Tag: scrum master tools

BONUS: The Agile Wire hosts interview Vasco Duarte on #NoEstimates – Jeff Maleski & Jeff Bubolz

This is a BONUS episode on the topic of #NoEstimates. The Agile Wire podcast hosts Jeff Bubolz and Jeff Maleski interview Vasco Duarte.

Some of you might have heard about #NoEstimates, and want to know more, and for others, it might be the first time you hear about it. Either way, in this episode we talk about the origins of #NoEstimates and why you may want to consider it when helping your teams. 

This is a shared episode with a fellow Agile podcast The Agile Wire, where hosts Jeff Maleski and Jeff Bubolz interview Agile practitioners. Both Jeff Maleski and Jeff Bubolz have been guests here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast.

About Jeff Bubolz and Jeff Maleski

Jeff Bubolz is a speaker, trainer, and agile coach. He has been a Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team member. Jeff has worked with enterprise companies to small start-ups. His goal is to end human suffering in organizations, by nudging people to be the change they want to see in the world.

You can link with Jeff Bubolz on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Bubolz on Twitter.

Jeff Maleski is passionate about working with and building up both individuals and teams using ideas from Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 and Dan Pink’s Drive. When leading project teams, Jeff strives for empirical based planning and forecasting, continuous learning, and delivering high quality software products that exceed expectations. Jeff believes in leading by actions and focusing on building relationships with others.

You can link with Jeff Maleski on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Marcus Hammerberg on predicting Software development without estimation

Marcus wrote a blog post about predicting progress in ‘well-defined’ projects. He used a simple example where uncertainty was very limited. You can read the details in the blog post. However, even when uncertainty about the work was low, the predictions he was able to do (and he collects quite a few metrics in that story), was limited. 

In this episode, we explore the limits to prediction, and how that affects how we should look at prediction in our own software projects. 

Embracing uncertainty and what that means in practice for software projects

Continue reading BONUS: Marcus Hammerberg on predicting Software development without estimation

BONUS: Leena N interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 7

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

BONUS: Wouter Lagerweij interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 5

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

BONUS: Chris O’Dell 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

BONUS: Manuel Pais interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 4

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

BONUS: Morten Herman interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 3

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

BONUS: Thierry de Pauw interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 2

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

BONUS: Dave Farley interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 1

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 you need to learn about being a Scrum Master, but will never get from a CSM course

No matter how many courses you attend, there are things that, as a Scrum Masters, you only really learn the important lessons on the field. Doing the work.

One of the reasons I don’t think certification courses are enough for Scrum Masters that certifications courses very often focus on the rules and regulations of the job, but not on the problems, the hardships and the obstacles we face, day-in, day-out when we try to do a good work as a Scrum Master.

So, what can we do when courses aren’t enough?

Continue reading What you need to learn about being a Scrum Master, but will never get from a CSM course