Agile in 31 days

Hola there! How is the weekend going coffee-lovers? Weather in Málaga is so good! And I went to see Malaga FC playing Spanish Cup and we won  the game! (we destroyed Deportivo) I cannot complain! Malaga FC is just awesome! Focusing. The daily stand-up, daily scrum or just stand-up is considered to be the most important meeting of the Scrum world. But why? And why not? Many not very-scrum teams usually think that this meeting is just useless and reduce the concentration as to be thought as a break or an interruption which breaks the rhythm. Obviously I quite disagree with it. What would you expect I was going to say? :) It is just a short daily meeting where we have to know what we did the day before, what are we doing tomorrow and what are our blockers. The method to extract this information is via focusing on the individuals. The individuals themselves will be acting as a part of the cake - that is the team - and in orders will speak 1-by-1 about their own progress. ...

Hola there! I am about to take a flight that departs to Málaga and just realized that i haven't posted a single coffee picture! Big mistake! Thinking further, I ended up with Twin Peaks !   Most of you 70s and 80s born people remember it. A story about Laura Palmer's brutal homicide surrounded by mysteries and strange stories based on freak people from Twin Peaks, extraterrestrial stuff, dwarfs and spirits. " A town where noone is innocent ". Wow! What a summary! Well, along with The Wire, this is my favorite series have ever seen in TV. Not my intention to spoil it if you haven't had a chance to see it. It's a must-see. The story's main character is and FBI agent - Cooper - who can delay whatever important business just for a cup of coffee. True love. That's how I came my mind into it.  Then thinking further. How the hell David Lynch (co-creator) came up with this story? Who knows. This is when I start linking it to agile stuff. I...

Hola my friends! Bit late for a coffee I think. Maybe a no caffeine one? It's Monday and I'm in love as The cure used to say. Yesterday we talked about the distributed teams and how to find the gaps. Today I want to talk about one of those exclusive co-located tools. The whiteboards. As a former boss said: "everybody loves drawings, graphs". Whiteboards is the essence of the agile manifesto. Who wants a fully-documented State diagram in Uml when we do have simple whiteboards?  Posts ago we  focused on the importance of the focus . What's important? How can our mindset acknowledge that easily? I don't think we can find any other powerful tool in Agile implementations to make visible what do we need to do. Just walk around, go for a coffee and come back. You will come across the whiteboard all day long. I don't need to remember what are our goals! They're just there! I will have a look at the whiteboard to check again on further implementati...

Hola! Please please do not forget your shot of coffee! Let's go! I've just realized of a curious example in Agile from my experience going out for dinner in Athens. As in Spain for Tapas , here in Greece it's quite common to order small dishes so everybody can share and try a bit of them. Mezes  ( wikipedia ). It obviously requires a bit of "coordination" as I am going to present you in the next few lines. Your sprint planning meeting is basically the agreement where we read the menu and we confirm the order to the waiter. Our sprint will take around 2 hours, we have evaluated the food in value (price), and size (e.g. sardines meze is a bit small). Your definition of done consists of completing the mezes dishes as a team (quality is guaranteed by the way). One meze finished, one story delivered. Food is presented incrementally on the table. If we are sure we can take more, we don't mind asking again the waiter. "Excuse me, sir, I think we can take m...

Hola! This is the first entry of my 'Agile' Blog. Welcome and please feel free to read it while having a coffee! This is a Blog created to document and track the last thirty-days of 2014 focusing on the Agile vision . The aim is to post real-life experiences related to Agile - somehow. As I defend in many places and conferences also to demonstrate that "Agile" is not just following ceremonies. The most important part (and surely the most difficult) is the Agile mindset. Being Agile via thinking Agile. The idea is to illustrate via my day-to-day examples that Agile is just everywhere. Let's start off.. My company has just sent me to visit one of our teams which is based in Athens to provide with Agile training/coaching. Compared to other companies, I can say that this is quite an Agile team. However, as in other teams, there is a lack of what I called "aggressive" mindset.  The conservative Scrum implementation tend to transform the sprint da...