"I travel around the world constantly promoting my projects and endorsing products." — Paris Hilton

Agile coaching is a journey into irony. One of the chief discoveries you can make on this voyage is that the more experienced you become, the worse at the job others often think you get.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

I’ve learned a lot by reflecting on how I responded to and resisted my father’s parenting. My father used to keep a note in the pocket of his blue work shirt, with two columns: one of plus signs, one of minuses. He used the columns to score my behavior and determine whether I had earned privileges and rewards. This did not have the intended effect.

I had a long history of tension with my father over unfair punishments, but I put aside my misgivings and tried hard to make it work. As I expected, it became clear quickly that my father’s scoring would be imbalanced. A negative mark was easy to gain and difficult to prevent, and on some days I received many of them. If my spoon made a noise against my teeth, I got a negative. If I looked unhappy about that, I got another; if I protested, yet another. I couldn’t avoid negatives, no matter how hard I tried.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)


Finally! With the "embargo" lifted by Scrum.org, we can now share with you the incredible journey that Barry Overeem and I have been on for the past months.

The bottom-line is that Scrum.org has acquired our "Scrum Master Advanced" class. We’ve been spending the past eight months turning it into the official, brand new Professional Scrum Master II class (PSM-II) for Scrum.org. As newly-minted course stewards, we are now responsible (with Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl) for the entire Professional Scrum Master curriculum (both PSM-I and PSM-II). If you’d like to know more about the class and how we designed it, click here for a detailed write-up.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

When I’m chatting with customers, prospects and journalists around high productivity application development, I sometimes perceive some confusion in their minds around the difference between the terms "low-code" and "no-code." It’s not surprising, since, in the high-productivity application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) space, there are many vendors all jockeying for position. So let’s clear the matter up and examine what’s really meant by each of the two terms, flag the differences and suggest which platform type is right for which types of projects.

Similar at A Glance…

Both low-code and no-code development platforms provide the means to develop software applications without the need to write code. Instead of requiring a developer to have any knowledge of traditional programming languages, they both provide a visual development approach to Rapid Application Development (RAD). This visual approach makes app development accessible to a greater number of people, specifically tech-savvy individuals working in the business lines. With the nature of an application in mind, developers select the functional components they need from an on-screen library and drag and drop them into a visual workflow.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

Hello, great people of the world. In the previous article, we have discussed how Scrum Masters need to master many things. In this article, we are going to discuss one of the stances that the Scrum Master need to master, the facilitation stance. A great Scrum Master is a great facilitator, otherwise, the Scrum Master will be seen as no more than a master of ceremonies or even an event organizer. A great Scrum Master is able to facilitate an event that leads to a high-quality decision that is owned by the whole group attending that event.

By default, the Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospectives, and Product Backlog refinement sessions. Throughout this article, I am going to use the term "facilitated event" as it may refer to more than just the built-in Scrum events. Throughout this article, I am also going to refer to a group rather than Scrum Team, because there are many instances where the Scrum Master needs to facilitate an event between a group of people outside of the Scrum Team or between the Scrum Team and those outside of the Scrum Team.

So What Is Facilitation?

In many cultures, I have seen how a facilitator is undermined and seen as the master of ceremony or an event organizer. I’ve even witnessed a program manager tell me that Sprint Retrospectives are less important than Sprint Planning because Sprint Retrospectives are just about having that touchy feeling. That is quite sad. Facilitation is not a passive activity. In fact, facilitation requires skills and facilitating an engaging event itself is an art. The outcome of the facilitated event is a high-quality decision. So we can also say that the Scrum Master is partly responsible for poor decision generated by the group of people.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

Agile is like Big Data – a buzzword that has been around for a couple of years already, but for which, in the end many people don’t actually know precisely what it is or how it works. Let’s start by putting everyone on the same level and go over the basics of the Agile method.

Agile consists in an iterative approach to software development, that builds the software incrementally – meaning that from the start of the project, step by step, a little bit of it is delivered at different stages, instead of delivering it all at once. It is like filling one glass of water after another, instead of giving away a full tank. Agile breaks down the project into little glasses of water, these bits of user functionality called user stories, ranks them according to their priority, and delivers them continuously in short cycles of two weeks: the iterations.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

I was having a discussion with fellow technologist Timothy and he ended up telling me a story from his college days.

In this story, his roommate arrived back at their apartment with a dog. The roommate was excited, but Timothy did not match his level of enthusiasm over the newest member of their household.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

Change management can be a cumbersome, even clumsy, practice that might even be classified as rigid. Add in an Agile mindset and the process seems at odds with each other. Interested in maintaining an Agile environment while navigating change management? Well, then, the following will help us intermingle the two approaches for managing change requests.

Is Agile for Standard or Non-Standard Changes?

Agile tends to be a better fit for non-standard changes given its fluidity. An Agile environment is always in development, always changing according to the needs of the project or the organization. Agile helps to attack work that’s unpredictable and effervescent. Standard changes, of course, are usually moved along in as predictable a manner as possible and can be slow and plodding.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

Visual story mapping is more than creating your run-of-the-mill to-do list. It is the best technique to enable your entire product management team to visualize multiple dimensions of information – and focus on how everything will come together to form a successful solution. Visual story maps align all product managers and create a common understanding of what needs to get done and how to go about doing it.

If you’re not convinced yet, here are the top reasons why easy Agile user story maps are better than any other product management tool out there.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

In continuation of my previous articles on design patterns, here I am with another very useful pattern — the bridge design pattern.

Bridge Design Pattern

  • The bridge design pattern is a structural pattern used to decouple an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.

    Source de l’article sur DZONE