Agile Thinking

Agile Thinking : How Can I Help You ?

One of the key values of Agile is its focus on delivering working software or solution. This approach is the key catalyst of some behavioural, cultural, and structural changes.

The team members contribute to delivering working solution but their individual goals on their own don’t help the user much. For instance, just the UI part of a user-story is of no use to a user. If developers just focus on building the solution but not on the quality aspect, again it doesn’t result into product ready increment.

Essentially cross-functional team members have to collaborate and help each other to deliver the Sprint goal.
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Agile Thinking: Continuous Improvement – ScrumMaster 1.0 to 2.0

by Avienaash Shiralige 7 Comments

Readers, Our “Agile Thinking” series is focussed on bringing agility into our thinking as this helps in moving from Doing-Agile to Being-Agile. You can read our earlier article in this series Agile Thinking: Stop Starting, Start Finishing.

This post talks about continuous improvement and obviously this can be applied everywhere irrespective of it is a process, practice or a role. From my recent experience, I would like to share today, how ScrumMater (SM) role evolved in some of the companies.

In many organizations, ScrumMaster role is defined something similar to what is shown below. For conversation sake let’s call it as SM 1.0 (see pic below)

In service industry projects, SM’s playing the role by book (SM 1.0) and expecting Product Owner(PO) from the client side to write stories, acceptance criteria and prioritization did not work due to some of the reasons stated below.

Agile Thinking : Stop Starting, Start Finishing

by ShriKant Vashishtha 13 Comments

Limiting “Work in Process” (WIP) items is one of key ideas of Kanban. A natural outcome of it, inherently coming from Lean philosophy is to stop starting and start finishing.

By having too many work in process items, it looks like everybody is busy but there is no functional outcome for the end user. So, instead, it’s important to work towards completing the user-story.

From the outset it looks like, “Stop starting, start finishing” philosophy is limited to Lean and Kanban world. Scrum world is either doing it well or doesn’t need it. Right?

Wrong!!!

Let’s take a look at a typical Scrum standup.