Bay Area Agile Philanthropy Group
A group of folks interested in using agile values and principles to give back to the community is going to meet in January to charter the Bay Area Agile Philanthropy User Group (BAAPUG). This will be on January 17 at Tacit Knowledge headquarters and we will define the community, the mission, vision and values of the group. If you’re interested in attending the chartering meeting, or discussion what we’re about further, you can join the Yahoo! group here. This group is based on inspiration from Bob Payne at Code Green Labs, creating events where people could both participate in an agile project and help out a non-profit at the same time.
Tags: agile, philanthropy
How will we demo?
If you are struggling with concrete enough acceptance criteria, acceptance criteria that doesn’t specify the “how”, just the “what”, one technique that I find especially helpful is specifying “How will we demo?” to the story. This usually puts the product owner and the team in the right frame of mind for what we’re getting at with acceptance criteria something both specific and actionable. For instance, if you are designing a shopping cart, the question “How will we demo this” may bring up a discussion of one book from the catalogue being searched for and added to a shopping cart and displayed for view. Typically I’ll have this as part of the template for a story card. Part of the beauty of this method lies in the act of imagining what will count as done in the future. There is something about the act of forcing humans to “remember the future”, of what the screen or web service will look like in two weeks during the iteration demo, that helps substantially when trying to get enough detail to estimate or commit to a story.
Tags: Scrum, sprint planning
Restickable Glue Stick - Another reason 3M has a stranglehold on the Scrum Community
I like 3M post-it notes for sprint and release planning. It makes it really easy to have multiple people interact with stories and tasks. Unlike electronic tools, I don’t become a bottleneck for planning. However, I’m not against electronic tools. In fact they make sense for distributed teams and for backing up data that is on cards. So, what’s a girl to do?
3M Restickable Glue
This is where the 3M restickable glue stick comes in. It’s like regular glue stick, except you can use it to make anything into a repositionable sticky note. This means you can print your backlog from Excel, Google docs, Rally, VersionOne, etc. onto paper sheets or Avery card stock, slap some restickable glue stick on each story, cut them out and stick-em to the wall. When the product owner wants to change priority on a story, just pull it up and move it and stick it where you want it. Rather than hard to use clear Scotch tape, which is hard to unstick, or bright blue painters tape which may cover your story card, this is hidden and easy to use.
One stick of this stuff lasted me about 10 sprint planning meetings.I recommend a stick in every Scrum Master’s kit.
In a later episode, I’ll explain how I like to print out my backlog to Avery card stock to make planning easy.
