Who is agile : a review.

I suprised myself last night in the reaction that I had to this book. I wasn't sure what to expect from the book but I'd seen a couple of tweets about it. So I fired up leanpub, chose my price and downloaded.

I loaded the pdf and flicked through the first few pages, skimming the contents, and reading a few further pages. The format is a standard set of questions, an extra question and a recommendation of who to interview. I flicked through the first interview with Lisa Crispin which was painless, relatively interesting,  but the questions were uninspiring (I'm guessing a generic questionairre is difficult to 'jazz up').

I then looked at the names down the list and thought about the format and felt little bit angry. Is this book an intropection of the circle that the authors know? What does it give to anyone else? What about all the people this book doesn't cover? Are they not agile?

So I have some reserverations. I had kind of thought this book would be a guide of how to be agile. I was wrong. Fortunately, so far, it's not so bad.

I probably know of, read, and respect 10ish of the 30 odd in the book. Some of the interviews I've read are fairly intesting but the power this book are the links that people mention. I've spent the last hour getting lost in the technical/agile and non technical books. The interviews are all light reading too. Something you can, by its nature pick up, read one and leave for a few weeks.

What I was pleased about was the communites section at the back. There's a ton of interesting information and ideas about things you can do in your community some stuff I hope to bring.

What I must remember is that this is a work in progress and it can be regenerated on demand. If agile is your thing or you are wondering if its more that just scrum & TDD then I'd certainly recommend you pick this up. If you are looking for another agile manual, there are better suited texts.

Looking forward to the updates and following the links.

Sprint retrospective: INVEST in good stories.

The column to the right of the 6 cards is 'done'

I've just come back from a sprint's worth of holiday and so unfortunately have not been able to be in work during the sprint. We set a fairly low and what I thought was an achievable target.

However on my return I've see a lot of cards in the 'almost done' column. This was not the new beginning I had hoped for.

In the retrospective, the team explain that the blue cards were all dependent on all the cards being done.

The green cards were started by branching off the blue and therefore were dependent too. Nothing could go out. There's an acronym that can help here, INVEST. Stories should be Independent, Negotatiable, Valueable, Estimatable and Testable. Because the project is a rewrite and we have made breaking changes the cards had to go out together. We have decided to consider more the impact of doing this in the future.

Process meltdown.

After our process meltdown. We've decided to dust ourselves down and try again. What I think we've done is retrospect ourselves into a corner. We used retrospectives to remove the barriers to our productivity but by reducing some of the ceremony somehow we have removed all structure. This combined with a change in personnel and the disruption of the Christmas period has resulted in a development process that is best described as sluggish anarchy.

Rushing Shu, Ha, Ri

We've decided to re-adopt scrum again. Why? I feel we started to run before we could walk. There is a phrase that has been picked up by the agile community, Shu, Ha, Ri. This phrase borrowed from Akido shows different stages of learning.

In the phase of Shu, the person tries to abide by the rules. She tries to learn all the principles and informations by heart. But she can't abide by all the rules while she is doing the practice. Her body(including her brain) starts to remember them bit by bit through repetitious practices. When the time comes she can internalize and abide by all the rules -- when Shu is achieved, Shu phase is finished and she enters into Ha phase.
In the phase of Ha, she tries to break the (old) rules. She tries to self-reflect on herself and her knowledge, and come up with anti-theses such as exceptions of the rules in the real world. But she can't break all the old rules while she is doing the practice. Her rules start to get more complete(or becomes more like "case-by-case") as the rules encompass exceptions bit by bit. When the time comes she can break all the rules and see the both sides of every rule (maybe substituting with a set of her own rules) -- when Ha is achieved, Ha phase is finished and she enters into Ri phase.
In the phase of Ri, she tries to leave the rules. She tries to get free from all the rules, and get into the state of no distinction, or into a new dimension. But she can't leave all the rules while she is doing the practice. Her body starts to forget them bit by bit through following natural laws and flows (or Tao). When the time comes she can leave all the rules -- when Ri is achieved, Ri phase is finished and she enters into a new dimension of Shu.

We feel that we tried to enter the Ha stage before mastering the Shu.

Learning to fail habitually

The one thing I don't like about scrum is it is a framework for exposing failure. This can be used as a positive but after a number of failed sprints your team can become demotivated. We kept on over committing on story points per iteration and rather than reduce we tried to combat low velocity by removing impediments. This became habitual. We were learning to accept loss as a norm.

Process rebirth

So today we've started the sprint with a much smaller number of points. The idea behind this is that we can achieve the goal. Hopefully this will make us feel better about the process and motivated to continue.