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Removing Road Blocks to bocoming Agile
I've been looking at how to progress further with the Agile Mindset in our organization - various teams have experimented with Scrum and taken on board the daily stand-up side of it. Of course there is more we can do, and we will - but there is one obstacle in the way I can't really find a way round (just yet) - what I call the validation bottleneck. With a small validation team in place, and large number of projects demanding this shared resource (and lack of commitment to recruit) how do we best pull in the validation into the Sprint cycles / daily stand-ups ? how do we create our the multi-disciplinary team which forms the essence of the team in Scrum ? Any ideas ?
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ilja Preuß on -
What's the validation team doing? Testing?
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Permalink Reply by Sina Jazayeri on -
Revalidating the system independantly, exploratory testing, stress testing and ultimately rubber stamping the system as DONE.
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Permalink Reply by Ilja Preuß on
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Having problems handed back from this validation team to your development teams is a huge source of waste: it disrupts new work, hampers learning (because the feedback is coming too late) and makes it hard to come up with reliable plans (because you don't really know when a feature will be DONE).
Therefore, it should be the goal of your teams for the validation team to never find anything to complain about. That means, of course, that they need to learn how to incorporate validation into their own work.
How do you best do that? It depends a lot on what resources you have. Perhaps you can, at least part-time, pull some of the validation team members into your teams for mentoring purposes. Perhaps you can get some training on Agile Testing, start a study group, brown bags, whatever. Perhaps you just need start do something small tomorrow.
Are your teams doing retrospectives?
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Permalink Reply by Sina Jazayeri on
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We are very new to Agile - and in short the answer in no. We do daily standups, and some teams have white boards and index cards, but we are yet to fully apply all elements of Scrum.
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Permalink Reply by Ilja Preuß on
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Frankly, in that case I recommend making adopting retrospectives your highest priority for now. It's vital to involve the whole team in the decision making on where and how to improve next, and retrospectives are *the* tool to do that.
If validation is a big problem, it will come up in the retrospective and dealt with by the whole team. Of course, it might still be that the team is puzzled by what to do about it, which is the right moment to come back here with your question... ;)
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Permalink Reply by Sina Jazayeri on
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Thanks - i'll lookup how to do retrospectives and see how we can best apply it.
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Permalink Reply by Ilja Preuß on
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A great format to start with can be found in the book "The Art of Agile". "Agile Retrospectives" is another good, more comprehensive book on the topic. The authors of the latter book also gave a google tech talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqtPZYigfNI
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Permalink Reply by Sina Jazayeri on
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That's great - I'll share this with other Agile Community members at Eurotherm (this is our internal community) and setup a gettogether to watch the Googletalk so we can reflect and take action.
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