Showing all posts in April 2017

In Scrum Activities, User Group

Agile and AWS: A Presentation at AWS Las Vegas

Author Stephanie BryantPosted on Leave a comment

Jon Hathaway and Alex Singh, presenters of Agile and AWSWednesday night, I went to a presentation on Agile and AWS held by AWS Las Vegas at Innevation Center. The speakers were Jon Hathaway of HATech, and Alex Singh of OrgAgility. The presentation was primarily a case study of transitioning slot machine manufacturing giant IGT into having a lean, Agile DevOps team and company culture to support it. By coaching the DevOps team in using Agile and AWS, they report that IGT reduced the time to upgrade slot machines on the floor from 18 months to 2 weeks.

That’s a phenomenal reduction in time, and I was very impressed with their results.

My One Takeaway

I took three pages of notes during the presentation. A lot of it was repeat information from my experiences with Agile, but I always like to have one takeaway to share, and here’s the one I chose from last night:

In this particular DevOps team, each day was like a mini-iteration. They start the day with a standup, like most teams, but that standup plans the goals and tasks for that day only. This keeps the team extremely flexible and able to solve problems. Multi-day tasks can be tackled, but if they have a higher priority item come in, they can switch focus on that item for one day, then refocus on the next. This reduces the overhead from context-switching. Employees are already context-switching by going home at night, so changing focus in the morning doesn’t reduce more productivity.

There were a lot of other topics and tons of information on using Agile and AWS, so much so that I felt almost like we were cramming a 2-day session on Agile into 90 minutes! But it was a very solid talk and both Alex and Jon were highly receptive to questions from the attendees.

In Scrum Activities, User Group

Can You Get Unicorns? Agile Estimating and Planning at the Las Vegas Agile User Group

Author Stephanie BryantPosted on Leave a comment

Agile Estimating and Planning was the topic of the first Agile and Scrum User Group meeting here in Las Vegas on Monday night, and it was a good one!

A little club business

In the last 3 months, Jim Schiel reached out to users of numerous local IT-related groups to invite them to join this new meetup group. As a result, we are now over 50 members and growing! Our first meeting was April 24th, and had about 8 attendees– not bad for a first time! We started by talking about the group and organization, then did introductions. The group was a wide range, from project managers and scrum masters like me, to developers and IT administrators. Slightly more than half were currently unemployed.

A great presentation

Can you get unicorns?Jim then gave a 90-minute presentation on Agile estimating and planning. He led an exercise in which we created and sized a backlog for a wedding. The exercise was a bit fun and a bit frustrating. I took on the role of an enthusiastic bride (the customer): “Of course the carriage should be pulled by horses. Unless you can get unicorns! Can you get unicorns?”

Jim’s a trainer and coach for numerous Agile methodologies, including Scrum. He explained the difference between estimating by “effort,” such as work hours or ideal person days, versus “size,” like story points or t-shirt sizing used in Scrum.

Some useful numbers I wrote down so I wouldn’t forget them:

When estimating the deliverable date, use the following formula:

backlog size/velocity * a variable = the number of iterations to complete the backlog.

This is a common approach, though it doesn’t really account for changes in the backlog after development has begun. The variable mentioned above is just for the team’s ability to work together:

  • If your team has worked together and is already a good, Agile team, with a fairly consistent and known velocity, the variable number is about 1.2 (adding 20%).
  • If your team is experienced-but-learning, multiply by 1.4 (adds 40%).
  • If your team is new, or they haven’t done Agile before, or there’s lots of technical debt, multiply by 1.7 or 1.8 (add 70-80%).

This really highlighted the importance of a strong team. Jim tried to hammer home that an organization’s process maturity isn’t its agility– the people/culture are its agility.

What’s next?

What’s next for the Agile and Scrum User Group? The next currently scheduled meeting isn’t till July, but I’m planning a Lean Coffee sometime in May or early June so we don’t lose momentum.

In Games

Training Game to Build Teamwork

Author Stephanie BryantPosted on 1 Comment

Here’s a 10-minute training game you can do with visual learners to build teamwork.

Setup the Training Game

Sort into small groups of 2-3 people.

Distribute 1 piece of paper per group and 1 pen or marker per person– no erasers! Remind players to keep their content PG. Otherwise, tell them there is no “bad” drawing in this exercise.

Start the Training Game

One person draws a basic symbol or shape on a piece of paper. Pass the paper to the next player in the group.

The next player adds something to the drawing. Pass the paper to the next player.

Finish the Training Game

Repeat for 8 minutes. Players may talk to each other during this exercise. See if a story emerges. Players may not erase or undo any element in the drawing. Pick one team to explain their drawing and the process.

Learning Objective of the Training Game

Teams build on each others’ work to make something greater than one individual could do alone. By passing the page back and forth several times, team members also see incremental improvement during the development of the final drawing.

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In Road Warrior

Business Travel Packing Retrospective

Author Stephanie BryantPosted on 1 Comment

Not packing light, here!I spent the last 4 days in San Diego at the Global Scrum Gathering. Today, I’m going to do a “travel packing retrospective” in which I list what I brought in my “one bag,” with everything I didn’t use crossed out.

This post is a “Personal Scrum” and serves as part of my “trip retrospective,” in which I look back at one element of the trip (my packing and luggage) and decide what I will change for the next time.

In this particular part of my life, I’ve been iterating my travel packing list for a while, but every trip seems to have its own set of needs. This particular packing list, however, is for short, professional-oriented journeys, roughly 2-4 days, in weather that does not require wool socks and winter coats.

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