Due to an unfortunate mistake on my part the RSS feed hasn’t been updating correctly since the beginning of November. You should now see 7 posts that you missed in that time.

The team are holding a daily standup mid-sprint. During the meeting Tonia the world’s best tester answers the obstacles question by saying: “The test server is down for the third time this week and I will spend the day writing new test cases.” Meanwhile Doug doesn’t raise any impediments but notes that he has spent his third day trying to write Unit Tests for a previously completed class (Ed: The team doesn’t know about Test Driven Development yet). This task was originally estimated to take one day. Read More…

This question often comes up. Usually because a team has become bored with their retrospectives. I suggest you don’t use the same style or format more three times running. The question came up again today with a person saying that their team was doing well and had achieved a steady state. To my mind steady state isn’t the point of Scrum. Scrum is a tool to help you be the best in your industry. Scrum should be a tool you use to disrupt an industry. To that end the next time you tell me that I hear that you’re team is a good as it gets my reply will be: “Ask the team what it would take for them to be the best in their industry, worthy of a case study on Infoq or a major conference presentation. Everything between the team and that case study is an impediment. Go forth and remove the impediments”. Read More…

Organizational Neuroscience: Taking Organizational Theory Inside the Neural Black Box is both the most significant and also most complex article I’ve read this month. Its a survey of key findings from the realm of neuroscience that the authors feel will be relevant to “Organizational Researchers”. Unfortunately being a research paper I find the language very stilted but it was still worth the effort.

• Implicit Attitudes: attitudes we hold that we’re not aware of – sometimes ones that are in contradiction to our explicit attitudes. Furthermore Strong Implicit attitudes are quick formed and once formed are hard to change. I’m guessing that these are part of why effective organizational change is so hard.
• Unfairness – being treated unfairly will often provoke a emotional reactions that trump monetary/economic self interest.
• Empathy with respect to fairness – when we see others experiencing pain we feel an echo of the pain ourselves. When it comes to unfairness we take a personal interest in the treatment of others.
• In many cases rationalization is an afterthought our brain uses to explain how it reached a conclusion. In reality our brains perceive a much smaller amount than we think we do. As a result we interpolate. Read More…

Last week at Agile Tour Toronto I had the privilege of working with my friend Paul Heidema to help introduce the basic concepts of Scrum in 60 minutes. This is a really interesting challenge, what’s the minimum amount you can teach people and still give them a taste of Scrum. In end we opted for about ~10 minutes of talking heads (spread throughout), ~30 minutes of simulation time and 15 minutes of debrief.

We invited our teams to create Children’s Books of the Goldilocks story. Along with the basic Story participants were asked to offer advertising, public service announcements etc.

Comments from participants:

• A number said it was surprising how well teams of complete strangers came together after two sprints.
• Several didn’t like the way I set them up for a mini “failure” by not playing the Product Owner role poorly and not communicating my needs. This is a fair point however it does simulate life with a real product owner

Feel free to use this simple simulation to help teach the very basic concepts of Scrum.