When we try to understand the product owner role on a Scrum team, remember that the product owner defines ‘what’ the team will develop. Product Owner Role in a Nutshell The Scrum Guide The excerpt below describing the product owner role is from the November 2017 Scrum Guide: The Product Owner is responsible for...
Category: <span>Implementation</span>
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March Presentation on Agile Transformation with LeSS (Large Scale Scrum)
The March AgileSoCal User Group‘s presentation will be on Zodiac Inflight Innovations’ agile transformation with LeSS. Adoption pitfalls, great insights & lessons learned from their Product Owner Mike Winston. This is a preview of their talk at Scrum Alliance‘s national Scrum Gathering in Minneapolis. Product Managers might want to check it out! Zodiac’s agile journey began before I was involved....
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The Time to Fix Your Code Will Never Come
It’s a strong statement, but I have not yet seen that developers are “given” the time to fix the cause of problems. These problems can be post-release surprises, hard-coded values that multiply change efforts (and risk), manual configuration, testing and deployment, duplicate logic and logic spread across many areas of the system, multiple languages (due...
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You’re as Agile as Your Code Base
Problems I see fairly regularly are tied to the code base and development team practices. You might have a Lousy Code Base if… Scrum calls for building a potentially shippable product increment every sprint, but if team members (and worse, teams) integrate late in the sprint, it’s going to be problematic. “What’s QA doing the...
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Stories of Agile Change from Companies Succeeding with Agile
Our Agile Leadership Summit is coming up, and we are excited about the sessions. In our classes, a common request is real stories of change and succeeding with agile. We have two leaders from local companies part-way through their agile journey. Colleen Kirtland is a Director of QA at Pacific Life, and found success with...
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Scrum Mastery Series
Check out our recorded interview with Crisp’s Joakim Sunden. Former Spotify Agile course and trainer.
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6 Similarities Between SAFe and LeSS
Although there are significant differences in how change is approached, here are some similarities between SAFe and LeSS, aka, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). Similarities Between SAFe and LeSS Both SAFe and LeSS address organizing multiple teams in an agile work environment (stating the obvious here, perhaps, but just to be...
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Getting Married, Acting Single – Agile Adoption Without Organizational Change
I’m warning you, this is a long one… I just had yet another meeting with executives in the middle of an agile adoption who felt their project managers were fighting for their individual PM projects (and PM’s were compensated to do so), but the execs knew that the individual projects weren’t equally important. Worse for their strategy, the PM’s...
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Large Scale Scrum LeSS as Advanced Scrum Master
Large Scale Scrum LeSS as Advanced Scrum Master After spending a bit of time going through the newest (and simplest) LeSS book (Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS), participating in Craig Larman’s Certified LeSS Practitioner workshop, and now applying its principles and guides with companies adopting Scrum (or more accurately, trying again at an agile transformation), I’d like...