Agile Complexification Inverter

Do you despise updating your resume as much as I do? Are you still waiting for an XML Resume standard such that you can publish the data of your job history and allow all the recruiters to format the data however they wish?  Right - a bot could do that job. Yeah, me too.  I've wondered why the old 19th Century technique of writing a resume still persists.  I've only ONCE applied for a job that did NOT allow a resume upload.  It wanted a LinkedIn URL and a few other bits of data.  I double-checked... nope, no place to upload a 19th C. letter stating all my wonderful qualities.  That's one out of a couple of thousand applications.  One company that had made it to the 21st Century. Since I've been searching for my next team ...  I've updated my tired ol' 19th Century paper resume to an online modern tool... it's sexy and cool.  All the kids are doing it.  Come along with me and let's try out NovoResume . This is a really nice and e...

First, allow me to lay out some ground rules and a touch of the backstory... I'm not a professional book reviewer, nor paid in any way to read.  But if I could get that gig... I'd be a happy camper.  I've never written a book, but I've hacked out some code, a few articles, some of which might be considered book reviews.  I've worked in the Agile industry for more than a decade (but who's counting), and so - I may be a little close to the topic to have a proper literary impartial bias.  In fact, let me just go ahead and be explicit - I've done this, been there, got the t-shirt; I shit you not - this shit is for real! Agile  Noir  by Lancer Kind Now the ground rules...  I think this review will be written ... what's the word... while I'm reading, at the same time, without much delay in the reading-writing phases.... in situ .... iteratively... oh I give up... So don't be surprised - dear reader - if I just drop off in the middle......

Introduction:  What We Have Learned Originally written in 1993, this edition written in 2003 has additional insights from 10 years of working with teams.  The authors see more pragmatism on the subject, less thoughtless rushes to a fad movement.  Top leaders are seeing that teams also apply to themselves, at the top of the business.  They see the core aspect as discipline, not the management fad du jour.  The discipline for team performance has 6 basics: team size, complementary skills, common purpose, performance goals, commonly working agreements, and mutual accountability.  The desire to be a team is not sufficient - one must have performance centric outcomes as the objective.  Leadership is more important at the beginning - but not the primary determinant of success.  Most organizations have untapped potential in team performance.  The organizations performance ethic makes the difference between one-off success and widespread org...

Let's look at an info-graphic of a beginning team's metrics and use this as a case study in Scrum Team Metrics. Description of charts: Burndown chart - a daily count of the number of task units (aspirin is this teams selected units for task estimation) not done.  This includes the task yet to be started, and task in process. Tasks in Process - a daily count of the number of tasks in process. Tasks Done - a daily count of the number of tasks that are done. Stories Done - a daily count of the number of Stories that are done. Velocity - the empirical measure of Stories that are considered done by the team and accepted as done by the Product Owner during the Sprint Review. The Back Story on this team: This team had been attempting to do some form of ad-hoc Scrum / Kanban with little guidance and understanding of the process.  The Kanban aspect came from the company's tooling (RTC) template - not from any real practices the team was implementing.   After som...

A fractal flower pattern I find Scrum practices to be very self-similar at various scales of granularity. For example the Sprint appears to start with a planning sessions. Yet within the flow of a sprinting team the planning sessions actually starts with a Sprint Review and Process Retrospective and only then do we look into the future. So in the big picture, planning starts with review. Just like in the Scrum Standup meeting - the 3 questions - it starts with a review. What did you get done (past tense)? Next, what will you do (future tense)? And last, what impedes your progress (current tense)? The Scrum Standup meeting has a flow of past, future, now. When laid out end to end sprints have a similar pattern: Review & Retro (past), followed by Planning (future), followed by sprinting or doing the work (every day, the now). This self similar pattern can be found in many of the Scrum practices. Practices that mature agile teams use to deliver working tested product increments...