Scrum Under Siege

Not all agile developers are created equal. Some have more experience and have people skills. We call these developers Tech Leads. Doug and Jack interview an agile Tech Lead. His name is Doug and he agreed to do an interview as long as he got to talk about Wisconsin sports. We end the podcast with talking about badger and Packer football. All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com  

When writing stories or refining them use a Notes section to capture all those cool thoughts that you will forgot by the time you start working on the story. Doug and Jack share a few thoughts on this simple yet important thing to do. All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com If you have any thoughts on future topics or want to share your thoughts on the podcast, please go to www.scrumundersige.com/contact 

Small stories that can be completed in a sprint is a scrum foundation. Writing small stories is an art and not everyone writing stories is an artist. Doug and Jack discuss some of the signs that a story is getting too big. This is important to realize as large stories kill agile. Don't be a killer. Write small stories. All of our podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com  

Formatting for stories helps teams deliver the work by sharing the needs and values of what is being asked. Story formats are easier said than done. Experienced Agile BSAs (the few out there) and POs that get the time to write good stories would agree. This isn't something you just pick up and succeed. Doug and Jack caution about falling into format turmoil. The podcast ends with helpful ideas on how to bring up podcasting in discussions. All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com  

If you want to get all preachy about it, stories, bugs, spikes and tasks are all considered PBIs (Product Backlog Items). We agree. We also feel that PBI is jargon Doug and Jack have a short discussion on PBIs and also give some tips about how to talk about podcasts with others. All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com  

In an agile world, good testers (QA) can take a mediocre team and elevate it to an exceptional team. If the team's tester doesn't understand how to be a tester on an agile team, bad stuff can happen. Doug and Jack discuss the things a tester needs to do on an agile team. Here's a spoiler, they cannot sit in their cubes and click and tick. All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com 

Almost everybody hires an agile coach at sometime in their agile journey. There are a glutton of agile coaches out there. Doug and Jack talk about the importance of figuring out what you want the agile coach to do. Once you figure that out, you can determine what to look for.   All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com  

When hiring a developer, it's pretty easy to get dozens of applicants. Thats when you interview them and see if they have the tech experience that you need. If you are also placing this developer on an agile team, then listen to this quick podcast where Doug and Jack give out a few other things to look for besides tech experience. All of our podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersieg.com 

Scrum Under Siege endorses dad jokes to keep things light and fun. Listen to this 2 minute podcast as I share my the top dad jokes with our awesome listeners. Professional Scrum Under Siege podcasts also found at www.scrumundersiege.com 

Are you having problem with finding an Agile BSA or BA? We are here to provide guidance on what to look for when interviewing potential candidates.  Find all of our podcasts here on our web page --> www.scrumundersiege.com 

Ever needed a little advice when looking for a Product Owner, then we are here to help. This episode is about what you need to look for and some suggestions to improve your interviews to find the perfect candidate for your team. 

Hiring a Scrum Master can be difficult due to the work experience Scrum Masters have. Do they understand what servant leadership is? Did their former companies even allow them to be servant leaders? Doug and Jack pontificate on how to look for a Scrum Master. Doug also points out that Scrum Masters seeking a job can use this advice as well.

Erin is a Business Agility Coach. Doug and Jack were curious what a Business Agility Coach was so an interview was conducted. Erin tells us what she does, what value she adds and who her customers are. Since the interview was done on Jack's porch, you also get to hear Jack rattle ice in his drink, airplanes, and possibly some kid riding his bike. Besides finding all of our podcasts on your podcast app, our podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com 

Sometimes an agile team doesn't have time to complete any work because they have to many projects on their plate. The obvious solution to this is to prioritize the work. This podcast gets into that a bit but talks about why agile teams find themselves in this mess. All of our podcasts also live at www.scrumundersiege.com. Go there for a little different take on the podcasts. Feel free to use the send us some feedback by using the Contact form.

Can you do agile as a secondary job (side hustle)? Probably not if you want to do all the cool things that makes agile cool but don't let that stop you from trying. This podcast talks about setting up realistic expectations and some tips and tricks if you want to give it a try. 

Somewhere out there is a team that wants to do agile but the resources are not available to do it the conventional way. One of the corners that gets cut is having a Scrum Master. We are biased and don't recommend doing this but we do realize the reality of the real world and say you can do agile without a full time Scrum Master. Listen to a few tips on how to do this. www.scrumundersiege.com

One of the big advantages of story mapping, estimating, understanding velocity and what it takes to release is the ability to generate a relatively accurate estimated release date. Listen to how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Story Mapping is a team meeting that helps educate the team on what is needed while also allowing people to ask questions and fill in any missed gaps. It is a good thing but can get sidetracked when people start asking to map out edge cases. We talk about a few different edge cases scenarios that can happen and what to do when they appear in your story mapping session.

Scrum Under Siege scores Story Mapping on a scale of 1 to 10 as an 11. We love it. Story Mapping is a discovery session and any time you get people in a room together tasked with discovery, sometimes the conversations get out of hand. Listen to this short podcast about how to avoid some unneeded conversations.

Personas are super useful for creating story maps. They help you flush out what some hidden value when your team is building the map. Doug and Jack talk about how to avoid some of the pitfalls you can slip into when creating personas. 

Product Owners should have a roadmap to help get funding and let the organization know what they plan on doing. Good roadmaps need to be somewhat realistic. So how do you make a realistic roadmap? You need to figure out some t-shirt sizing for the future work. Doug and Jack share some thoughts on how to do this.

When team work is dream work, estimating is easy. When there is a decent difference of opinion, the waters get a little muddy. We give a few tips on what to do when team estimating runs into a few snags.

Ever wonder what estimating technique is better between: Fibonacci, T-shirt sizing & no estimates? We give you our own opinions on what might be the right technique for your team.

When estimating work in agile, we agree with the agile Overlords and recommend t-shirt sizing the work. Doug and Jack talk have a brief discussion on t-shirt sizing and some of the advantages of doing it. 

Agile coaches do not teach story estimating using hours yet the moment the agile coach moves on, everybody forgets what they are taught and starts estimating in hours thinking this will be a key to success. Thats a mistake. Listen to Doug and Jack describe why hour estimates are bad news.

Retros have lots of value in agile and are often overlooked as a ho-hum ceremony. There are a few things that can creep into your retro to make them ho-hum. Listen to the fellas give some solutions to some common retro problems.

In theory, refinement sessions go great. Everybody attends and actively participates. Sometimes things don't go according to plan. What do you do? Listen to some problems that can occur and how to deal with them. This episode is sponsored by MNRegister's jobs page. MNRegister has the best local jobs, just for you! www.mnregister.com/jobs

Jeff Kern from Upsie sits down with Scrum Under Siege and tells us about what life is like running agile at a start up. We talk about comparing corporate agile vs start up agile, what its like not to have a scrum master or QA, haircuts, boiling frogs and spending time on the cloud. An informative and entertaining chat. This episode is sponsored by MNRegister's jobs page. MNRegister has the best local jobs, just for you! www.mnregister.com/jobs

Demos are a foundational agile ceremony. Gather people together and give them a demonstration of what you did in the sprint and talk about what is to come in the next sprint. Seems easy to do right? Not really. We have seen several demos fall flat. In this podcast Doug and Jack identify things that can go wrong in a a demo and offer tips on how to prevent the wrongness.  This episode is sponsored by MNRegister's jobs page. MNRegister has the best local jobs, just for you! www.mnregister.com/jobs

Agile is a simple wonderful concept that get mired down in all sorts of corporate nonsense. Here are few no brainer ideas that one can easily implement to make things go a lot smoother.

Ever wondered if carry over for an Agile Sprint matters? We have an episode slated to address that. We talk about what exactly the "carry over trap" is and how to avoid it. This episode is sponsored by MNRegister's jobs page. MNRegister has the best local jobs, just for you! www.mnregister.com/jobs

Capacity planning a sprint is helpful for new teams or teams that feel it is needed. Its easy to burnout your team or not accomplish what your team had hoped for. In this latest episode about Capacity planning pitfalls we will address common mistakes made on teams. We call these pitfalls. Pitfall #1 - Capacity planning people at 8 hours a day is unrealistic.  Pitfall #2 - Capacity planning people down to 0 hours gives no room to finish work.

Stand-ups are easy to operate in a 15 minute time box robotically or drone on for a hour update. To truly make a ceremony effective in Agile, it has to be engaging. You want the collective team to stay engaged and actively eager to help each other out. Seems easy enough, but most teams tend to struggle with this. Listen to our latest podcast about what we have experienced. Its sure to be impactful. 

FYI – This podcast is about Charters. It is not about death. We just wanted to have a little fun with the title. Doug and I think Charters can be useful but you better be thoughtful about why you are chartering and then adjust accordingly. Check out this episode for tips and tricks in creating a useful charter.

MVP isn't as easy as it sounds. There are many barriers or reasons why traditional "by the book" mvp doesn't always work in lager corporations. Some of these barriers include management demands, giant project roadmap, cross commits to other teams, budgets, established expectations and migrations.

Ever wondered if your priotization techniques really work? Hear us talk about teams simply prioritizing everything as their number 1 and our thoughts on this.

This is a real life example of understanding top priorities but not going after the top priority right away. It sure is easy to say to go after high priority first, but sometimes the real world gets in the way. Doug and Jack talk about some reasons why Agile teams don't always go after the high priority Roadmap items from the get go. Come check out our new episode, Value is in the eye of the beholder, that identifies why companies and teams don't always tackle the highest listed Roadmap items right away.

Jeremy Mann is a professional contractor who hangs his hat on the BSA hat rack. While Jeremy's passion lies with BSA work, don't let that fool you. He is a Scrum Lord who can talk and teach scrum with anybody.  This interview is geared at the work BSAs do in the Agile world. Jeremy makes his case for why BSAs are important. Here is list of questions asked and answered. What is the difference between a BSA and a BA? What value does a BSA bring to an Agile team? Who does the BSA work on a team with no BSA? What makes a BSA a good Agile BSA? Story formats. What does Jeremy use? What are keys to keep story mapping from spinning out of control?  

Agile by the book says there are no hard deliverable dates. Teams figure out the work and the work drives the delivery date. This happens a lot but we have been faced with hard deadlines many times. Listen to what causes hard deadlines. We will propose our solutions to help you survive the deadline perils. Ensured to make your commute go by fast. 

They say that the velocity of a team is the Holy Grail for agile metrics. We think that velocity is cool but not that cool. King Arthur would be disappointed in us. Velocity is filled with false positives that we will discuss. Working with velocity is an art, not a science or simple math equation.

We had Sabine, a organizational change agent focusing on business agility, to talk about why Organizational changes are so difficult from a leadership level. Come tune in to hear about challenges every company will face when adopting Agile and what exciting new items are being explored in the Agile world. 

We have data all around us, sprints, story points, velocity... Your team will be asked for all sorts of reporting and metrics, but when should we really use the data at our disposal? Come join us and hear our take on this topic. 

Beware of the good intentions that distract from delivering whatever you are working on. We go into details about things that we have faced that haven't worked as expected. 11 mins.

Agile shops and corporations love to hear about metrics around delivery. Resist the urge to report for the sake of reporting. Whats worth more, metrics or a useful product? 10 mins.

Come learn with us about the differences between Product vs IT organizations. We have a very special guest, Chris Barron (Agile Consultant/Coach/Trainer), who will provide his take on all of this. Chris has been our mentor and sounding board for this podcast so we wanted to give him a chance to promote his thoughts. Hope you're are as excited about this interview as we are. 20 mins.

Listen to our short episode about storming on teams. We have our own interesting takes with a pragmatic approach that coaches won't tell you. 11 mins.

Listen to our short Episode about Team Identity. In this episode we will talk about teams that you will encounter in your own experiences as we share our own tales. We will leave theory at the door and give you practical takes on what Agile Coaches won't tell you. 10 mins.

Listen to our short Episode about Team Life Cycle. We will talk about the stages of getting your Agile team to be more self sufficient and will provide input about our own experiences. We will leave theory at the door and give you practical takes. 13mins