Episode 10 of The Board saw the debut of our cameraman Gavin Coughlan as he took a place at the desk in front of the camera. Gavin and Paul’s topic this time was project kick offs.They discussed how to introduce teams to the concepts of Scrum, doing a definition of ready, a definition of done and a team charter. They also suggested using journey lines in a project kick off to help the team get to know each other.

Links

• Using Journeys Lines for Retrospective
• Journey Lines Activity
• Improving user stories with a Definition of Ready
• What is the Definition of Done

Join us for Episode 11 of The Board, 23 May 6.30 EDT, 10.30am NZST.

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Episode 9′s topic was quality on Agile projects, Paul and Kirstin talked about the following items:

• how is quality defined?
• how do we maintain quality on Agile projects?
• what tools do we use?
• we also discussed the use of system metaphors, and also recommended Extreme Programming (eXtreme Programming in Action)
• simple design, Test drive development, behaviour driven development, pair programming

• Test driven development
• Behaviour driven development
• System metaphors

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On episode 8 of The Board Nathan and Kirstin talked about Agile in China and the Scaled Agile Framework. We also covered Agile tooling (Rally) and reviewed Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland’s Software in 30 days.

Links

• Rally Dev SAFe Toolkit
• Scaled Agile Framework
• Book – Software in 30 days
• Book – Agile Software Requirements

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During episode 7 Paul and Kirstin talked about User Stories: the why, the what and the how. They discussed all things related to User Stories and their journey through Scrum. They also discussed Mike Cohn’s book, Agile Estimating and Planning.

Links

• User stories: a beginner’s guide
• User stories: a beginner’s guide to acceptance criteria
• User stories and stakeholders – bringing people on board with Agile
• Agile experiments: creating user stories with story mapping and ‘buy a feature’ prioritisation
• Agile Estimating and Planning – Mike Cohn
• Comakers – Jeff Patton

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Paul Flewelling and Kirstin Donaldson hosted Episode 6 of The Board and they covered:

• Scrum teams, what they are, how they work and tips for coaching scrum teams
• games we’ve used for team building and for demonstrating Agile principles
• encouraging team members to contribute to retrospectives
• The Rope game
• book review of Gamestorming by James Macanufo
• Retrospectives ideas resource http://tastycupcakes.org/

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On episode 5 of The Board we had a new presenter, Paul Flewelling, an Agile Coach at Boost. He joined Kirstin on our Product Owner episode. They discussed:

• what makes a good Product Owner 
• how to engage your Product Owner
• pitfalls that can come with the role 
• recommended blog:  Dannorth.net/blog
• recommended book: Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn
• The Product Ownership http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-innovation/the-product-ownership-test/
• Test Driven Development and Agile
• Behavior Driven Development and Cucumber, embracing agile development

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Episode 4 of The Board covered a range of topics:

• the role of Scrum Master – what makes a good Scrum Master?
• we referenced Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
• simple solutions to development in Agile teams
• metrics in Scrum; use of metrics to support the team, using metrics for release planning
• loss of a Product Owner mid sprint
• book review of Leading Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
• lean start up principles

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During our 3rd episode of The Board we talked about:

• responding to change over following a plan
• the removal of a key team member during a sprint and coaching a team through it
• the role of the Product Owner
• the inspect and adapt cycle – retrospectives
• review of The Power of Scrum
• review of the blog www.allaboutagile.com

If you’d like to comment on anything you’ve seen during episode 3 we’d love to hear from you via the comment section.

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In our second episode of The Board Kirstin and Nathan talk Agile values and review ‘Lean from the Trenches’ by Henrik Kniberk. They also highlight Kane Mar’s blog www.scrumology.com.

We’re interested in your questions on future episodes of The Board, you can join us at The Board every second Thursday – you’ll see our next scheduled date on The Board’s Livestream homepage. Once the episode is live you can use the text chat on Livestream to ask us questions or let us know about interesting Agile approaches you use in your day to day work.

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The Board is streamed live every two weeks, it’s all about Agile. We filmed our first episode, live, 6 months ago, Nathan Donaldson and Kirstin Donaldson volunteered to get in front of the camera and chat for half an hour about everything Agile.

During episode 1 they covered the following topics:

• common problems with new Agile Teams
• how to coach a Product Owner
• how a Team communicates, the value of face to face communications
• advice to a new Scrum Master
• what the role of a Scrum Master is
• agile outside of software development
• using Kanban to run business development and management
• Kanban in China
• using Scrum in your personal life
• the value of visible workspaces
• recommendation of the week: ‘Agile Retrospectives – Making good teams great’ by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
• what do you like to do at the end of a project

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No one wants to be the next Novopay! How do you ensure good value for money in web application development? It’s a question we are often asked and doesn’t have a straightforward answer. In this post we will look at some of the techniques we use to deliver better value for money on our projects.

Customer and team collaborate at every stage

To ensure that the vision held by the customer is shared, the customer and team must collaborate effectively and efficiently. Using good facilitation tools and techniques, and agile ways of working, the customer’s vision is clearly shared by the team and enables them to make sound decisions at every stop of the way.

Get fast feedback from the market

Key to getting good value for money is getting feedback from your market early and often. Working to get the application to market as early as possible reduces risk by ensuring the feedback loop from clients is as short as possible and by reducing investment before feedback. Integrating customer feedback into your development process will ensure that the features being developed are of value to your customers.

Build quality in to reduce the cost of change

Following technical best practices such as BDD & TDD is an excellent way to ensure quality is at the forefront in development. Technical best practices reduce the number and severity of defects in the work which frees valuable resource for creating features. The cost of finding and correcting defects grows quickly, so early discovery and re-mediation is key.

Prioritise the highest value features first

By focusing on producing the highest value features first you will ensure that the product is viable at the earliest possible stage. This ensures that the return on investment is as high as possible.

Inspect and adapt your product, processes and tools

It is absolutely essential to continually and rigorously inspect both the software being created and the way the team is working to create the software. We use agile processes to ensure that the team and client work together to improve on a continuous basis. The result is a high-performing team that is continuously improving, adapting to change and providing more and more value.

All of these ideas are supported by Agile and Lean and we are in a great position today where we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants who’ve discovered pragmatic solutions to the problems of software development.

We would love to hear your your point of view, what has worked for you in the past?

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This week we’ll be covering a range of topics related to quality:

• retrospectives and their influence on quality
• the done definition
• Agile software practices

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This week on The Board we’ll be talking about:

• Agile in China
• The Scaled Agile Framework
• Tooling

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The Board, Boost’s live, Agile show, is expanding it’s format to include more of what we like best… you.

We’re still beginning the show at 10:30am NZDT (4:30pm EDT), but now we’ll start streaming chat 10 minutes beforehand to allow you to interact and ask questions that will be presented to the hosts of The Board. We’ll keep our chat area open for the duration of the show, but this will allow you to contribute to the discussions in the show in advance.

The topic for tomorrow is: User stories

If you have any questions, thoughts, concerns or stories, please look for our streaming signal at:

10:20am NZDT – 20th of March 2013 | 4:20pm EDT – 19th March 2013

and share your thoughts with us.

Just go here and look for The Board – Episode 7

Thanks and talk to you tomorrow.

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We’ve put together a short video segment on one of the many learning games we play with people to help demonstrate the power of Scrum and Agile.

The Rope Game from Boost New Media on Vimeo.

We’ve also included the instructions for the game below.

If you are interested in using games to help your Scrum teams, we discuss the topic on our latest episode of The Board, The Board – Episode 6

—————–

The rope game

Time:

3 to 7 minutes

Materials

1. 6 to 10 people  –> to form the circle
2. 1 person to stand out of the group
3. 1 metre piece of rope, per person in the circle

How to play

PART 1

1. Ask one person to volunteer to be a “Project Manager” and step out of the team.
2. Have the team form a circle (facing in).
3. Give each team member a rope and ask them to hold it in their right hand and pass the other end to a person standing across from them.
4. Ask each person, in turn, to pass their ropes across in the same manner until everyone is holding two ropes.
5. Ask the Project Manager to direct the team so that it is untangled and standing side by side in a circle.

PART 2

1. Get the team to form a circle again
2. Ask them to repeat handing across the ropes to re-tangle themselves.
3. This time, ask the Project Manager to simply observe and not say anything
4. Ask the team to untangle itself (typically takes between 20 to 40 seconds)

Learning

This exercise demonstrates the power of a team’s ability to solve complex problems when they collaborate. It resonates with Scrum in that you encourage the team to be self organising to get the full benefit of their abilities.

If you try the game, please let us know how it went in the comments below!

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• The tiny Scrum
• Explaining an Agile Coach to Mother
• Scrummaker: the customer validation process
• Scrummaker, or, building a new Agile product in two days
• Business Analysts and Scrum projects: A short case study