From her early start with Extreme Programming to learning how to integrate testing with Continous Delivery, we explore Leena’s story and describe some of the most important lessons she collected about adopting CD/CI.
Read on to learn what were Leena’s main lessons, as well as the main challenges teams face when adopting CD/CI.
Continue reading BONUS: Leena N interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 7
Wouter started his Continuous Delivery journey as an Extreme Programmer in his first years of engineering experience. He shares the story of how, as a team, they sat together with the operations department to learn how they developed their software. Thanks to that, they radically changed their build system to export the kind of packages that operations needed. A brilliant story that also illustrates the adage: “Your first customer is the next step in the process!”
Read more to learn why testing is such a key skill and technical area when adopting Continuous Delivery.
Continue reading BONUS: Wouter Lagerweij interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 5
Chris started her Continuous Delivery in a small agency, nurturing a build server that nobody cared for. That gave her an insight that is not very common: taking care of the build server was a very practical way to help and care for the team’s success. It was a practical tool that the team needed, but no one was looking after. It was a concrete way to help people.
Read more to find out how trust plays a key role in Continuous Delivery adoption, and to read Chris’ recipe to get your team started with CD.
Continue reading BONUS: Chris O’Dell interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 5
How do we get started with Continuous Delivery? Manuel suggests that we run a Value Stream Mapping session with all the teams involved in the release process to learn about the “current state” of the release process.
We also review the most common challenges and blocks for teams that are starting to adopt Continuous Delivery.
Read on to learn about the different motivations businesses have to adopt Continuous Delivery, and Manuel’s 3 steps from bi-weekly release to Continuous Delivery.
Continue reading BONUS: Manuel Pais interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 4
Morten’s adoption story starts with a team at eBay Denmark. The team had started working in a more continuous mode, but there was a lot of “release friction” as Morten calls it. You are probably familiar with that friction: it takes a long time to release; the site needed to be “closed” for every release; the team would need to come in at night during the weekend, etc.
That’s the reality for many teams. No surprise they prefer to release less often. In this segment, we explore that story, and also the steps the team took to go from “high friction” to “no friction”.
Read more to find out how Dev and Ops are different and why that matters when adopting Continous Delivery.
Continue reading BONUS: Morten Herman interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 3
When Thierry got started, the team had troubles with version control, so he helped the team “commit to trunk”, and after that, it was much easier to adopt continuous integration. The build server quickly evolved into a continuous build pipeline. From there it was a small step to continuous delivery.
Although not all stories are this easy for teams adopting CD, this story provides a striking example of how things that are “hard” for some teams, just become the “natural way” of working for others. What’s preventing your team from working this way?
Read more to find what was Thierry’s most painful lesson about Continous Delivery adoption as well as all the resources he recommends for those wanting to dive deeper into the topic.
Continue reading BONUS: Thierry de Pauw interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 2
We talk about testing strategy; business benefits of Continuous Delivery; main challenges when adopting Continuous Delivery and resources to help you and your team get started.
Dave got started with Continuous Delivery in a project that sounds pretty much like any large project that is struggling. There were 200 people working on the project, the tests were written after the code, which inevitably led to a nightmare of brittle tests, high coupling between test code and implementation code.
Dave got interested in Extreme Programming and things started changing.
Read on to get access to all the resources Dave lists in the podcast.’
Continue reading BONUS: Dave Farley interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 1
What is Business Agility? In a time where it seems that every company wants to adopt Agile, there’s also the dark side of Agile: the belief that it only affects “people in the IT department”. That could not be further from the truth.
In this episode, we have Evan Leybourn sharing what Business Agility is about, and why it matters for your organization.
Continue reading BONUS: Business Agility, what it is and how to achieve it with Evan Leybourn
Diana and I were kicking around a few topics for this episode, and we ended up selecting “Agile and Leadership, friends or foes?” The idea is to talk about how Agile and Leadership play together (or not)
In this episode, we talk with Diana Larsen and Jutta Eckstein about what problems Leaders try to fix with Agile, what challenges they have when they try to adopt Agile, and we will do this with the focus on the Scrum Master role, and what they can do by working with the leaders of the organizations they work within.
Let’s start by defining some of the major challenges we see happening out there.
Some of the challenges we mention in this episode are not new. You are probably familiar with many of them. We talk about how Agile requires us to think about leadership as a distributed responsibility that team members need to take on, which is itself a major challenge for Scrum Masters as they help their teams understand what that means in practice.
We also discuss how important it is to understand that leadership is not simply a “role”, but also something we need to earn, including Scrum Masters.
Finally, we talk about the important role that leaders play for the teams they work with. Specifically in setting the direction that helps the teams adopt quicker processes like Hypothesis-Driven-Development, for example.
We then discuss how Scrum Masters can understand, and learn to cope with these challenges. Not surprisingly, Agile Retrospectives come up as a critical tool for Scrum Masters to use when working with teams and their leaders.
Regarding collaboration with leaders, we discuss how Scrum Masters can help teams focus on the right goals, which need to be defined in cooperation with leaders in the organization.
But there’s a second tool we discuss that complements perfectly the work we do with the retrospectives and helps the teams and leaders understand where they can contribute the most: visualization as a way to establish a shared context.
Stop me if you have heard this one before. Way back when I was taught that Scrum Masters need to protect the team from interference. Although it made sense to me at the time, with the passing of time, and after collecting more than a decade of experience, I have come to value a different approach.
In this segment, we talk about the need (or not) to protect the team from Leadership interference.
The goal, of course, is to generate a real collaboration between the team and the leaders in the organization.
Given that leadership, and the collaboration between teams and leaders is a critical topic for Scrum Masters, we discuss some of the resources (books, podcasts, articles) we’ve found useful and informative on how to tackle that collaboration.
Here are the resources we mention:
How about you? What have been your major challenges when working with leaders in your organization? Leave a comment below and share the tools/books/podcasts you’ve found useful.
About Diana Larsen and Jutta Eckstein
Diana Larsen co-founded and collaborates in leadership of Agile Fluency™ Project. Diana co-authored the books Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams; Five Rules for Accelerated Learning; and the seminal “Agile Fluency Model: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile” article.
You can link with Diana Larsen on LinkedIn and connect with Diana Larsen on Twitter.
Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach & consultant.
As a developer, she started with XP in 97/98, started scaling agile in 2001 (and published about that in 2004), and am now Jutta focuses on company-wide agility.
You can link with Jutta Eckstein on LinkedIn and connect with Jutta Eckstein on Twitter.
You can learn more at Jutta Eckstein’s website, and check out Jutta’s books on Amazon and LeanPub.
In this BONUS episode, Tom Henricksen, the host of the Agile Online Summit presents this unique Agile conference that you can attend from home.
The Agile Online Summit has been on since 2017, and is now in its third edition. From 500 participants in its first year, the AOS 19 will have 3000+ attendees from all over the world, and when you look at the list of speakers, it’s easy to understand why. AOS 19 will have, among others:
This session packed conference will take place online from October 7th to 11th. Beyond the recorded sessions that will be accessible in those dates, there will also be live sessions organized to help you ask direct questions from the participants as well as interact with your fellow conference attendees.
For more details stay tuned to the Agile Online Summit website, where all the sessions are described, and where the information about upcoming live sessions will be added.
As any IRL (in-real-life) conference, Agile Online Summit is a networking opportunity, which will help you get to know the speakers as well as other participants. There will be a slack channel available for all who sign-up at this link (NOTE: DISCOUNTED VIP TICKET for Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast fans).
The Slack channel will be the preferred community hang-out area with channels for you to interact with participants from all over the world, but there will also be live sessions where you can ask questions directly from the speakers. Sign-up for the conference to know when those sessions take place (NOTE: Tickets are FREE for live attendance, purchase the VIP ticket for life-time access to the talks).
About Tom Henricksen
Tom Henricksen is a technical professional and coach. After working for many years as a developer, Scrum Master, and manager he has made a lot of mistakes and wants to help others achieve their goals. Tom has a passion for sharing wisdom with other agilists.
Tom is the founder and host of the Agile Online Summit.
You can link with Tom Henricksen on LinkedIn and connect with Tom Henricksen on Twitter.
You can find Tom Henricksen’s website at MyITCareerCoach.com.
