It is a great concept this multidisciplinary thing: Create a single team with all the different people required to deliver a service, instead of having different knowledge areas doing their part independently. Make them work at the same pace. Have them focus on the same goal at a given moment. Remove extremely detailed documentation to […]
Scrum teams: self-organizing or self-directed?
Recently I am facing discussions too frequently with different people about the meaning of a self-organizing team in SCRUM. I think there are some misunderstandings between self-organizing and self-directed teams. Let’s see… a self-organized team follows a goal ( that might or might not be shared ) defined by the P.O. and her stakeholders. The team […]
Yet another niko-niko calendar
Recently, As part of the Coaching project Agilar is doing at King.com , we introduced the usage of niko-niko calendars to offer awareness of the team’s mood. As usual, it’s being a very useful tool for everyone to understand in a glance how things are going, and help sharing the responsibility of improving the team’s […]
The value of your network
How do you manage your professional network? I have an account at both Viadeo (which I rarely use) and LinkedIn (which I use much more than Facebook). I always wondered how some people managed to get to over 500 connections so quickly. I personally reached that number less than a year ago and I have […]
A coach is not part of the team
Teams are cool. Forming part of a cool team is even cooler. By working closely with a team it is easy to feel part of it but that’s not the job of a coach. As a coach your role is to make the team go through the tortuous path to high-performance. Chances are you are […]
Agile Game Development: Planning, what is a User Story?
Recently, Jose Ramón and I are working with the guys from King.com at Barcelona. Some of our learnings there is that in game development, we tend to think that a game feature is a User Story. This belief leads us to think that developing US takes way longer than a reasonable time for a sprint, […]
ScrumMasters and Dragons : Bcn Session
Last Wednesday, March 20th, Agilar celebrated the end of this winter in Barcelona organizing a “ScrumMasters and Dragons” session, in collaboration with Appstylus . We had the opportunity to perform this session with around 20 people, with different skills: From agile coaches, members of the Agile BCN community, some advanced practitioners and some newbies. From Agilar, we had the pride to […]
Estimating User Stories: Agile relative estimations vs single-and-direct US estimation
Ok, time to speak about agile planification. Estimating user stories one-by-one is a common ( bad ) practice in many teams. What stage are you currently? My team doesn’t use Story Points, we still estimate in man-hour, and we plan our week capacity to be 40 hours / week / developer. My team doesn’t use […]