Great resource for reviews of books in the form of sketch videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/Callibrain/videos
Ten Things the Beatles Can Teach You About Being Agile
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting blogpost about ten things he learned from the Beatles about being agile:
- Getting Better
- Can’t Buy Me Love
- With a Little Help from My Friends
- A Day in the Life
- I Am the Walrus
- We Can Work it Out
- Tomorrow Never Knows
- Come Together
- Don’t Let Me Down
- Eight Days a Week
Read the post here: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/ten-things-the-beatles-taught-me-about-being-agile
Ten sentences with all the Scrum Master advice you’ll ever need
Mike Cohn has been a Scrum Master for over 20 years. Over that time, he gave and collected quite a lot of advice and distilled it down to the ten best bits for you:
- Never Commit the Team to Anything Without Consulting Them First
- Remember You’re There to Help The Team Look Good
- Don’t Beat the Team over the Head with an Agile Rule Book
- Nothing Is Permanent So Experiment with Your Process
- Ensure Team Members and Stakeholders View Each Other as Peers
- Protect the Team, Including in More Ways than You May Think
- Banish Failure from Your Vocabulary
- Praise Often But Always Sincerely
- Encourage the Team to Take Over Your Job
- Shut Up and Listen
Read the complete article here: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/ten-sentences-with-all-the-scrum-master-advice-youll-ever-need
When Kanban is the Better Choice
five conditions under which Brendan Wovchko has found Kanban to be a better fit than Scrum:
- Low Tolerance for Change
- Obvious at All Levels
- Fluid Priorities
- Small Teams
- Complex Collaboration
Read the complete blog-post here: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/when-kanban-is-the-better-choice
How To Scale Scrum for Large Software Teams | The Nexus Framework from Scrum.org
10 powerful strategies for breaking down Product Backlog Items in Scrum
Teams that have mastered Scrum know that the key to success lies in a just-in-time, increasingly refined, breakdown of work on the Product Backlog. They prefer Sprint Backlogs with many small (functional) items instead of just a few large ones. Smaller items improve flow and reduce the risk of failing the sprint. In this article, I will explain why the breakdown of work is important, and why it should be done across functional — instead of technical — boundaries. Christiaan Verwijs offers 10 useful strategies that experienced Scrum Teams use to break down work in this article: https://medium.com/the-liberators/10-powerful-strategies-for-breaking-down-user-stories-in-scrum-with-cheatsheet-2cd9aae7d0eb
How writing Unit Tests forces you to write Good Code: And 7 bad arguments why you shouldn’t
Unit Testing is about writing good, well-designed, decoupled code that, as a result, is automatically testable.
Good Code is code that works well and is easy to maintain, extend, comprehend and understand (in the present and in the future).
The following (well-established) practices are important:
- Reduce coupling
- Maximize encapsulation
- Single responsibilities
- DRY
- Open/closed
- Documentation
- Use design patterns
What is a Good Unit Test?
- Tests only your class, not it’s depedancies
- Input/output checks
- Hypothesis-based
- Concept-based
- Small
- Intuitive
- Uses business/domain terminology
Reasons why you should not write a unit test:
- ‘Unit testing takes too much time or is too difficult’
- ‘Unit testing is a luxury (we don’t have)’
- ‘Unit testing is not necessary, because I already write Good Code’
- ‘Unit testing is not possible with this legacy code’
- ‘I don’t have enough knowledge of Unit Testing’
- ‘Unit testing are inferior to regression/integration/manual tests’
- ‘Someone else (like a tester) can write tests for my code’
Read the complete article here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/how-writing-unit-tests-forces-you-to-write-good-code-and-7-bad-arguments-why-you-shouldnt-9b0cc3461d7a
Beyond Budgeting – The Adaptive And Agile Management Model
Beyond Budgeting is a powerful Agile management model for budgets. The Corporate Rebels give you the low-down: https://corporate-rebels.com/beyond-budgeting-model/
The True Cost of Rewrites
Your code is complex and working with it is difficult. Years of development and bug fixes have you ready to declare bankruptcy on your technical debt and start again from scratch. It feels so freeing to leave all your past mistakes behind and start over in
Before you do a cost-benefit analysis on rewriting your application, take the time to consider the true costs of the effort. I think you’ll find it almost never pays off to approach a rewrite in this way.
Read the complete article here: https://8thlight.com/blog/doug-bradbury/2018/11/27/true-cost-rewrites.html
The Scrum Master Craft
Being a Scrum Master is a craft, as it is a combination of knowledge, skill and experience that enables you as a Scrum Master to be effective.
The duty of the Scrum Master is to reveal not Resolve. There are many anti-patterns from the misunderstanding around Servant Leadership.
Flow works best in a pull-based system. This applies to
A technique Simon Reindl has found helpful is to flip every statement into a question. “You seem to be covering up progress” becomes “How are you making your work transparent?”.
W.A.I.T. (Why Am I Talking?)
A phrase he heard a lot is “The person talking is the one doing the learning”. The meme/trope of the evil villain monologuing, while their downfall is being prepared for them is not a good space to be in within a team. This was summarised by Andy Hiles as W.A.I.T.
Read the complete article here: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-master-craft