Agile Angel – April 2013

Hi everyone!

Starting today (June), I’ll start posting last month’s Agile Angel Newsletter in this blog. If you want to get the all fresh Newsletter, be sure to check the previous link and join it! We send just one issue every month or two, so no Spam or high bandwidth required.

Enjoy!

Continue reading

Posted in Articles | Leave a comment

The Easy Way To Stop Estimating

Ahoy!

Wow, it’s been a long time since I wrote my last post… I don’t want to bother you with the reasons, let’s just say I took something similar to a sabbatical – jealous, right? :-D

Anyway, some interesting things happened in the last months. One of them was I got to make a workshop about reducing estimations at XP2012. I already presented something similar at ALE2011, so it seems like I’m becoming an expert on the issue :-D . Here is the video and the presentation I used:

The Easy Way To Stop Estimating – Workshop at XP2012 from Proyectalis on Vimeo.

I realize I should have tested some of the excercises before, as they became somehow messy but, hey, I’m a Spaniard, we like everything las minute! :-D . I also need to impprove my pronunciation, although it feels like I can make myself better understood than a year before, when I talked even faster and with less care on pronunciation. Anyway, we had lots of fun and it seems that some people liked it so much that they invited me to do talks in their own events… More info on that soon (I hope)!

Posted in Articles | Leave a comment

Building Histograms

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from someone from attended my ‘Easy way to stop estimating’ speech at ALE2011 asking how to start building your histograms if, ironically, you are not supposed to do estimations (in which case, you don’t have estimations to build a histogram with :-) ).

Of course, the whole point of (nearly) dropping estimations is to rely on actual, real, measured data instead. On the following explanation, I’ll assume you are not ready to drop the whole thing and still need some minimal estimation (although I can’t imagine why :-D ).

There are several ways to do histograms depending on the nature of your work. If you are solving small ‘ticket-like’ issues you can trace how long they take to solve, maybe doing also a small pre-estimation of “small-medium-large” issue – then build the histogram with the actual data (and maybe dividing it in three histograms for each kind of estimation).

If you are more into user-story like product backlog then (if you wish) you can make a small pre-estimation of “small-medium-large” or directly use story points with a reduced set (“1-5-8-13″ for example). Then there are two ways you can go:

  • You can stick to that number. If a “1″ end up being actually a 5, you still count it as a “1″. This way, you would be acknowledging that, in future sprints, other “1″ stories will probably become a 5. So for example, you start with “1, 1, 5, 5, 8″ for a total of 20 estimated points – then the first story takes way longer than you expected, and you end up with 15 delivered points – Great! next time you’ll commit to less capacity.
  • You can re-estimate stories later on. Then you will acknowledge that the first “1″ was actually a “5″, and you’ll still go for 20 points of capacity. I DON’T LIKE THAT. It’s not that you are wrong, but it’s kind of a “vanity metric” that will make you think you actually delivered the 20 points you commited, when the truth is that you only delivered 4 out of 5 commited stories.

Of course, you can also do hourly tracing of user stories, meaning that you can tag them as “small-medium-large”, write down a beginning date when you start, an end date when you end and then assigning the difference for histogram building.

Example: User story 35, originally considered of “medium” size, started monday morning, endend wednesday afternoon – 3 DAYS.

You can make more complex calculations, for example including queuing time or focus factor, but my advice would be to keep it as simple as possible.

Once you have histograms, you can start playing with SLA’s and say things like “80% of our medium-rated stories are done in less than four days, and they NEVER take more than two weeks” – That’s a SLA :)

Please, everyone trying to reduce the estimation process, keep my informed of your progress!! :) )

Bonus: don’t miss Vasco Duarte’s brilliant post on the topic

Posted in Articles | Leave a comment

LeanCamp Barcelona

Hi guys! It seems I’ll start this year tourneé at LeanCamp Barcelona. It’s a great opportunity to share with people from the Lean, Agile, Lean Startup, Customer Development or UX communities worldwide, as this event is connected to others at New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam…

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Lean Startup Speech

A few months ago I attended e-nnovation conference in Poland – great time, great guys (and gals! :-D ) , and great vodka!

I was asked to deliver a speech on Agile and the Lean Startup movement, and I’ve just been told it has been online for a while! The quality is very good, thank you e-nnovation guys!

Hope you enjoy:

Angel Medinilla from e-nnovation on Vimeo.

As usual, the slides are available at our Slideshare place:

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Hire a great Scrum Master

I’ve been asked this question today on twitter and I thought to myself “man, there’s a book to be written here”. Unfortunately I’m a writing a book on some other topics, so I can only dedicate some time to share advice with you on the this one but, hey, we could make a meme out of this. :-)

First of all, you have to understand what’s the role of the Scrum Master. Serious. A lot of people will agree that the Scrum Master is responsible for delivery dates, controlling the project, reporting progress or making individual performance reports to management. Think twice. A good start is to read the Scrum Guide and some other resources on the topic. Long story short, for me the Scrum Master is responsible for success in the long term: making the team more efficient, raising it’s performance, improving their quality of life and creating an Agile culture in the whole company. Oh, and not to forget coaching the Product Owner.

Next, you have to make an assessment of your team and decide what kind of Scrum Master you are looking for. Scrum Masters come in various flavours, and they tend to shift with time. I have some slides on the topic of the evolution of the Scrum Master from “the Scrum Guy” to “Agile Coach”, including stages “Scrum Mom” and “True Scrum Master”:

If your team is immature in terms of Agility, they’ll need a Scrum Mom for a while, but be sure that the Scrum Master is able to evolve into a True Scrum Master and then Agile Coach when the team itself matures.

But let’s go back to the topic: how to hire a good Scrum Master? I think there are three main areas you want to explore when interviewing:

  • Technical: this person understands Software Development. Is familiar with technology, has read on patterns, clean code, QA, architecture, technical debt, versioning… Knows the Way of Working of programmers, understands that software is not a matter of “Man Hours”.
  • Human: this person is a good human being. His empathy is high and knows how to deal with conflict and sell ideas to management and clients. He is a superb and enthusiastic communicator, a great story teller. He cares about motivation and knows how to motivate his team. He is a loving and compassionate person, but 100% uncompromising when it comes to personal improvement and self development.
View more presentations from Proyectalis
  • Agile: this person understands the roots, values, principles and essence of Agile Sofwtare Development. Knows about Lean, eliminating waste, focusing on value delivery, small batch production, frequent delivery of working software, adapting to change… He is never comfortable with the “Status Quo” and is always looking for the next improvement. He has a lot of different ways to run a retrospective. He knows about Agile technical practices and tools and how to introduce them to the team, including pair programming, test/acceptance test/behaviour driven development, continuous integration, collective code ownership, coding standards…

Ideally you’ll search for the three of them, but if you have to settle for two, I’d go technical + human: they can learn the Agile thing later. Human-Agile is also a good choice (try to train them on the technical side), but I’ll never go for Technical-Agile (a.k.a. Agile Zealots): they’ll have a very long and difficult path becoming better persons. ;-)

Also, here are some characteristics of great Scrum Masters I’ve known:

  • Humble: big names on the Agile world usually make great consultants or part-time coaches, but when it comes to hiring a full-time Scrum Master is a good thing to look for a humble person.
  • Reads a lot: specially about Agile & Software Development. This includes blogs, books, twitter
  • In fact, many great Scrum Masters are very active in the Agile community. You could ask what conferences, open spaces or community events this person has attended over the last year, for example.
  • Certified. Yes, I know: the two-day certification by itself means nothing (please, don’t hire a Scrum Master because he is certified), but it’s very usual for good Scrum Masters I’ve known to have engaged some certification class in the past.
  • Likes to play. Great Scrum Masters know how to enjoy a retrospective and put their team to play and have a great time while learning and improving. The “we are serious guys and this is called work” guys seldom make good Scrum Masters.
  • Take notes on a notebook. A paper one. And likes to draw, although he may not be that good at drawing. You can call this a long-shot, but my guts have a good feeling about guys that use pen and paper on a daily basis – it tells a lot about their right side of the brain :-)

Last but not least, some activities you could try while interviewing this person:

  • Let the team interview him (and act at your own risk if you hire him despite the team said “we don’t like this guy”).
  • Let him conduct a short retrospective (over one single topic, for example)
  • Ask him to make an Agile Assessment of your organization through some interviews with project managers and developers
  • Take him to a Kanban / Scrumban board and ask him for some possible improvements

In fact, I’d love to hear about your own tips&tricks for hiring great Scrum Masters (if you blog about it, please link to this article so I can read you :-) – Oh, if you skip the touchy-feely stuff I’d be very pleased :-D

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

ALE2011

A couple of weeks ago I attended ALE2011, the first unconference by Agile Lean Europe, both as an organizer, speaker and sponsor.

I must say I tried too keep up with the organizing team but I couldn’t make it due to my nightmare agenda on the last months and also my extended summer break this year (a really deserved one month and a half). So I decided early to cover this lack of dedication with a humble sponsorship of the event. Hope that counts :-)

I was selected as a speaker from Spain. I must say I’m not really comfortable on speakers being chosen by country and not by merits, but hey, this was the “Europe” part in “Agile Lean Europe”. It gave a lot of opportunities to speakers that, on other circumstances, would have low probabilities of being chosen by the typical program committee (by the way, instead of chairs the organizing team was divided in sofas, how cool is that?). Some of this more unknown speakers were a pleasant surprise, while in other cases some of the presentations were, I must say, a little bit empty, dull and self-promotional. Hey, this is the game: take it or leave it :-)

I definitively take it. My presentation was crowded, and I had a really engaged and passionate public that decided on their own to make an Open Space on the topic:  eliminating waste by dropping the estimation process. On the improvement side, I need to speak slower, as I tend to go really fast and my English is not that good :-(

I had decided not to propose any Open Space because I already had some featured space and I felt like I should leave Open Space for people without presentation slots. I remember being on other conference, proposing an Open Space and seeing how a couple of Agile Super Stars monopolized the Open Space by proposing games, extensions to their talks or other kind of activities, so this time I preferred not to be the monopoly guy. But anyway, the Open Space took place and I participated as everyone else. I must thank the facilitator, Sven Tiffe, and I remember being very close to the opinions by Liz Keogh.

Probably one of the best talks was delivered by Chris Matts, and boy did he deliver. The topic was feature injection, but this was in fact the less important part. His delivery is so good that I’ve been jealous since then and I’ve learned a couple of things I must work on to improve my own style.

Possibly the best part of the event was the networking and the creation of new and solid relationships. I remember having nice conversations with Vasco Duarte, Eric Lundh, Yves Hanoulle, Olaf Lewitz, Olav Maasen, and some Spanish ex-pats from Nokia.

Unfortunately, I was handicapped by the fact that, on thursday, my wallet was stolen by two pickpockets while having lunch outside the hotel and I wasted a lot of time on police stations and the spanish embassy (which is only available from monday to friday, from 9:00 to 13:00!!!), although I must say German police is astonishingly efficient, polite and nice (and I got my money back in 24 hours!!).

I think I need some more time to think on some of the great ideas I got from this event, so please stay tuned next weeks. Oh, you can browse some of my ALE pictures at Flickr.

Posted in Articles | 3 Comments

ScrumWeek Barcelona, featuring Jurgen Appelo

Hi everyone!

I’m proud to inform that ScrumWeek Barcelona will take place on november 7th to 11th, and we will count with one of the most influential and active members of today’s worldwide Agile community: Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0, a best-selling management book for Agile developers. As the author states, it has a picture of a monster in it, and that has to be something you should also consider when looking at this course. What was the last seminar you took that had a monster in it?

The venue is still to be determined, please stay tuned, but today (Sept. 12th) we already opened registration. Jurgen’s course will take place on monday 7th and tuesday 8th, and the cost for early bird registration (untill Sept. 30th) will be 800,00€, and during early bird we will be offering one free additional ticket to anyone buying four, so you may want to check with your colleagues if they are interested in attending and form a group of five with them (or just sell them the four tickets and get a free one for yourself, hehehe :-)   . From October the 1st to October 31st the cost for regular registration will be 1000,00€. Course fee includes all the materials, the amazing experience and… Oh, what the heck, we’ll buy you lunch also ;-) . Please notice that accomodation expenses are not included (we will be offering more information on the venue soon). For registrations, please e-mail me directly.

We will also have place for a Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) and a Scrum course by the Plain Concepts crew, and also for my own seminar on Coaching Agile Teams (altough these will be taught in Spanish, sorry european guys ;-) ). Community events will take place all over the week during afternoons, and we are open to any suggesions on how to improve this Agile experience. All the (Spanish) information on Barcelona’s ScrumWeek is available here, and we will probably be updating them as we approach the dates.

Update: the event will take place on Hotel Barceló Sants.

See you there!

Posted in Articles | Leave a comment

XP2011 slides

Wow! This is indeed beeing a busy exciting week. I’m attending XP2011 as a speaker and I’m not only the only spanish guy with tutorial, session and invited talks, but one of the folks with the most sessions. Thanks XP!

I taught a tutorial on the topic of Agile Management on Monday. Unfortunately, I overcrowded the presentation and my session was cut down from four ours to three, so I only managed to reach slide eighty-something. Still, I received great feedback, specially on the Manager vs. Scrummaster duties slides and excercise. Negative feedback was, as usual, “need more time”, which I tend to take as another positive feedback (hey, after three hours of Agile torture you still want more? :-) ).

Yesterday I facilitated (and participated, which I shouldn’t have done, ouch!) at a fishbowl session on Agile Contracts with Mary Poppendieck and some great folks from the European Space Agency. We had very interesting insights from guys from NOrway, which seems to be the promised land of Agile Contracts (searh Google for “PS200″ ;-) ). I also made a one hour invited talk on the topic of Scrumban, which was a great success: 52 people showed up, that was 30 % of the conference, a huge crowd considering there are six simultaneous tracks. Hope you find the slides useful:

Still I have to make a lightning talk on Command & Control,which I will possibly *not* upload as slides have no text and will be very difficult to understand without the speech, but maybe I’ll find time to make a reading-meant version :-) . Oh, and please link this post! I want page rank! paaaa-ge raaaa-aaaaank…!! :-D

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Coaching Agile Teams – Resources

I recently taught a “Coaching Agile Teams” three days seminar in Madrid and one of the  attendees took the time to search for mostly all the resources mentioned during it. I think it’s a good database of  food or your brain, and if you live somewhere in Europe you have plenty of time to order some of those for your summer reading :-D   .

Most of them are in English, but if your are interested in the content of any spanish resources please contact me. If you only have time for a small part of this list, I’ve highlighted on bold letters the unmissable ones:

Books:

- “Emotional Intelligence”, by Daniel Goleman
http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B002ROKQNS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186666&sr=1-2
- “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, by Daniel Pink
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-Motivates-ebook/dp/B003RISUIG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186702&sr=1-3
- “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Project”, by Geoffrey A. Moore
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-Technology-ebook/dp/B000FC119W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186750&sr=1-1
- “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency”, by Tom DeMarco
http://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Busywork-Efficiency-ebook/dp/B004SOVC2Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186801&sr=1-1
- “Flow”, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
http://www.amazon.com/Flow-ebook/dp/B000W94FE6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186847&sr=1-1
- “PeopleWare”, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-ebook/dp/B003I84OIU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186871&sr=1-1
- “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose”, by Tony Hsieh
http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/B003QADCNS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186890&sr=1-1
- “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, by Stephen Covey
http://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-ebook/dp/B000WJVK26/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186920&sr=1-1
- “Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders”, by Jurgen Appelo
http://www.amazon.com/Management-3-0-Developers-Developing-ebook/dp/B004ISL6JY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186964&sr=1-1
- “No Miedo”, by Pilar Jerico
http://www.casadellibro.com/e-book-no-miedo-ebook/1802888/2900001408583

- “La Nueva Gestión del Talento: Construyendo Compromiso”, by Pilar Jerico

http://www.casadellibro.com/libro-la-nueva-gestion-del-talento-construyendo-compromiso/1197542/2900001251355
- “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t”, by Jim Collins
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302186998&sr=8-1
- “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable”, by Patrick Lencioni
http://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-ebook/dp/B000UCUX0K/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&qid=1302186111&sr=1-1
- “Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition”, by Lyssa Adkins
http://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Agile-Teams-ScrumMasters-ebook/dp/B003QP47YG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186202&sr=1-1
- “Tribal Leadership”, by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright
http://www.amazon.com/Tribal-Leadership-ebook/dp/B0012GTZFC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&s=digital-text&qid=1302186600&sr=1-1
- “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us”, by Seth Godin
http://www.amazon.com/Tribes-Need-You-Lead-ebook/dp/B003RWSQ4A/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&qid=1302188521&sr=1-4
- “Fukowski, memorias de un ingeniero”, by Alfredo de Hoces
http://www.alfredodehoces.com/files/MemoriasDeUnIngeniero.pdf

- “Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace”, by Ricardo Semler
http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0446670553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302188916&sr=8-1
- “The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works”, by Ricardo Semler
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works/dp/B0009S5AVW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1302188916&sr=8-2
- “How the Brain Learns”, by David A. Sousa
http://www.amazon.com/How-Brain-Learns-David-Sousa/dp/1412936616/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302188574&sr=8-1
- “Training From the Back of the Room!: 65 Ways to Step Aside and Let Them Learn”, by Sharon L. Bowman
http://www.amazon.com/Training-Back-Room-Aside-ebook/dp/B001P4N444/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A317O7WZ1CN6AQ&qid=1302188728&sr=1-1
- “Who am I? The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalities”, by Steven Reiss
http://www.amazon.com/Desires-Motivate-Actions-Define-Personalities/dp/0425183408/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302189300&sr=1-1
Articles

- “We Tried Baseball and it Didn’t Work”, by Ron Jeffries
http://xprogramming.com/articles/jatbaseball/

- “Top Ten Ways To Be Happy At Work”, by Susan M. Heathfield
http://humanresources.about.com/od/success/tp/happy_work.htm

Videos
- “El Coeficiente de Optimismo”, by Emilio Duró
http://vimeo.com/19994624
http://vimeo.com/19996142

- “The First Follower”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-1_-P016Ns

- “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-3E8pyjFo
- “Clientes en situaciones de la vida real”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbdM7e-H0tw

- “His Holiness the Dalai Lama Speaks: Peace and Prosperity”

http://www.amazon.com/His-Holiness-Dalai-Lama-Speaks/dp/B001B3LIR4

- “Bill Clinton: The Power of Eye Contact” (Éste lo comenté yo :P )

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/11/21/bill-clinton-reality-distortion-field/

- “Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

- “Abraham Lincoln – Gettysburg Address”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAgkV0y7Njg
- TEDTalks
http://www.youtube.com/user/tedtalksdirector?blend=1&ob=4

- TEDex
http://www.ted.com/tedx
Movies

- “Office Space”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/

- “Gandhi”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083987/
Slides

- “Círculos viciosos” (transparencías de Proyectalis vistas en el curso de “Coaching de equipos ágiles”)

- “Netflix Corporate Culture”
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
- “Shock Therapy” (Implementación corporativa de Scrum en MySpace, dónde existían equipos que no estaban convencidos con la metodología)
http://rapidscrum.com/shock.php
Series

- SuperNanny
http://abc.go.com/shows/supernanny/video

- El encantador de perros
http://www.cesarsway.com/

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment