Study Guide for Professional Kanban

This page represents a good place to start to learn the competencies for Professional Kanban. Schedule a free 30 minute call Table of Contents Understanding Kanban Kanban and Flow Definition This competency provides a high-level overview of a Kanban system and its purpose. It also covers key components and when you may or may not […]

Introducing Kanban for Professional Scrum Teams

A few weeks ago I was in Boston to visit the Scrum.org offices and learn to teach the Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) training class co-taught by Steve Porter and Daniel Vacanti. This is a new Professional Scrum training course created by Ken Schwaber, Scrum.org, the Professional Scrum Trainer Community and Daniel Vacanti who helped […]

Business Agility Consultancy

Our Agile consultants work with organisations to resolve problems and seize opportunities. We collaborate with leaders to identify what successful outcomes look like.  We conduct health-checks to assess the current State of Agility within your organisation. We meld this discovery with our experience to advise changes to the existing ways of working, culture and tooling […]

Scrum-Overview

What is Scrum? Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. The Scrum Framework is made up of five values, three Accountabilities, three artefacts, and five events. In this video, I’ll go through an overview of each one, explaining what they are for and […]

Hiring a Professional Scrum Master

One of my customers is hiring for the Scrum Master Role and asked if I had a handy-dandy Scrum Master Job Spec that they could use. I did not, but there have been a few good ones floating around in the ether so I thought that pulling one together would be a good idea anyway. […]

Audience

What is your role? No matter what you role is we have something that caters to your needs. UX Designers Edit This Design work can sometimes feel slow, and not well suited to quick agile cadences and Scrum events, but that isn’t the case. Learn UX techniques that fit beautifully into Scrum, and practice these techniques […]

I do continuous deliver, why should I Sprint?

Martin Hinshelwood·FollowPublished innaked Agility from Martin Hinshelwood·3 min read·May 17, 2017–Many folks believe that a Sprint is an arbitrary length of time in which you create and release software. They look at their continuous delivery pipeline and say to themselves; “Why would I limit myself to shipping only once every two weeks?”To that I say: “Where in the Scrum Guide does it say that you can’t release every day?”You will not find it, I know as I have looked. I work with many teams that release software on a continuous delivery model of everything from a few hours, to a few days, and often on-demand. Can you say that they are not doing Scrum? Of course not.So why would you want a Sprint at all?A Sprint enshrines your empirical process by providing a maximum delivery cadenceIt increases communication and alignmentIt Adds some predictability to the unpredictable nature of software by evening the batch sizes.A Sprint is a container for planning!As far as the Scrum Guide is concerned you must deliver working software at least every 30 days, but there is nothing to stop you doing it more frequently than that. Indeed continuous delivery and Scrum go together quite well in my experience.A Sprint enshrines inspect and adapt by containing your other feedback loops:Sprint Planning — Inspect the Backlog and Adapt the plan for the next SprintDaily Scrum — Inspect progress and adapt the plan for the next 24hours.Sprint Review — Inspect the Increment and adapt the BacklogSprint Retrospective — Inspect the Sprint and adapt the process.Without a Sprint when would you bring all this together? The Sprint makes the effort required to pull your work together and create a Done increment of software mandatory. It is absolutely crucial to understand that if you don’t at least have working software that meets your definition of done by the end of the Sprint then you are not doing Scrum.If you are an awesome disciplined team then by all means do something that looks a little more like Kanban, but if you don’t have the discipline to follow the rules of Scrum, how would you expect Kanban to work.Communication & AlignmentAn additional benefit of Sprinting is that it gives a cadence that your management, and other dependant teams, can follow easily. If you are coordinating work, then having a common frame of reference, Sprint 231, will aid in communication.Creates PredictabilitySoftware is inherently unpredictable. The standard deviation between the amount of work required for seemingly similar tasks is so big that it is very difficult to gain predictability. A Sprint creates an artificial batch of a fixed size (or at least less varied) with a time boxed Sprint so that you can create that cadence of predictability.ConclusionA Sprint is a container for planning rather than releasing and while Scrum requires that you have a working increment of software at least every Sprint, there is nothing to stop you doing it more often. Indeed the recommendation from Scrum.org is that you not only ship your software at least every 30 days, you should endeavour to do so more often.Scrum.org recently changed its mantra from “Improve the profession of software development” to “Improve the profession of software delivery” to start to enshrine the idea that delivery, to your customers, is no longer optional to get significant actionable feedback that you can reflect on.In short, while the Scrum Guide does not explicitly state it, it is no longer optional to ship your software to production at least every 30 days if you want to stay competitive and build the software that your users deserve.Who is naked Agility Limited — Martin HinshelwoodMartin Hinshelwood is the Founder/CEO of naked Agility Limited and has been their Principal Consultant and Trainer on DevOps & Agility for four years. Martin is a Professional Scrum Trainer, Microsoft MVP: Visual Studio and Development Technologies, and has been Consulting, Coaching, and Training in DevOps & Agility with Visual Studio, Azure, Team Services, and Scrum since 2010 and has been delivering software since 2000. Martin is available for private consulting and training worldwide and has many public classes across the globe.Originally published at nkdagility.com on May 17, 2017.Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodGetting started with a modern source control system and DevOpsThere are a number of things that you have to think about when selecting a modern source control system. Some of that is purely about code…8 min read·Nov 10, 2017–Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodHow do you handle conflict in a Scrum Team?As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer — Martin Hinshelwood — Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I…3 min read·Oct 7, 2019–Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodWhat my father taught me about Evidence-based Management (34 years before it was invented!)A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based…7 min read·Mar 20, 2014–Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodThe Dumpster fire of SAFe!SAFe has done irreparable damage to many companies like Volvo & Fitbit. 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To make things…4 min read·Feb 14, 2024–28Jessyvictany5 Best Alternatives to AgileLearn more about 5 different alternatives to Agile development.5 min read·Oct 6, 2023–1

Release planning and predictable delivery

Martin Hinshelwood·FollowPublished innaked Agility from Martin Hinshelwood·10 min read·Dec 29, 2017–Many organisations wrestle with the seeming incompatibility between agile and release management and they struggle with release planning and predictable delivery.TL;DR;Without working software, you cant build trust and you don’t know when you will get the next piece of working software.Any software that you create is an organisational asset and decisions to cut quality need to be reflected in your company accounts and as such those decisions need to made by your executive leadership and should not be made by the Development Team. Once you accept this, and quality becomes non-negotiable, your Development Team can focus on creating shippable increments of working software. Once you have shippable increments of working software you can then start to look with interest at the progress being made on features and goals.Without a regular cadence of delivery of working software any belief that you will get working software is misguided at best. Professional Development Teams create working software.The incompatibility between predictable delivery and agility is fictitious (tweet this) and while usually created by an organisation and structure that is unwilling to let go of the old ways and embrace the tenants of agile it can also be the result of a Teams fervour to divest themselves of all things that smack of prior planning. There is a lack of understanding that agile and the path to agility is far more than just a change in the way that you build software, it is a fundamental shift in the way that you run your business. Much like the lean movement in manufacturing, companies that embraced it wholeheartedly were the ones that ultimately see the competitive edge that it provides. If one is unwilling to let go of the old ways then one can’t attain the value of the new. This change will take hard work and courage as the fundamental transparency required to inspect and adapt effectively is at odds with the measures of the past. The lack of predictability of software development is the key to understanding the new model.Why is software so unpredictableAll software development is product development. In lean manufacturing, we can optimise the production of pre-developed products through the nature of its predictable production. Each unit of work takes the same amount of materials and time to produce so any changes that we make to the process, time, or materials can easily be qualified and the benefit demonstrated. Manufacturing lives in the predictive world.With software everything that we create takes its own amount of time: You can really only know how long something took after it has been completed. Even in manufacturing if you asked an engineer how long it would take to develop a new type of unit of work they would not be able to tell you with any certainty. Once they have developed it however they can tell you exactly how long it will take to make each one, and then systematically optimise the process that you use to make it. In software development we are always doing new product design, therefore, we have no certainty…and this often results in chaos. Software lives in the empirical world.All is not lost however as we can, by looking at our history of delivery for similar things, make a pretty good forecast…The best thing we can then do is to expend effort to make that forecast as accurate as possible while accepting that more time spent planning does not necessarily affect the accuracy of that forecast.Figure: Diminishing returns from Agile Estimating — Estimation ApproachesUltimately Software Development is a creative endeavour and has the same lack of predictability that painting a picture, writing a book or making a movie has. Yet movies get made all of the time. How can that possibly be! Well they have a Director (Product Owner) that has a bunch of money and a plan for delivery, a Producer (Scrum Master) to make sure that everyone has the skills, knowledge and assets available at the right time and place and one or more Units (Development Teams) that have all of the skills necessary to turn the Directors ideas into a working movie. They create Storyboards of what they expect to create so that they can run it past the stakeholders and get feedback. They take those storyboards to the Units who collaboratively work together with the stunt, prop, lighting, camera, sound and wardrobe crews to get estimates and costs and ultimately coordinating to create the movie. Sometimes they don’t know how to do stuff, and just have to have a go and see what they get.Making a movie is just like building software, you need a budget, you need a plan, and you are trying to reach a ship date. And just like building software you have to make money at the end of the day so that you can do it all over again.Accept the lack of predictabilityWhile I hope by now you understand that the lack of predictability is part of the nature of building software, there are many things that we can do to lessen the impact of that chaos. Indeed if you were to estimate all of the discreet things that you need to do to achieve a goal (let us call them backlog items) in Small, Medium and Large what would your standard deviation of actual hours be? I would wager that it is fairly large. So large in fact that at least half of all mediums would be more accurately classified as Large. But that reclassification can only be done with hindsight. This is indeed one of the tenants of the No-Estimates movement, as really there are only three classifications of size: trivial, fits in a Sprint, or too big to fit in a Sprint.This difficulty in estimation is normal for organisations that move towards agility as the transparency that it brings uncovers these sorts of problems. In order to increase the accuracies of our forecasts, there are a number of simple activities that we can perform. These activities, while easy to understand, are very hard to do as they require a culture shift within your organisation as well as the courage of the participants to make them work.Focus on continuous qualityMost software lacks quality for the simple reason that you can not easily see the quality in software like you could with a table or a painting. I am not talking about the quality of the User Interface, but the quality under the covers; the quality of the code.If you put developers under pressure to deliver they will continuously and increasingly cut quality to meet deadlines.-Unknown (Tweet this)A lack of quality of the code results in an increase in Technical Debt (or more accurately an unhedged fund) which in turn results in two nasties. The first is the teams increasingly have to spend more time struggling with the complexity of your software rather than on new features. If you are still pushing your teams to deliver the same feature level every year you are only encouraging them to cut more quality and thus incurring more technical debt which becomes a vicious cycle. The second is an increasing number of bugs found in production. Bugs found in production also directly impact on the number of features that the team can deliver and any bug, no matter how small, costs ten times and much to fix in production than it does in development.The only way to handle technical debt is to stop creating it, and then pay a little back each iteration. If however, you are so drowning in technical debt that you cant create working software at the end of the iteration then:Create a short measurable checklist that mirrors minimum releasable product (Defenition of Done)Stop adding new features and make your product meet that checklist and release your productWhile you have an increment of working software (Sprint)— — Work to create something of value (Increment)— — — — Work towards a new goal while meeting the DOD (Sprint Goal)— — — — Leave things better than you found them (Engineering Excellence)— — Review that thing of value with your stakeholders (Sprint Review, Backlog Adaption)— — — — Get feedback on at least one new thing for stakeholders— — — — Update the Backlog to reflect this new information— — Reflect on how you worked with your entire team (Sprint Retrospective, Kaizen)— — — — Is quality increasing?— — — — Is the DOD increasing?— — — — What can we change to make things better?Go to #1You can call the activity that results from dropping out of the while loop of working software to be a Scrumble; You need to stop piling more features on top of the features that don’t work and fix things so that you can make new things. Ultimately professional teams build software that works.There are a number of strategies that can help you both stop creating and start paying back technical-debt:Sufficient requirements — If your backlog has things in it that are too big or too vague then your team will not really be able to understand them and this, in turn, creates a multiplier for uncertainty. Follow the INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valued, Estimable, Small, Testable ) model for every single thing that you ask the team to deliver. If you invest in you backlog in this way you will find it much easier to deliver the contents and thus predict that delivery. This will require you to spend a significant amount of time in refinement. Backlog refinement is key to facilitating a flow of actionable Backlog Items to your team.The Development Team chooses what they can deliver — this implies that the Development Team can reject any item on the backlog that they do not understand. If we accept that every Development Team is trying to do their best to deliver for their Product Owner then the only reason to reject anything would be if an item is too big or does not have enough detail to understand. These Backlog Items can be put on the queue for refinement and refined over the next Sprint. Remember that there is no such thing as a rejected backlog item, only actionable feedback and continuous improvement.Definition of Done (DoD) — Along with having sufficient requirements the single biggest blocker to predictability is a lack of common understanding of DONE. Done for a Development Team should equal what it means to complete an item with no further work required to ship it. If you cant ship working software then you need to stop sprinting, Scrumble, and focus on getting your software into a shape that can be delivered in a Sprint.Test First — Focus on Test First practices like TDD or ATDD to help you make sure that not only did your engineers build what they expect, but that you ultimately built what the customer expects.Fixed length iterations — If you have variable length iterations you can’t be sure what you can do in a particular timeframe. How much decomposition do you need to do to the backlog? How much can the team deliver in a single iteration? You can’t be sure unless you have fixed length iteration, and you reject the idea of staggered iterations.No separate teams — This means no separate test teams, configuration management teams and definitely no separate maintenance teams. Its hard for folks to grasp, especially with the recent focus on DevOps but if you have separate teams then why would your Development Team, those best placed to fix any problems, care about the problems of other teams. The most successful organisations at creating software have development teams that own the entire application lifecycle (Amazon AWS | Visual Studio.)Manage dependencies — Managing dependencies is a hard task and my advice would always be to minimise the number of dependencies that you have. A Development Team should have all of the skills required to deliver what you want at the quality level that you want. So if you need to have productionised databases or scripting for production delivery then you might need a DBA or an Operations administrator or two. This can be hard for many teams or organisations but you will have far less success creating silos like Configuration Management or DevOps. Rather add those individuals that you need to the team. However, if you have a dependency on a separate team, maybe you have an application upon which all of your other applications depend, then you may need another way. This is not a silo of types of individual skills, but of a domain and that team just has something in their backlog upon which you are dependent. It is up to the team’s respective Product Owners to fight negotiate over when these things get done.Use a modern source control system — A modern source control system is more than just code management, it should include all of the goodies talked about in DevOps practices and beyond.If you can, do them all, and many more…Who is naked Agility Limited — Martin HinshelwoodMartin Hinshelwood believes that every company deserves high-quality software delivered on a regular cadence that meets its customer’s needs. His goal is to help you reduce your cycle time, improve your time to market, and minimise any organisational friction in achieving your goals. Martin is the Founder/CEO of naked Agility Limited and is both a Professional Scrum Trainer and a Microsoft MVP: Visual Studio and Development Technologies. He has been delivering software since 2000 and has been Consulting, Coaching, and Training in DevOps & Agility with Visual Studio, Azure, Team Services, and Scrum since 2010. You can reach Martin on hello@nkdagility.com.Originally published at nkdagility.com on December 29, 2017.Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodCan the Definition of Done change per Sprint?I was asked this question today and I think there is a clear answer, however it may change depending on the context of the question.4 min read·Oct 14, 2019–Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodThe Dumpster fire of SAFe!SAFe has done irreparable damage to many companies like Volvo & Fitbit. Do not take their case studies at face value!2 min read·Jun 25, 2022–Martin Hinshelwoodinnaked Agility from Martin HinshelwoodI do continuous deliver, why should I Sprint?Many folks believe that a Sprint is an arbitrary length of time in which you create and release software. They look at their continuous…3 min read·May 17, 2017–Martin HinshelwoodinSerious Scrum80% of communication is non-verbal | naked Agility with Martin HinshelwoodIn light of the new normal and the last 20 years of technological progress, we need to re-define co-location as we no longer need to be in…6 min read·Jun 28, 2020–Valerio ZaniniinAgile InsiderSystem Story and Job Story formats: Not everything is a User StoryThe System Story and the Job Story are two alternative formats to describe Product Backlog Items (tasks in a backlog) when the User Story…4 min read·Sep 15, 2023–Neeraj KushwahaDemystifying Agile and ScrumIn the dynamic landscape of project management, traditional methodologies often fall short in adapting to the ever-evolving requirements of…7 min read·Feb 4, 2024–Alexandra Turian8 easy steps to create a Jira story template for issue descriptionLet’s enhance our approach to refining user stories and address Jira issues with precision. 🚀·5 min read·Nov 28, 2023–eiki9 Patterns of User Story SplittingOne of the biggest challenges in Agile Product Backlog management is how to split a User Story. While one of the important practices in…5 min read·Jan 30, 2024–6OTTO TechinOTTO TechHow to setup a Kanban board in Jira using sub columnsThe team that I am part of is very used to Jira Scrum boards but recently decided to give Kanban a try. Since our tickets are all setup in…5 min read·Oct 4, 2023–2Barry OvereeminThe LiberatorsA Quickstart To Improve Team MoraleThree simple retrospective formats based on the Liberating Structures “Conversation Cafe”, “Troika Consulting”, and “Discovery & Action…9 min read·Nov 14, 2022–

Work can flow across the Sprint boundary

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can’t have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I’m going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don’t endanger the Sprint Goal. UPDATE: To find out how to allow work to flow across the Sprint boundary you can […]

I do continuous deliver, why should I Sprint?

Many folks believe that a Sprint is an arbitrary length of time in which you create and release software. They look at their continuous delivery pipeline and say to themselves; “Why would I limit myself to shipping only once every two weeks?” UPDATE: Scrum.org just posted my Scrum Tapas – Scrum and Continuous Delivery which […]