Demo – Lean Agile Guru

Mar

25

2019

Nothing to Demo?

Demo, Horizontally Sliced Story, Story, Vertically Sliced Story

Nothing to demo at the end of the Sprint? Was there a story of value that was created in your Sprint? If yes, then go demo that! If not, then you might just be blowing smoke (i.e. you are claiming that you are working and completing stories of demonstrable value but there is no evidence (a demo) to support that claim!) Might be that your stories were actually tasks... a symptom that you were unsuccessful in shifting your mindset from thinking in terms of task (Work Breakdown Schedule of tasks) to thinking in terms of value (Roadmap of values)! Or...you…

On-track or Off-Track? Part II

Cadence, Demo, empiricism, inspect and adapt, OKR and CFR, Positive Intent, Product Owner, Releasability, Retrospective, roadmap, Show and tell, Show me the money, small batches, Sprint Review

One might ask the following: "Why bother checking? We "know" that we are on track already!" "Can we just keep working and deliver the work when we are done?" "Can we just tell you what tasks we did and have completed?" "May we provide you a PowerPoint deck, screenshots, metric, list of lessons learned from our Spikes, some documentation and toll gate decks?" Good questions! Think about those questions for a few minutes. The thing is, a few errors accumulated everyday/ every sprint/iteration... unchecked... for a whole program increment (PI) spells disaster. Does it make sense to show the incremental…

What is the Heart of Scrum?

Demo, Heart of Scrum, inspect and adapt, Scrum

"The heart of Scrum is assessing the condition of activities and empirically determining what to do next." -- Ken Schwaber, Inventor of Scrum (with Jeff Sutherland) Empiricism: Transparency, Inspection, Adaptation. Determination of what to do next arises from what's openly observed and inspected, from experience, training, and common sense (sometimes it is not common at all). We adapt to the situation based on these information...empirically determining what to do next. Example: Demo. The beauty of a demo -- within a sprint/iteration, program increment, or large solution -- is this: it allows one to observe and experience what has been created…