32. Scrum Day San Diego 2015
Victor (@AgileCoffee) participated in Scrum Day San Diego and interviewed a number of participants, including the winners of the Agile San Diego usergroup’s annual Agile Awards. Congratulations to Joe Dailey (winner of the Agilist of the Year, 2014) and to ID Analytics (recipient of the 2014 Agile San Diego Team Excellence Award). Also Dr. Dave Cornelius (@DrCorneliusInfo) and his son, Dave, accepted a gift on behalf of the 5Saturdays initiative which introduces Scrum to high school students. Over 100 Scrum enthusiasts gathered on June 12th, 2015 in San Diego County to advance their understanding on how to launch Agile projects successfully.…
What is a ScrumMaster?
In addition to our regular podcasts, I host a couple lean coffee meetups every month where we get people dropping in who are less experienced yet very curious about Agile methodologies and lean principles. One common theme at these in-person sessions centers around the role of a ScrumMaster, and it’s a topic that engages us old-timers just as much. Many of us have been serving as ScrumMaster of our teams, but the job description changes for every workplace and every team. For this reason, I trust the responses from my peers; still, we’re often left with more questions than “correct” answers.…
The Pair-Coaching Domino Game
Back in March I led a pair coaching workshop at Scrum Day Orange County 2015. My goal with the session was to examine a few pair-coaching roles, share a list of competency areas for Scrum Masters, and use dominoes to demonstrate viable situations where pairing will help the coach, her team, or the larger organization. (You may remember that I enjoy exploring this topic, and that I wrote about it earlier in the year. It seems that I’ll be talking about more this summer at the Scrum Alliance Coaching Retreat, possibly at the Agile Open SoCal and certainly at Agile SoCal in…
28. “Agile” Under the Microscope
Victor is joined by Dale Ellis (@theDigitalDale), Jason Kerney (@JasonKerney), Zach Bonaker (@ZachBonaker) and Garrett Borunda (LinkedIn) at the Cape Rey in Carlsbad for a lively morning of Agile and Coffee. In this episode, our Agile heroes discuss: Agile tools to give Voice to a Teams “Agile is a cancer” Erik Meijer’s presentation The Hacker Way – a Rational Alternative for Agile (explicit content) in which he claims that “Agile is a cancer that we have to eliminate from the industry” Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility) by Dave Thomas (manifesto signatory) The Failure of Agile by Andy Hunt (manifesto signatory) Shu Ha Ri by Alistair…
25. Agile Planning and User Story Mapping
Vic is joined by Brett Palmer (@brett_palmer) and Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Agile Planning – discussed WSJF and Donald Reinertsen’s book “The Principles of Product Development Flow” User Story Mapping Roles in pair-coaching Servant Leadership AgileGathering.com has the info about our upcoming Agile Coach Camp US West, April 10-12, 2015
24. How to Budget for Agile Software Development
Vic is joined by Brett Palmer (@brett_palmer), Jon Jorgensen (@waterscrumban) and Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Agile Budgeting – Larry lent his copy of Agile Estimating and Planning to his CEO. Will he get it back? The power of Standing for Agile – getting the team to arise Mike Lavery (@baconPhilosophy) asks about tips for moderating the initial Product Backlog meeting Framework Regression pain – when can a team create a circle of excellence? Initial product backlog mtgs are always the toughest with new teams. Are there best practices for moderating the meeting?#askAgileCoffee —…
23. We Discuss a Listener’s Topic!!
Vic is joined by Dale Ellis (@thedigitaldale), Dr. Dave Cornelius (@DrCorneliusInfo) and Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Agile Coach kits – what do you keep handy? Dale mentioned a handout by CarbonFive. He actually meant Lane Halley‘s Lean UX recipe cards. You can find them on Slideshare here and here. Your most memorable retrospective Story Mapping User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton “Why Documents Fail And What You Can Do About It” (video on YouTube) “Why are we still failing with agile?” @jasonlittle asks book: The Servant by James C Hunter why…
12. Three Amigos or the Dirty Dozen?
A fresh brew: Vic is joined by Jon Jorgensen (@waterScrumBan) and Brett Palmer (@Brett_Palmer) for another morning of Agile and Coffee. In this episode, our heroes discuss the following topics: pre-review of “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time”, Jeff Sutherland’s upcoming book from Crown Publishing. we’ll be holding a review of the book in an upcoming episode, including book giveaways – stay tuned how does this book relate to Joy, Drive Collaboration Explained and Tribal Leadership? Nerf Gun Economy inspiration from S.Bowman’s “Training from the Back of the Room” Brett recommends the video of Katie Brown,…
Capacity Planning worksheet for Scrum teams
[ UPDATE July 2016 – I no longer subscribe completely to the concept of capacity planning, at least to this level of detail. I will keep this post available, but I will not maintain the fancy spreadsheet 😉 It’s fun to geek out with numbers and formulas, but we could do better having meaningful conversations with our teams. ] The topic of Capacity Planning came up in a recent coffee, and I decided to introduce it to my new team. I just developed a spreadsheet (illustration below) that helps make visible the number of hours that each team member is…
presenting “Agile for Start-ups: SG’s History with Agile”
In November I presented at SoCal Code Camp (USC) on the topic of my company’s history with Agile (from start-up to 200+ employees and 160B emails). It was my first time to present this topic, and it was tailored for an audience without much Agile experience. (For those interested, here’s a link to the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/VictorBonacci/agile-for-startups-sendgrids-history-with-agile-2013-bonacci# (If you’re interested, you can also view the full hour-long presentation here: http://www.screencast.com/t/WNwufLDPh01) In December I presented the topic again, this time to a roomful of practitioners at Agile San Diego. The audience there gave terrific feedback, including questions such as: which metrics were introduced when? to what effect…