Stefan Wolpers

Thanks for the Kudos! Best, Stefan

I agree, Alan. As so often, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I would like to train a support chatbot to help with everyday questions when no other support, for example, from the community is available. Also, I would be interested in a sparring partner to get a better understanding about a specific topic or thought.

Explain what?

https://age-of-product.com/scrum-anti-patterns/

In my world, the team is regularly refactoring the application — it is part of the daily job. Hence there is no need to do what you describe.

It is about the conversation; not the numbers. Think CCC.

How is that relevant for the article?

"Valet" — I like the coining!

I was referring to the moment when people wait in-line to share with others. The newer version of the article can be found here: https://age-of-product.com/stand-up-anti-patterns/

…“textbook Scrum” I have practiced successfully with more than 20 teams in 10-plus organizations.

I guess we agree to disagree.

I absolutely agree, Patty!

Keep it simple and do not indulge in fancy tools; the law of diminishing returns applies here, too.

It helps understand the background of traditional managers.

Hi Margot,

That depends on the context — be creative!

Thanks for the link!

Thanks for the kudos! You might be interested in downloading the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide (free PDF) as well. Next post in the coming week is the sprint retrospective.

I am not promoting that we live in a binary world. How would that be possible given that any organization needs to find its own of handling things? The level of how “agile” you are is always relative. The are too many variables in the equation.

Which also explains why I asked one question in the poll: to have a quick sentiment test, and more importantly, spark a discussion. And in that respect, everyone is qualified to have an opinion and participate.

Free your mind and hack some tools. The NPS model is a great tool to bring up and track sentiment levels. I use, for example, to run polls on confidence levels to meet release dates.

Thanks a lot for to hint! (The fix is submitted to review.)

Thanks for the kudos!

What makes you believe that? Could you be more elaborate?

I disagree, your opinion contradicts my experience as shared in the post.

And how is that helping the team to get better?

You're referring to these “72% accomplished” metric?

Totally agree, particularly on sprint review part. On some projects, they feel more like an extended version of the daily reporting routine — aka daily scrum –. And I am as well still searching for the golden key… :)

Tobias, I agree. Anything that you would add?

Ouch! Thanks for pointing at it! #fixed

I dug further into the agile micromanagement aspect in my latest post Agile Micromanagement in the Era of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

Thanks for sharing the post!

You will like to my next post: "Agile Micromanagement in the Era of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose"…

I would not call agile a fraud, but it is certainly prone to be abused to serve personal agendas of the middle management.

I will publish a new post tomorrow that will dig deeper into the reasons for that.

Well, turn the product owner into a someone who's solely writing user stories, get rid of the Scrum master — what are these people doing anyway the whole day —, and delegate any product decision to separate entity, and you get a sprint-based waterfall model with some agile suger-coating on top. Sad thing is, that this may work quite well in a lot of organizations.

Agreed. I was just summarizing and categorizing the concerns some developers are voicing for various reasons. Some ground in failure adoptions and I have experienced them myself. Some are probably more ego-related. But see for yourself, I shared five links at the bottom oft the post. If you're interested, I can also provide some HN threads on the topic…

There has to be one, I am still optimistic… :)

I have had my fair share of such management failures, too. As I mentioned in the TL;DR of the original post:

The agile consulting industry repackages an originally human-centered, technology-driven philosophy into a standardized, all-weather project-risk mitigating methodology. Sold to command & control organizations, their middle managers turn “Agile” into a 21. century adoption of Taylorism for knowledge workers.

I started a LinkedIn group some months ao, the ‘Agile Clinic’; the dev perspective would be highly appreciated: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8435015

Got it. By my understanfing, the product backlog grooming is a weekly excercise, where the PO and the team are working jointly on the user stories. It substitutes to a large part sprint planning I…

At least you got to try…

I also managed to sneak in a kind of business value poker through the backdoor that way: Getting from the external project into the "real" backlog required some pitching by the stakeholders…

That's also how I handle it. I just don't call the large one "backlog", as that might cause problems with expectation management on the stakeholder side. I usually create a different project (e.g. in Jira) for that purpose… (Okay, now I am wearing the PO hat.)

Good ones, Deepak! Will enhance the list…

MY sincere apology, Serguei, I did not notice your comment earlier!

To your question: It's not about taking planning away. On the contrary. But I am convinced that "commitment meeting velocity" isn't a suitable metric for an agile team and its rate of success. Going with that is like having a planned economy, where are plans are always fulfilled…

Thanks a lot for the feedback! I am currently working on the next release of set of questions; this time including guidance on acceptable anwers.

Absolutely, "fixing" projects and agile transitions seems to be an less well communicated demand – who likes to admit failure?

Good list of indicators!

Referrring to #6, I like to mention, though, that imposters are not necessarily external consultants. I just published a list of 38 interview questions to identify those as early in the process as possible and would appreciate your feedback. (The corresponding DZone article is still in moderation.)