looking to improve our release processes so it was really great to get so many good responses. We learnt we're not that far apart from our peers out there. We've got a lot to learn of course, some of that comes from hearing from others and some from the mistakes we make. The trick is to make your mistakes small ones and learn fast with minimal disruption to your customers. This survey was run at least 5 months ago, so it’s a snapshot in time.  Most places I have worked change their processes (inspect and adapt!). I've reproduced the responses in their entirety, so it is a bit of a long read. I’ve anonymised the responses somewhat, retaining ...
Read more