Scrum

via Bruno Baketarić: “There’s a commonly held myth that a lack of a time-bound delivery commitment, such as a sprint demonstration, will lead to a lack of focus, laziness, and increasingly long delivery times. There is, in fact, no such evidence from more than a decade of training and coaching for a living and wish to dissuade adoption of Kanban or customers from switching.” (David J. Anderson, 2023 in ‘Discovering Kanban’, p. 108)

via Mike Bowler: We’ve announced another public class of Applying Metrics for Predictability over the weekend of October 14/15.

via Alper Çuğun-Gscheidel: Every time I mention slack time as one of the most important things for healthy engineering teams people look at me as if they’re seeing water burning.

via Mark Levison: Backlog Refinement can prevent Zombie Scrum - I love the phrase Zombie Scrum. It conjures to mind teams using the practices of Scrum and getting limited benefit. They ran a workshop with their subscribers to find what was helping them with #ProductBacklogRefinement.

via Mike Bowler: I’ve noticed anecdotally that for a development team, as WIP goes down, quality goes up. I’m thinking my way through how I would visualize that and any suggestions are welcome. I can easily pull WIP numbers out of Jira (all my clients use Jira - sigh). The trick is how to measure quality. Pulling number of bugs entered into Jira can be done but absence of bugs doesn’t prove quality. SonarQube has some technical quality data but quality is more than just code.

via Mark Levison: Mise en place of Great Scrum Teams, Christiaan Verwijs - outlines 5 strategies on making refinement better:

Hot take (that may lead to some “interesting” conversations when I get back from sabbatical): Points or other detailed project estimates in software project management are a waste of time.

via Mark Levison: Solid summary article that covers INVEST (Yay), DEEP (good), Definition of Ready (maybe).

via Mark Levison: Silent backlog refinement meetings: a more effective Agile meeting.

Gareth Davies at Parabol: What is Backlog Refinement?