Modern Agile Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Seye Kuyinu: From Working Software to Human Flourishing, A Holistic Approach to Scrum Master Success

In this episode, Seye delves into his multi-layered perspective on success as a Scrum Master. Firstly, he emphasizes understanding success from the perspective of those he serves, suggesting collaboration to define it. He also sees success in terms of “working software” and advises teams to contextualize its meaning. Seye underscores the human aspect of product development and references the concept of “making people awesome” from Modern Agile. He encourages Scrum Masters to align with their personal values and live them out, adding depth to their success definition in the agile context.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Temperature Mapping

In this episode, Seye introduces his preferred retrospective formats, starting with “temperature mapping.” Using tools like MURAL, this format encourages team members to share their emotions throughout the sprint. Another favorite is the “Sailboat retrospective,” employing visuals to stimulate discussion. Seye also advocates for a “futurespective” using storytelling, where teams envision the future. These formats foster open communication, engagement, and forward thinking, enhancing the retrospective experience and driving improvements in the team’s agile process.

How can I, as a Scrum Master, supercharge my facilitation?

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Seye Kuyinu

Seye has been a Scrum Master for about a decade now. He first connected to Agile, frustrated with the lack of adequate communication that plagues traditional complex projects. He finds People and Interactions over Processes & Tools cannot be overstated, while seeing that everything is a fractal- our individual, team, organization and societal challenges are the very same. The solution in every layer is the same- an understanding of ONENESS!

You can link with Seye Kuyinu on LinkedIn and connect with Seye Kuyinu on Twitter.

BONUS: Tim Ottinger on practical ways to enable psychological safety: The Trust Transaction

Psychological safety has been claimed to impact greatly the productivity and well being of teams. Building trust is how we reach psychological safety, but trust is a touchy topic for teams. Scrum Masters try to build trust between team members, with stakeholders, with other teams, with the Product Owner. Trust maybe one of the critical ingredients that allows collaboration to emerge. But how do we build trust? How do we learn what works, and what doesn’t when building trust?

Tim Ottinger shares his learning in this BONUS episode on trust, with a very practical approach, just like we like it here on the podcast.

Read on for the details on the Trust Transaction…

Continue reading BONUS: Tim Ottinger on practical ways to enable psychological safety: The Trust Transaction

BONUS: Erwin van der Koogh, #NoEstimates as seen by a CEO

Does your company need estimation? Listen to Erwin’s take. He’s a CEO. He should know.

Erwin has his own company and invests his own money in that company. For him, #NoEstimates solves a clear problem: too much time wasted estimating, instead of producing.

He challenges us to investigate how much money and time we already invest in that process, and then to measure the benefits. Are we getting enough return on the time and money we invest on estimation?

We learn about Erwin’s story of adoption. How he started with gradually larger projects, even at larger clients, and what he learned about the dynamics that push companies to make larger and larger decisions. Those larger decisions look like they require estimates, but why aren’t we questioning the need to make large decisions (large batch)?

Continue reading BONUS: Erwin van der Koogh, #NoEstimates as seen by a CEO

BONUS: Joshua Kerievsky introduces Modern Agile

In this BONUS episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, we explore the idea of what Agile needs to be to continuously adapt to what we have learned about what works and what does not work in Agile.

Agile is soon 20 years old, the Agile manifesto was published in 2001, and as it says right there in the first phrase: it was about discovering (the active word) new and better ways of developing software.

Nearly twenty years on, Joshua Kerievsky has started writing about what he has learned and started a movement with his article Modern Agile.

He starts by making a point that practices need to evolve. Agile has never been about the specific practices, but rather about the value and principles described in the Agile manifesto. And as practices evolve, some should be changed, and others completely removed or at least replaced. In the #NoEstimates movement, for example, the call is for a completely different way of scheduling/predicting project releases, this is just an example of a practice that is a big contrast to the usual Story Point estimation techniques of the first few years of Agile.

Joshua mentions a concrete example: trunk-based development. An approach to software development that foregoes the idea of needing to have multiple branches, but rather has the code integrated at all times. Something that not all Agilists would even support today.

The 4 principles of Modern Agile

We review the 4 principles of Modern Agile:

– Make people awesome: Where we discuss how the goal of our work is to make people excel at something that matters to them. Either users, customers, programmers, or whoever it is that we are serving. In the context of Agile, this principle means that the practices we use are in the service of those developing the products and services with the Agile approaches we support

– Make safety a prerequisite: While discussing this principle we review books like The Power of Habit and Smarter, Better, Faster. These books inspired Joshua to bring the idea that safety needs to become a habit, and together with the story of Paul O’Neil (CEO of Alcoa), it created the link between safety (physical and psychological) and productivity.

– Experiment and learn rapidly: One of the key ideas of Agile was to bring speed of delivery, satisfying customers early and often, thereby creating a feedback loop that helped teams and organizations learn faster and therefore improving their products/services faster than their competitors. Experimentation is one of the key ideas that Joshua built into Modern Agile.

– Deliver value continuously: from the fake features that prove demand, to constantly delivering something concrete in a short-time frame. Modern Agile is about the value cycle: deliver, validate, learn, rinse and repeat.

We discuss how these principles are linked and why we need all 4 principles to be present.

The Modern Agile community

At ModernAgile.org, the Modern Agile community is active in discussing their lessons learned as well as what new ideas come from applying the principles. All the material on the site is open source and available for you to use.

Listen in to learn about Modern Agile and see how you can apply the ideas that you resonate with. Agile is adapting to the new reality, and so should you.

About Joshua Kerievsky

Joshua is the founder and CEO of Industrial Logic, a pioneering Extreme Programming/Lean consultancy that radically improves the software development capabilities of organizations around the globe.

In the mid-1990s, Joshua was among a small community of “lightweight methods” practitioners experimenting with better ways of developing software. Since then, he’s helped thousands of people across hundreds of organizations learn better ways of making software. Today, he leads an effort to modernize Agile by removing outdated practices and leveraging the best of what the software community and other industries have learned about achieving awesome results.

Joshua is an international speaker and author of the best-selling, Jolt Cola-award-winning book, Refactoring to Patterns, numerous Agile eLearning courses, and popular articles like Anzeneering, Sufficient Design and Stop Using Story Points.