impact mapping Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Gurucharan Padki: The many anti-patterns that emerge when we focus on story points and velocity

The team Guru was working with was asked to “be more productive” and to “burn more story points”. That request led to a big anti-pattern, as the team was only concerned with the numbers after that point. In this episode, we discuss the many anti-patterns that emerge when teams are asked to focus on “the numbers”, instead of the quality and impact of their work.

In this segment, we refer to SDLC, aka Software Development Lifecycle, and the Shift-left movement approach in software development.

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland, Guru found an inspiring book that explains how, and where Scrum can be used, from visual boards for painting a house, to Scrum in education. The book makes Scrum easy to understand, and helps change agents learn how to present the framework to stakeholders and teams.

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Gurucharan Padki

Gurucharan Padki comes with 18 years of experience in the IT industry, of which he has spent more than a decade in the Agile world delivering products, programs and projects with focus on engineering and quality . He has played the role of product owner, scrum master and agile coach in multiple organizations across India and the world driving transformations.

You can link with Gurucharan Padki on LinkedIn.

Julie Wyman: Getting a Scrum team back on the retrospectives train

Julie was part of a team supporting a large program of 10 scrum teams. The team that Julie was working with, started to skip the retrospectives because they were trying to catch-up. However, after they had been able to catch-up, the team did not come back to start holding their retrospectives again. When should the Scrum Master stand-up and push the team to hold their retrospectives again? In this episode, we talk about the critical role Scrum Masters play in keeping the teams accountable to themselves when it comes to process, and how sometimes, it is important to stop, even if that affects delivery, because retrospectives are the “power station” for the rest of the work the team does.

Featured Book of the Week: Impact Mapping, by Gojko Adzic

In Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects by Gojko Adzic, Julie found a way to crystalize the concept of business impact. Impact Mapping, is a short book with lot of visuals. You can also learn about Impact Mapping in Gojko Adzic’s presentation on Impact Mapping.

About Julie Wyman

Julie Wyman has been working with Agile teams for over a decade and is continuously learning with and from them. She’s based just outside Washington, D.C., but has had the pleasure of supporting teams distributed across the globe and even experienced her own Agile takeaways all the way in Antarctica.

You can link with Julie Wyman on LinkedIn.

Karol Sójko on how Impact Mapping changed his way of thinking

Impact Mapping, a technique popularized by Gojko Adzic transformed how Karol thinks about software and product development.

About Karol Sójko

Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.
Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters
You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.