Tomorrow I’ll be training up a new breed of Product Owners at my client’s organization. One of my favorite aspects of the training is that I get to debunk myths about Agile development. A myth that frequently shows up is that magically more work gets done by going Agile. The reality is that we work smarter, not harder. The Dilbert comic below encapsulates this myth nicely:
User stories define three things for my team:
Writing high-quality user stories goes a LONG way toward the success of our team, but this of course begs the question – how do we write high-quality stories? I’ve created a presentation that demonstrates the simple, yet powerful technique that we employ to make our stories amazing. The summary: remove all terminology.
I hope that you enjoy this brief presentation!
Another outstanding sprint; another outstanding retrospective. The theme this round is “A Land Before Time”. Our team is represented by the blue, bridge-crossing dinosaur. The team then drew things that impeded our progress, or helped us to arrive safely at our destination. The result is epic and insightful:
Sprint Retrospective
Creative retrospectives are the way to go.
Every two weeks my team meets to discuss how we can be more awesome. In Agile/Scrum this is called a “retrospective”. The conventional format is to talk about what worked, what didn’t work, and what we can fix. While the conventional format is good, we can do better. On the whiteboard I drew water and a boat. I then gave the following instruction:
1. Our team is represented by the boat.
2. If something is working, draw something that makes the boat move faster.
3. If something isn’t working, draw something that makes the boat slow down.
After saturating the drawing with things that were working or not working, we then brainstormed and illustrated fixes.
Sprint Retrospective
The outcomes of this meeting included: Amazing brainstorming, praise from our coach, and a totally energized team. Props to Innovation Games for inspiration around creating this format.