The waterfall methodology for software development is rapidly losing popularity, while the Agile methodology is increasingly used for software development by companies around the world.

“concretizzazione” dei principi dell’Agile nelle due metodologie più diffuse, ovvero Scrum e Kanban, esplorandone le principali differenze.

All too often a Sprint Review is nothing more than a team saying they did a bunch of stuff with no actual feedback happening. The same can be said of Retrospectives, where the team produces many stickies, but no change manifests. The Daily Scrum Is a daily feedback mechanism, but all too often reduced to merely a task status update.

Bring up the board that shows the status of every item the team is working on.Starting in the right-most column, get an update for each ticket in the column.Be sure to ask: “What’s needed to move this ticket to the next stage of progress?”Highlight blockers that people bring up and define what’s needed to unblock work.Move to the next column to the left and get updates for each ticket in that column.Continue until you get to the left-most column.

More people brings more status updates.More updates mean more information that others won’t care about.The team may be working on multiple projects at once.If the team has customers, ad-hoc work will regularly come up.

I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my jobPeople zone out when a teammate starts talking about how they worked on something that doesn’t affect me.It’s finally my turn to give an update. No one is listening except for the facilitator.We go over our time and end when the next team starts lurking outside the room.

What did I complete yesterday that contributed to the team?What do I plan to complete today to contribute to the team?What impediments do I see that prevent me or the team from achieving its goals?

As facilitators, scrum masters act as coaches to the rest of the team. “Servant leaders” as the Scrum Guide puts it. Good scrum masters are committed to the scrum foundation and values, but remain flexible and open to opportunities for the team to improve their workflow.

Scrum-Based Learning Environment: Fostering Self-Regulated Learning.

An Agile Framework for Teaching with Scrum in the IT Project Management Classroom

Spikes Spikes are a type of exploration Enabler Story in SAFe. Defined initially in Extreme Programming (XP), they represent activities such as research, design, investigation, exploration, and prototyping. Their purpose is to gain the knowledge necessary to reduce the risk of a technical approach, better understand a requirement, or increase the reliability of a story estimate. Like other stories, spikes are estimated and then demonstrated at the end of the Iteration. They also provide an agreed upon protocol and workflow that Agile Release Trains (ARTs) use to help determine the viability of Epics. Details Agile and Lean value facts over speculation. When faced with a question, risk, or uncertainty, Agile Teams conduct small experiments before moving to implementation, rather than speculate about the outcome or jump to a Solution. Teams may use spikes in a variety of situations: Estimate new Features and Capabilities to analyze the implied behavior, providing insight about the approach for splitting them into smaller, quantifiable pieces Perform feasibility analysis and other activities that help determine the viability of epics Conduct basic research to familiarize them with a new technology or domain Gain confidence in a technical or functional approach, reducing risk and uncertainty Spikes involve creating a small program, research activity, or test that demonstrates some aspect of new functionality. Technical and Functional Spikes Spikes primarily come in two forms: technical and functional. Functional spikes – They are used to analyze overall solution behavior and determine: How to break it down How to organize the work Where risk and complexity exist How to use insights to influence implementation decisions Technical spikes – They are used to research various approaches in the solution domain. For example: Determine a build-versus-buy decision Evaluate the potential performance or load impact of a new user story Evaluate specific technical implementation approaches Develop confidence about the desired solution path Some features and user stories may require both types of spikes. Here’s an example: “As a consumer, I want to see my daily energy use in a histogram so that I can quickly understand my past, current, and projected energy consumption.” In this case, a team might create both types of spikes: A technical spike to research how long it takes to update a customer display to current usage, determining communication requirements, bandwidth, and whether to push or pull the data A functional spike – Prototype a histogram in the web portal and get some user feedback on presentation size, style, and charting Guidelines for Spikes Since spikes do not directly deliver user value, use them sparingly. The following guidelines apply. Quantifiable, Demonstrable, and Acceptable Like other stories, spikes are put in the Team Backlog, estimated, and sized to fit in an iteration. Spike results are different from a story because spikes typically produce information rather than working code. They should develop only the necessary data to identify and size the stories that drive it confidently. The output of a spike is demonstrable, both to the team and to any other stakeholders, which brings visibility to the research and architectural efforts, and also helps build collective ownership and shared responsibility for decision-making. The Product Owner accepts spikes that have been demoed and meet its acceptance criteria. Timing of Spikes Since they represent uncertainty in one or more potential stories, planning for both the spike and the resulting stories in the same iteration is sometimes risky. However, if it’s small and straightforward, and a quick solution is likely to be found, then it can be quite efficient to do both in the same iteration. The Exception, Not the Rule Every user story has uncertainty and risk; that’s the nature of Agile development. The team discovers the right solution through discussion, collaboration, experimentation, and negotiation. Thus, in one sense, every user story contains spike-like activities to identify the technical and functional risks. The goal of an Agile team is to learn how to address uncertainty in each iteration. Spikes are critical when high uncertainty exist, or there are many unknowns.  

Kanban vs. Scrumban

People-centric means that you will allocate specific people to focus primarily on the maintenance tasks,

Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent. We live in these boxes, as pervasive as oxygen, and as inflexible as punched cards.