Agile

A cold and gray day in Zurich with @PragDave and friends at #AUZH25. Another great Agile Unconference organized by the amazing #AUZH team. Dave Thomas opened the day with a reminder that we should “break things, but not hurt anybody”, which really resonated with me as we continue to experiment and improve the way we work. The breakout sessions were full of great conversations, on topics like team empowerment. How many people really want to take ownership, versus just taking a paycheck? And how do we keep organizations from drifting back toward heavy processes? ...

Jeff Bezos at amazon publicised the idea of one-way and two-way doors. One-way doors are said to be the decisions you cannot undo once made, whereas Two-way doors represent the reversible decisions. If something is a two-way door then there is little point spending a lot of time debating the decision. Try it out and see what happens. But if you are unable to reverse a decisions, then you want to spend more time to make sure you are doing the right thing.

It’s not every day you meet one of your heroes!

Always great to get a shout-out from the Agile For Humans guys, Ryan and Todd. Sad to hear that after almost 500 episodes Your Daily Scrum has run its course, it really was a great series becoming part of my evening routine. As mentioned in the video, I truly believe that this helped me through many scrum.org exams. I’m looking forward to all the new things you’ll be sharing!

Scrum is a timeboxed framework. We have sprints of fixed length (i.e. two weeks) and during the Sprint Planning event the team decides what will be completed during this time. If additional work comes up it would ideally be put into the product backlog and pulled into a future sprint once prioritized by the product owner, and given the team’s capacity for this work. However, it is not uncommon that we have requests which cannot be delayed until future sprints (i.e. 3rd level/production support). I will describe an approach on how these can be dealt with below. ...

This afternoon, Wednesday 18th November, the latest version of the Scrum Guide1 has been released. The first update in over three years and there are quite a few changes. Scrum Inc. ran a 3-hour Zoom call2 to introduce the new guide, and here are a few of my takeaways from that call. The first thing is that the guide has been reduced from 18 pages to 13. There were a lot of unclear descriptions around Product Backlog Items, Retro Items and Sprint cancellations that have all gone. This reduction appears to be an attempt to open up Scrum to a wider audience, not just IT projects, which was JJ Sutherland’s reiterated in his takeaway. ...