[But When Do We Stretch?]
If you’re here for the dancing, prepare to be disappointed.
Agile is not about stretching muscles.
Sadly.
While I’ve had informal experience with agile stand ups, kanban, scrum, and other lean management solutions, I’ve not formally researched it and since the DevRel group within Packet uses it for documentation and ticketing, I’ve been drinking from that firehose for a few weeks now.
But first the news:
- Thessaloniki for €10? D66 calls for minimum price for plane tickets
- CORONAVIRUS INFECTION SOURCE USUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO TRACE
- What are your employment rights regarding holidays during the coronavirus crisis?
I totally just ordered Head First Agile: A Brain-Friendly Guide to Agile Principles, Ideas, and Real-World Practices from Amazon.NL and can I just say how AWESOME it is for Amazon to FINALLY open a full official store in the Netherlands? Buying from .com, .co.uk, and .de was a bit of a pain and … now that I think about it, really, I shouldn’t be buying from them for so many reasons but English books in the Netherlands is HARD.
ASIDE: I love Head First books. Per Wikipedia, it’s “a series of introductory instructional books to many topics, published by O’Reilly Media. It stresses an unorthodox, visually intensive, reader-involving combination of puzzles, jokes, nonstandard design and layout, and an engaging, conversational style to immerse the reader in a given topic.” And it works.
But you don’t have to order a book – I just love paper, yo, cause I’m Old School ™ – you can read a few different articles online and Atlassian has an entire agile resource that I’m diving into while I wait for the book to arrive.
The first article that my boss (hi, A!) sent over to my group was Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable which has the famous graphic used in so many agile talks / articles, but then actually explains it in context.
The picture is a metaphor. It is not about actual car development, it is about product development in general, using a car as a metaphor.
Then I dove into Product Backlog Refinement explained.
“The goal of Product Backlog refinement is to work with the Scrum Team and stakeholders (when relevant), to get Product Backlog items in a ‘ready state’. What does this mean? This basically means that the development team has the idea that an item is:
– Clear enough, so they understand what stakeholders are asking for and why they are asking for it.
– Small enough, so the items should be small enough to get done within a sprint (typically a few days of work) to comply with the definition of done.”
It’s breaking down an overarching project or larger task into bite sized bits so you can add it into a ticketing system or trello or kanban and others can pick up individual bits without having to break them down further.
That article is available on scrum.org which is also a resource to dive into scrum. But the main part of the website is about getting training / certified, so if you just want the education, go to https://www.scrum.org/resources/ for all of the free articles or dive into https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum.
Finally, because I didn’t notice those resources until literally just now, I was poking around looking for, well, something like scrum.org, and instead I found The Agile Coach Atlassian’s no-nonsense guide to agile development which, after a brief skim, seems pretty thorough as well.
“Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.”
https://www.atlassian.com/agile
Do you have a resource that you prefer? Would you like to hear more about agile or other lean management solutions? Send me your questions / comments / input; I’d love to hear from you, Warriors.