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AdamM

About AdamM

https://ouragilejourney.com

I have been a software developer since June 2008. Before that I spent almost 5 years working my way from part-time computer support to Systems/Network Administrator & IT Team Lead of a 500 person multiple campus company. Before that I did 2 years as a phone support technician. With over 12 years of IT industry experience spread across both system administration and software development I see IT in a broader scope than most. Now I am becoming something more. I am an Agilist. I am moving on to project management. I am pushing positive change within my team, group, and company. I am looking to provide the best solutions for delivering the most value to organizations in the shortest practical time. I believe that even as I move from implementing Agile to teaching Agile to others I will never be done learning it.

Posts by Adam Myhr:

Back to the Basics: Prologue

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“Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun.” – Ray & Molly (Dakota Fanning & Brittany Murphy), Uptown Girls 2003

If you haven’t seen the movie I forgive you. The quote is used twice. The first time by Ray (pre-teen girl) to justify herself (to Molly – her 20-something Nanny) spending a lot of time doing the same basic dance move over and over again instead of just having fun. The second time is by Molly to explain why she is taking an entry-level job in the fashion industry when her resume suggests she could skip ahead to a mid/high career level position. There are times when I read forums and blogs online where I feel as if Scrum is that higher level job or the more advanced dance moves. The problem is that successful Scrum should build on a Manifesto and Principles.

While reading a blog post by Mario Moreria I felt he may have found part of the root cause.  I have pointed out the danger of Agile being seen primarily as Scrum in previous posts. That post and my own thoughts inspired me to explore the heart of Agile. This week I am starting a series of posts that will go over what I consider to be Agile basics based on the Agile Manifesto and the twelve principles used to uphold it.

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PSM Versus CSM Revisited

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Previously I talked about the differences between Certified Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Master. In that post I concluded that from a hiring stand-point they were functionally the same. The big difference comes for the person seeking the certification. One certification requires a class costing $1200 followed by a short, reportedly easy, test and the other requires a difficult test costing $100. Since the company just spent more than those totals combined to send me to PMI-ACP training followed by the exam fees I opted to self fund my certification. Lack of spare vacation days means I needed one that didn’t require 2 days of my time. As I ended that post I pointed out that my money is on the PSM.

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Thoughts for a Holiday break.

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I’m taking a break this week and possibly next. I didn’t want to just disappear for two weeks though. I leave you with a short simple thought.

As an Agilist I have a mindset I approach projects and planning with. I go beyond just projects with it though. It is the same approach I use in direct development of software. I use the same mindset in setting up my work space and picking the tools I use to do my job.

I even take this mindset beyond the workplace. In parenting two preschoolers an Agile mindset is essential. Imagine taking a road trip with preschoolers. What approach would work better? Creating a strict plan completely built up front with deviation only allowed in extreme circumstances or creating a loose plan with room for adjustment made available?

This is the Agile mindset. A mistake many make is in thinking the Agile mindset is about taking that road trip with planning limited to a vague idea of where you want to end up. In reality it is planning the important parts of the road trip (destination, overnight stays) and allowing for the details (gas stops, meal times) to be worked out as close as practical to the time they occur.

So practice this mindset over the Holidays. Go ahead and have a plan for visiting family, for how the evenings and mornings will go with your family. At the same time, be ready for things to change. Be OK with the fact that there are things about the time you don’t yet know. Allow reasonable change to occur. Sometimes, even the end goal will change by the time you get there.

Don’t just use Agile practices at work, start to really be Agile. Become an Agilist.

Cross-Functional: Teams vs Individuals

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Last week I was reading through some old posts on Scrum in preparation for my PSM exam. One on Ken Schwabers blog caught my attention. I will not pretend to know more than Mr. Schwaber about Scrum or Agile. I did pose a question with some explanation to my thinking in the comments. I have expanded on that comment here and would love to know what other people think about it.

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Professional or Certified?

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Certified. Adjective. Having met the official requirements that are needed to do particular type of work.

Professional. Adjective. Conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession.

Do you prefer your football players to be certified or professional? What about your auto mechanics? Does it matter?

Professional Scrum Master (PSM). Certified Scrum Master (CSM).

Initially I had no preference for either of these certifications. I chose to enter the realm of Agile Project Management through the broader avenue of the PMI-ACP. As I have been immersing myself in the Agile world over the last year I have come to realize something. Many people seem to act as if Agile and Scrum are interchangeable. (They are not.) As I strive for Agility in all I do I started to look into Scrum certification. I found two recognized and competing certifications.

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Do What You Can Now

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If you haven’t read last weeks post yet I would encourage you to spend some time going through it. In fact, I really would like you to read it over before finishing this post. Usually a writer at this point will tell you that they’ll wait while you go read it. I’m going to be brutally honest with you. I’m not waiting.

I’m not going to pause in my typing for the approximate amount of time it would take to finish the previous post. I’m also not going to try to get some cool web wizardry cooked up to prevent the rest of this post from appearing until after you’ve finished reading that one. It would be relatively pointless since we both know I wrote this whole thing before you looked at the first word. What I am going to do is assume you’ve read it. With that in mind I say I have to ask, what did you do in the last week to move closer to being truly Agile?

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When to go Agile

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Change for the sake of change is not a good way to run a company. Truly it’s not even a good way to run a team within a company. Constant unnecessary change will drain a teams energy. It will prevent Agile teams from becoming high-performing.

By that same token never changing is an even bigger failure. The real trick is to do the right amount of change at the right time for the right reasons. This is what we deal with as we try to become more Agile. Every situation is different and I am not going to pretend to have all those answers. What I do know is that there are some general guidelines to help us create an approach to implementing Agile based on how ready the organization may be for change.

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Fighting OK

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One of the worst things to have happen at work is for everything to be OK. Last week I read a post over at Managed Agile Development. It got me thinking about the push towards Agile that we are making. We have met with resistance, and some of it is most definitely because things here are OK.

Our development process doesn’t have a huge pain point. Sure, we have some irritation here and there, but nothing really hurts. With nothing causing a large amount friction there’s resistance to change. 

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Agile is not Scrum

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When looking for information on Agile, software development is the most common industry represented. Within those results more often than not Scrum is used as the implementation. Many articles that try to talk about Agile in a generic sense use terminology from Scrum. A common side effect of this is that many people associate Agile and Scrum on a 1 to 1 level. This is a problem.

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Story Points should not be numbers.

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Earlier I introduced the concept of Planning Poker for estimation. (Part One. Part Two.) This has continued to be a very good tool for our team, and specifically our project manager. While most notably used for estimation, that is only part of the benefit that is received by using a process similar to Planning Poker. To our team the interaction between the team and the product owner coupled with the team wide understanding of upcoming user stories are bigger benefits.

When I first introduced this new form of estimation to the group I made a mistake. I did explain the concept of story points to the group and even had cards made to represent them. The cards all had graphics backing the central number to help frame them as relative effort. Boxes play heavily into the product we develop, so I had single boxes, groups of boxes, and pallets of boxes for the story points. I also created a separate set of cards for estimating tasks and bugs. They were to be done in hours, so they had cards with numbers and no background. The mistake is that the story points were set up with the same set of values as the hours.

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