Agile – Page 2 – alper.nl

https://jhall.io/archive/2022/06/19/a-gitflow-story/

Please let’s never talk about GitFlow ever again other than with stories like this of how we moved people away from it.

Some teams will be willing to try something else and see how it makes their lives radically better and others will refuse and put their heels in the sand.

Sure there are reasons why people react in a certain way, why some people are protective or conservative but those reasons are not destiny and everybody can choose agency and make things better.

What choice will you make?

“Stripped of their original purpose, this is what so many Scrum events have become: a series of actions performed by rote.”

A lot of it has become theater and sprint planning may be one of the worst things any organization can do.

https://chrisjameslennon.medium.com/the-age-of-scrum-is-over-185407ad705b

Lots of teams try to dogmatically implement scrum without looking at their team and goals. There are lots of alternative ways of doing things most of which will be more agile, not less.

View at Medium.com

Lots of examples here by Intercom about how to enable teams to ship as fast as possible and at the same time also as safely as possible.

Be available after shipping
Ship instrumentation first
Use feature flags
Ship to a small subset of traffic
Ship the “read” path first
Document and share your plan and actions

https://www.intercom.com/blog/ship-fast-safe-learn-from-production/

Momentum definitely is magic and I’d add that you get it by focusing on tempo.

https://evanm.website/2022/02/momentum/

Working in the Spotify organizational structure can be a bit tiresome but I’m glad we’re getting the important stuff from their product development culture, listed here by Jason Yip, right as well: aligned autonomy, trust and decoupling. Without those the structure indeed does not matter.

https://jchyip.medium.com/the-top-3-points-you-should-have-paid-attention-to-in-the-spotify-engineering-culture-videos-that-f936a512fb3b

People leaving your team have a cost that is far far larger than what you can directly see (and we know what a challenge directing stuff that you can’t see is). These visualizations
by Benji Weber put forth a strong argument especially against people working as isolated individuals on things.

Cost of Attrition

An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?

https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/agility-speed-96057078fe40

One of the things I have to fight the most for and that I think is what allows me to work well: “Regularly get in your team’s shoes”. Call it Genba, or Fingerspitzengefühl but the most important thing is to stay in touch with your team’s day to day reality.

https://www.okayhq.com/blog/status-quo-is-so-hard-to-change-in-engineering-teams

I often get surprised reactions when I say that we don’t do Scrum. After reading about how other technology companies run their projects, it seems that Scrum—which is wasteful and does not fit reality—is on the way out.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/