Silver Stripe Blog

A few days ago, the hard disk on my laptop crashed. I called up tech support and asked them to replace it. A technician came down and changed the hard disk and then proceeded to reinstall the operating system using the recovery disk provided by the manufacturer. Unfortunately the disk was scratched so the reinstall could not complete. Now instead of replacing the disk, the technician asked me to contact tech support and someone else will come down and provide a new disk. Knowing that the OS would have to be reinstalled, and something might happen, why didn’t he have a backup disk with him? So I have to make another call to tech support.

Executives see the rising number of calls and try to cut corners to manage it quicker, leading to.. even more calls. A broken process itself contributing to increasing the demand.

Thats failure demand.

So what does this have to do with agile teams?

Continue reading ‘Why agile teams need to understand failure demand’ »

A lot of people think agile is something that it is not. So I thought I’d list three things that agile is not.

1. Agile is not a way to make development less diciplined: In fact, doing agile well requires more discipline than normal. Apart from cranking out code, you may have to do unit tests, refactoring, continuous integration, constant prioritization, one-piece flow. All these take discipline to do. If you think that you want to shift to agile because it’s less work, then you may want to rethink.
2. Agile does not mean you work without direction: If you thought that Agile means you can get started immediately, then think again. Sure, you don’t need to know the complete requirements before starting out. But you should at least be reasonably clear on what you hope to accomplish in the next sprint, even if it just means spiking out different possibilities. Some agile teams spend many sprints going here and there without any idea of what they are trying to do. Sometimes it is better to sit still than dash around aimlessly.
3. Agile does not mean there are no managers or leaders: Yes, Agile processes emphasize empowered, self-organizing teams. But that does not mean there are no managers or leaders. Every good team has good managers, who ensure that everything proceeds smoothly. Every good team has a good leader who can set a vision for the team. Don’t micromanage your team, but don’t leave them in the lurch either.

Got any more? Add it to the comments below.

Kevin Mullet was in Chennai yesterday and he gave a talk on User Experience Design. Thanks to Serendio for organising the talk. I’ve attached below a mindmap of the talk based on my notes. Click the image to see the whole mindmap.

There is a discussion going on in one of the Scrum lists about compensation in a scrum team. How do we reward individual performers when Scrum plays down individual performance?

It’s a mistake to think that rewarding individual performers does not work in a Scrum team. Forget Scrum, it does not work anywhere in the organization!

Continue reading ‘Compensation Systems For Agile Teams’ »

In the “old world” there was a certain flow that information would take.

Say you are a developer and you had a question regarding the testing. You would bring up the issue with the development manager. The dev manager would bring it up with the test manager in the next meeting (you, of course, were not invited). The test manager would ask a tester. Then the information would flow back in reverse until you got your answer.

Continue reading ‘Are ScrumMasters the new bottleneck?’ »