Spikes And Stories

Teams that don’t deliver working product frequently aren’t agile.

I hold firmly to this truth for many reasons.  For example, how can we iterate on a product that isn’t real?  Wouldn’t you agree that continuous improvement is at the heart of agility?  So if the product isn’t real, how can we be sure we’re learning the right lessons?  And how is “frequent” defined in this context? For that last question, read this blog post about metrics where I talk about what metric matters most.  It’s a simple one and one that’s typically easy to measure:

How often are we delivering working code to our target environment?

So why does this even matter?  What do these frequent deliveries get us?  Here’s six reasons agile teams delivery frequently: [Read more…]

What’s my plan?  That’s a question I was asked recently.  It occurred to me in that moment that I didn’t have one.  Sure.  I had a vision, I knew the next few steps, and I knew where I wanted my teams to get.  However, the longer term was fuzzy, and it depended on how a few bets panned out. Those bets would tell me if I should amplify or dampen something we were doing.  So if I didn’t have a plan, what did I have?

I realized what I had instead was a north star.  Well, maybe a few of them.  Or maybe they’re better described as a set of heuristics?  Guiding principles?  I don’t know what to call them.  What I do know is I’ve collected them over the last decade as an agilist, and they drive my decisions and how I interact with world around me.  They look something like this:

[Read more…]