The Agile Pocket Guide E-Book

Peter Saddington

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 111

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Agile Pocket Guide explains how to develop products, services, and software quickly and efficiently, without losing the main components of the framework so effective in streamlining the creating of these products and for making positive change within a company. It includes * The basic tennets of the Scrum framework * How to apply the processes and steps required to become agile * The dynamics of a successful agile environment * The very basics of Scrum and how to employ them quickly * Practical questions to ask the Team Leader as well as the Team * How to build an environment of communication and collaboration for the entire organization

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

About the Author

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Team Tribes: A Story

Characters

Definitions

Meetings

Chapter 1: Servant Leadership

Chapter 2: What the Business Wants from You—Managing Requirements

Chapter 3: Your Agile Team

Chapter 4: The High-Performance Team

Chapter 5: Everyone around the Campfire

Chapter 6: Daily Stand-Up, or Daily Scrum

Chapter 7: Introducing the Product Owner, or Value Driver

Chapter 8: Discoveries from the Product Backlog

Chapter 9: The Sprint Backlog and Release Planning

Chapter 10: Sprint Planning Meeting

Chapter 11: User Stories and Estimation

Chapter 12: Timeboxed Sprints (Iterations) and the Meaning of Done

Chapter 13: Tracking Flow and Information Radiators

Chapter 14: Demonstration of the Product

Chapter 15: The Retrospective

Chapter 16: Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Win!

Chapter 17: Team and Business Cultural Dynamics—Team Science™

Example Case

Chapter 18: Scrum of Scrums

Example Case

Chapter 19: Thirty-Second Scrum Elevator Pitch

Example Case

chapter 20: Understanding Requirements

Example Case

Chapter 21: Paired Programming—Team Kaizen

Example Case

Chapter 22: Measuring a Working Product

Example Case

Chapter 23: Technical Debt Is a Progress Killer!

Example Case

Chapter 24: Oh Kanban!

Example Case

Chapter 25: Personal Kaizen—More on Servant Leadership

Chapter 26: Team Kaizen—Practicing Agile

Chapter 27: Product Kaizen—The Value Driver for Your Product

Chapter 28: Cultural Kaizen—Leadership in Dynamic Team Cultures

Chapter 29: Conclusion

Index

Cover image: © logorilla/iStockphoto

Cover design: Michael J. Freeland

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Saddington. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Saddington, Peter, 1982-

The Agile pocket guide : a quick start to making your business agile using Scrum and beyond / Peter Saddington.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-43825-1 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-118-46179-2 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-46179-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-46177-8 (ebk)

1. Agile software development. 2. Software engineering. 3. New products.

4. Production management. 5. Teams in the workplace. 6. Workflow. I. Title.

QA76.76.D47S22 2013

005.1—dc23

2012030655

About the Author

Peter Saddington is an experienced Business Transformation and Organizational Coach with Action & Influence, Inc., a research and analytics company that focuses on human dynamics and culture in enterprises. In his work as a software development consultant for 15 years, he supported enterprises such as ING DIRECT, Capital One, T-Mobile, Cisco, Yahoo!, J.Crew, InterContinental Hotels Group, Cbeyond, Primedia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Motorola, Samsung, and the United Nations.

Peter holds three masters degrees (in counseling, education, and divinity) and is Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). He has trained hundreds of students in better Agile and Scrum software development methods. He is also the author of Scrum Pocket Guide—A Quick Start Guide to Agile Software Development, published in 2010.

An avid writer, Peter is the executive editor of the popular AgileScout.com news blog, which reaches thousands of viewers per day all over the world. He also writes about team optimization and human capital on MyAI.org.

Peter resides in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, daughter, and son.

Preface

“You should write a book.”

My boss told me some years ago. At the time I was sending Agile updates to the team every week via e-mail (and I still do this in my consulting and coaching work) about better practices in business transformation, product and software development, and team optimization. These were subjects I knew from experience would help us develop more efficient methods than those we were already using as a team.

But when I began to think about actually writing this book, I was temporarily sidetracked. Was there really a need for yet another book about business transformation and software development, particularly Agile and Scrum software development? (In the 20 years or so since Scrum methodology was first used and called “Scrum” by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, a lot has been written on the subject!)

I've read many books by famous authors out there who help the community create better products, increase value across the enterprise, and grow businesses with start-up mentalities. Eric Ries, Scott Belsky, Geoff Smart and Randy Street, and Seth Godin are some of the more popular authors rising today who write about better product development. In terms of Agile software development, Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Ron Jeffries, and Ken Schwaber have been immensely helpful in my years as a trainer and coach in this field—for small and large businesses, nonprofits, and even government agencies.

This guide isn't meant to be part of those great pillars in the Agile and business community; rather, it will offer a unique perspective on what I've personally learned about paving the way to successful Agile cultures within businesses and development teams.

Through my experience of helping transform businesses and helping organizations implement Agile, I've discovered that in the relationship context, a team is more like a Tribe than anything else. It embodies all the positive and negative aspects of a Tribe, and, when encouraged correctly, this Tribe can become not only a high-performance Tribe but also one that can grow in efficiency and influence. It is absolutely crucial that we understand the unique culture and makeup of each Agile Team. I've always said that technology doesn't build great products and software. It's the people that make up a team: how they communicate, collaborate, deal with conflict, and work together successfully that reveals the potential in each individual and unleashes the productivity of teams. You have to know your people. You have to know how to engage and coach correctly and turn each person's potential into value.

Technology doesn't build great products and software, people do.

—Peter Saddington

I hope this book helps to clarify and improve the implementation of Agile through organizational change, especially by bringing personal involvement and ownership into the equation. My time will have been well spent if my reflections provide encouragement to any organization willing to embrace best practices in Agile product and software development, and if they can also shed light on the importance of culture within the team. While my personal touch and experience are apparent throughout the book, I do not depict every single applicable theory of Agile; that said, I do cover the main foundational elements of the Scrum framework. I've taken the liberty to format certain aspects of Scrum to best suit general situations. Some will agree; some will disagree. I welcome all feedback and please do e-mail me!

The chapters are not intended to be a hard-core prescription for how to implement Scrum in your organization; these suggestions can provide a framework in which to engage the team so that it can digest the information and own the responsibilities, all at a sufficient pace. Some teams are faster, and some are slower. Some corporate cultures have more red tape while others have less. It's all in how the Agile Leader wants to inform and educate the team about the positive changes necessary to become a high-performance tribe. Every chapter is pretty quick and to the point: each of the first 16 chapters includes a set of three questions meant to elicit the necessary feedback, from either you or your team, for implementing the ideas I discuss, while Chapters 17 through 24 end with examples of specific scenarios from my own experience as a coach and Agile Leader.

To make sense of this book, you should already be somewhat familiar with Agile principles or have spent some time online reviewing Agile and Scrum.

The quick review of the Agile Manifesto 1 represented by the following list shows priorities at work within the Agile framework:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Working software over comprehensive documentation.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Responding to change over following a plan.

The Agile philosophy simply asks you to work collaboratively as much as possible with your teams and clients to build products with quality, shipping early and often, while learning and relearning along the way.

Some principles behind the Agile Manifesto include:

The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through continuous delivery of valuable software.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Welcome changing requirements.

Motivated business people and developers work together throughout the project with face-to-face interactions.

The team has a commitment to technical excellence at all times.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective.

You can find more information at www.agilemanifesto.org.

The following list provides a quick summary of Scrum basics:

Scrum is not an acronym but rather a strategy in the game of rugby for getting an out-of-play ball back into play quickly and efficiently.

In the Scrum approach, the team works together as a whole to focus on business priorities in a “time box,” that is to say, releases composed of many short sprints with an incremental improvement of the software after each deployment.

Scrum includes three main roles: Product Owners, who set the priorities of the software product; the Team, whose members build the product; and a ScrumMaster or Project Leader, who oversees the process and removes impediments to success.

Scrum is a transparent process based on self-organizing teams that break the workload down into pieces or iterations.

Scrum iterative development is a continual process of evaluation, planning, setting requirements, analysis and design, implementation (deployment of code), and testing.

You can find more information, presentations, and white papers on my website at www.agilescout.com. All material is copyrighted by its respective author. For more information on the basic tenants of Scrum, please visit www.scrum.org.

My best wishes to all those out there willing to employ Agile principles. Let me know how things are going on Twitter (@agilescout) or e-mail me at [email protected]. I'm always willing to share information and discuss issues.

Best, Peter Saddington – Mdiv, CST

1Agile Manifesto. Agilemanifesto.org.

Acknowledgments

A great many thanks to everyone who has helped me learn better practices in business transformation and Agile product development. This book is dedicated to those who have been with me through years of success and failure. It is also dedicated to my mentors who were willing to teach me, coach me, and give me the chance to provide organizational change and positive improvement to their businesses.

I would also like to thank my parents for always supporting me. You two are truly my heroes!

Thanks to my wife, who lets me reach for my dreams, and to my little girl, who keeps me smiling.

Thanks to John, who has never been impressed with me and has always pushed me to excellence.

Introduction

Team Tribes: A Story