What counts as Velocity?
Recently we encountered a large-enough issue that required a postmortem (like a retro). One of the teams involved asked if they should put that into the sprint and give it points (ie. size it). This reminded me of a debate we encountered in our earliest days of implementing Agile. One side insists that we only point planned stories that provide immediate, direct business value to the company. Therefore, things like defects, chores, and meetings should not get points assigned. The reasoning here is that these activities are typically not included because they may occur without consistency and predictability across iterations;…
SendGrid’s history with Agile
I thought I’d highlight the milestones SendGrid has had in our Agile journey. Ground Zero When I started at SendGrid in May 2011, the organization was on the verge of adopting Agile and Rally’s agile software solution. In other words, the decision to move to Agile had been made prior to my start. (In fact, it was a key selling point used to get me to join SG.) The company was barely 18 months old, still a start up and had an Engineering staff of 10-15, tops. Hired as the first project manager and Agile coach, I was responsible for putting…
Now with more Meetups
Introducing the newest meetup: Agile Coffee – OC. I’ve been meaning to start this group since Stuart & I went up to San Fran for the SF Agile conference last May. There we met Jim Benson (Personal Kanban) and were introduced to Lean Coffee as a forum for discussing Lean, Kanban, Agile, limiting WIP, visualizing workflow, and just about anything else. A self-organized pull-system of learning / sharing. (Jim helped create Seattle Lean Coffee and has run it at dozens of conferences before the SF Agile event.) So that’s the goal here, in Orange County, is to get us together and start forming…
notes from retro: reducing distractions
By our Agile cadence at SendGrid, team retrospectives (and demos) fall every other Tuesday. Today one of my teams is coming up with a focused set of actions to try to solve the problem of distractions / context-switching. This team deals with many of our system-critical services (mail processing and delivery), so it’s staffed with really smart folks. (Well, really smart folks are on all our teams, but the features these folks work on receive a bit more attention than others.) They get interrupted often with everything from questions about our daemons and architecture to brain-teaser solutions and lego designs. Distractions are…
new year, new projects – a fresh start
With the new year comes a fresh new crop of initiatives targeted for the upcoming twelve months. And those initiatives ain’t gonna drive themselves to completion. This is where the project manager / scrummaster steps in resolutely and takes control. First, the tech leads of each team get together with the SMs and POs and hold a very important conversation: yearly scoping (aka commitments). The POs & product staff define the initiatives in broad strokes, then the tech leads discuss with each other what it takes to get these projects done. Slowly a list of Ins and a list of Outs begin to take…
Hello coffee!
Agile coffee, indeed. I’ve had no fewer than three cups today. Resolutions for 2013: no more discussing coffee, today make most of Mike Cohn’s day with us talk through my retrospectives at SendGrid get out into the community talking about agile principles OHIO – only hit it once! That’s what’s brewing. Let’s make 2013 our best!