Search / 30 posts tagged Agile teams

I have just started reading Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams by Alistair Cockburn. I was not too sure what this book would provide for me in the way of relevant learning. I am intrigued that this work came out of years of experience by Alistair.

I’ve been reading “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki lately and he makes a compelling case for composing teams of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets. He claims that teams that are composed only of “experts” do not do as well as teams that are composed of a mix of experts, novices, and average players too.

Alright, too busy to write much as usual, but some good points in Mike Polen’s post that summarizes a talk by Jim Shore. Got it via Ole Mortens blog that does a decent job of bulletizing it all.

An Agile coach contacted me to discuss an issue on his team. One of the critical contractors on his team had left the project for another assignment, unexpectedly, on two week’s notice, just before an important release. Oh my! The coach described his initial shock and dismay.

I finished reading “Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams“, Sutherland, Viktorov & Blount last night. The authors describe an Integrated Scrums model which deliberately splits Scrum teams across different geographical locations, rather than co-locating teams and using the scrum-of-scrums approach.

Does your team have Working Agreements? (WA’s) Effective teams think about how they will accomplish their work together before they begin working. They describe the levels of performance and professionalism they want to achieve, then record them in Working Agreements.

In the course of surfing the web for related things I discovered a few more useful articles on distributing teams: More on Distributed Teams - Ping Identity’s “Swarm” Model for Remote, Distributed Agile Development Agile Project Management for Distributed Teams Can distributed teams be agile?

many developers intuitively understand the benefits of working in small tightly-focussed teams. Apparently, one way of determining whether your team is an appropriate size is using Pizza as a measure. Seems an interesting idea, although I have yet to find any definition of what sort (and crucially, size) of pizza should be used.

About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives. This is an update. Over the past year, I’ve had some new ideas and participants in our “Agile Retrospectives” workshop have provided their creative thoughts.

About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives. This is an update. Over the past year, I’ve had some new ideas and participants in our “Agile Retrospectives” workshop have provided their creative thoughts.