Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Teams, Testing, Automation...
Over the last 20+ years I've worked on various Agile teams, some following Scrum, some following Kanban and various flavours inbetween! Along the way I have learnt a lot of good things from some amazing people, seen a lot of bad things happening within teams and organisations and I have tried to capture some of the lessons learnt in my blog. Hopefully you'll find some of my experiences and thoughts useful.
If you've read something you don't agree with, then drop me an email (details can be found in the footer), I'm always up for learning new things or even having a friendly discussion with people that have different views or opinions.
Agile: Agile Posters
I finally got round to creating some posters to give a high-level overview of agile, below are the 2 that I decided worked best out of the designs I came up with.
Scrum: Scrum Posters
These posters are based on the information found in the scrum guide around the roles, artifacts, events and values.
Kanban: Kanban Poster
The purpose of this poster is to give a visual high-level overview.
Teams: Teams Posters
Teams are hugely important when trying to build products, especially software based products.
Teams: Collaboration vs Cooperation poster
What's the difference between collaboration vs cooperation?
Agile games: The coin game
The coin game is a great way to help show the benefits of breaking work down into small, valuable chunks.
Agile games: Context switching
The purpose of this game is to highlight the impact that context switching has on individuals.
Agile: Make your own Agile.
Over that last couple of years, I’ve been hearing phrases like ‘Agile doesn’t work’, ‘We tried the Spotify model and it’s not fixed our issues’… sound familiar?
Scrum retrospectives: PACMAN retro
The importance of having time to reflect back on the previous sprint is easy to see for any agile scrum team.
Kanban: Value stream mapping
One of the key principles of Kanban is to ‘start with what you do now’...
Scrum basics: Roles & responsibilities
Roles and responsibilities in scrum are important and it’s good for each team member to understand...
Scrum basics: Scrum events
Scrum has a number of events that help the scrum team remain transparent and allows the team to inspect and adapt at regular intervals.
Scrum basics: Definition of 'Done'
The definition of 'Done' is an important concept for any scrum team in my opinion...
Scrum: Estimations
There’s been a lot of interesting thoughts around estimating in Agile teams that I’ve read and even talked about over the years, it normally comes down to whether estimation should be done or not.
Scrum retrospectives: NERF wars retro
Recently our team invested in some NERF guns to have a bit of fun in the office from time to time...
Scrum retrospectives: Rate our scrum events retro
The importance of having time to reflect back on the previous sprint is easy to see for any agile scrum team...
Scrum retrospectives: Recipe retro
The importance of having time to reflect back on the previous sprint is easy to see for any agile scrum team...
Agile: Be agile, be innovative, be fun!
Working as part of a software development team can be demanding at times, lots of work on the product roadmap and priorities changing from sprint to sprint can lead to frustrations within teams.
Agile: Team health checks
As a scrum team it’s important to want to keep improving how we work together and how we can get better at what we do, with this in mind we recently took a team health check.
Agile: User story mapping
I recently attended a workshop around user story mapping, I had not heard of the concept before and thought the workshop was extremely useful.
WebDriver - using xpaths efficiently to locate webElements
I agree with most people that would say the least efficient way to locate webElements in WebDriver scripts is to use 'xpaths'...
Reading list
Below are some books I've either read or I'm currently reading that I've found helpful when learning about Agile, scrum, coaching...
