Are there any standards (Best practices) in Agile/scrum world? How important are they?

Standards help the people to work and communicate in time tested manner. This helps to reduce the noise and chaos. Standards help a newbie to learn the tips and tricks of trade.

But is it advisable to follow the standards always?

Change is the only thing which is constant. Any standard or best practice which doesn't evolve with the changing environment doesn't help anyone. Such obsolete standards prevents the team from improving continuously. In many cases thy prevent new thinking and innovation.

A standard/ guideline made for one company/project/person may not work for another because they have unique requirement. These guidelines will have to reviewed and adopted to the new project/person. Like everything ins scrum, even the standards will have to undergo the process of continuous improvement.

Some Thoughts

It is advisable to put the good practices on the team wall so that everyone can view them. Any standard hidden in some SharePoint site or any other repository might not get enough views. If these are pasted on common areas team will get to see them every day and can suggest any improvement.
If any automation can be made to verify the output against the standards then the necessary investment should be made .

Improvement process

Team identifies a problem and the necessary process/standard changes
Team discusses the new process & make the necessary changes. Team publishes the process change within the team and stakeholders
After a specified duration team revisits the standards to check the effectiveness
If the process/standard change has achieved the necessary outcome then it is circulated as a best practice guideline to other teams also.

Comments

Product Backlog: Should you write everything in user story format?

I like user stories a lot. They help everyone talk the same language and results in a better product. User story alone does not constitute product requirement. User story is supposed to be a place holder for discussion which should happen between the team, Product Owner and the customer. This discussion result in a common understanding which along with the user story content is the product requirement. This format captures the essence of requirement without confusing the readers User Story is only one of the many different ways in which requirements can be represented. This is not mandatory in any Agile “process”. But many have made this mandatory. I have seen many spending countless hours trying to write the requirements in user story format when they could have easily written that in simple one-line sentence in few minutes. I have seen team members refusing to even discuss the requirement until product owner rewrote the requirement in user story format. ...

PDCA & SCRUM (or Agile); Why is it important?

The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This is a scientific cyclic process which can be used to improve the process (or product). This is cyclic in nature and usually time boxed. Plan This is the first stage of the process. During this step the team discusses the objectives, the process and the clear conditions of exit (conditions of acceptance). This stage sets the measurable and achievable goals for the team. DO Team works together to achieve the objective set in the planning phase. Team works with the set of agreed process. Check Once the implantation is done team regroups and verifies the output and compares it to the agreed conditions of acceptance decided during the planning phase. The deviation, if any, is noted down. ACT If any deviation in planned tasks is observed during the Check stage, a root cause analysis is conducted. Team brainstorms and identifies the changes required to prevent such deviatio...

Why is potentially shippable product quality important

Agile teams work in iterations. During this period, they are supposed to work on product increments which can be “delivered” at the end of iteration. But how you know that the correct product was delivered? Many teams have different kinds of acceptance criteria and Definition of Done (DoD). But in many cases, this “done” is not the real “done” there might be some testing pending, some integration or review pending or anything else which prevents the actual use of the product increment. Many of these teams will need additional iterations to finish hardening their products. Many teams will implement different types of “gates” or approval steps to move to next stage. The free flow of product will be interrupted. They might end up doing mini waterfall within their agile process. Many don’t even realize this. This results in poor quality and requires additional effort to “harden” the product. Potentially Shippable Product increment The acceptance criteria and DoD should be modified...

The Agile School

Search This Blog