Agile Banana

Chapter Six: Plan reality, not fantasy Plans almost always describe a fictional reality, so only plan for the next increment of value and estimate the remainder of the project in larger chunks Quick Summary Estimates of work at the beginning of a project range from 400 percent of the time taken to 25 percent of the time take (as plotted on the cone of uncertainty) Humans are terrible at estimating, but good at comparing the size of one task to another Use planning poker to estimate tasks, and at the end of a sprint you'll know your sprint velocity (the pace at which your team gets through work) Main Points Projects tend to accumulate documentation as people cut and paste and throw in boilerplate. This leads to thousands of pages outlining requirements, compliance, reports, phase gates and quality assurance. Buried among it all somewhere is what actually needs to be done. Capture these on sticky notes, and estimate how long each will take. Then prioritize the work. People will say e...

Chapter Five: Waste is a crime Waste can be minimised by teams tackling one project at a time, not delaying bug fixes, and preventing people from working more than forty hours a week Quick Summary Teams should tackle one project at a time to limit the amount of efforted that is wasted switching focus Teams should fix problems when they arise - if bugs are dealt with straight away they can be fixed in a fraction of the time Don't let team members work more than forty hours a week - they will actually get less done  Main Points The main causes of waste at work are multitasking, work in progress, not fixing problems when they arise, working long hours, and various forms of unreasonableness such as setting unreasonable goals and expectations. In particular, studies have shown that humans are terrible at multitasking. The same is true of teams. If a team works on two projects simultaneously, 20 percent of their time is wasted on switching contexts. Working on five projects simultaneousl...

Chapter Four: Time Working in sprints allows a team to deliver something quickly for customer feedback, while the the daily "stand-up" allows teams to communicate efficiently. Quick Summary Break your work into small chunks that can be completed in a regular, set, short period (2-4 weeks)  At the end of each short period or "Sprint", have something that's done and can be demonstrated to stakeholders  One meeting a day - get together for fifteen minutes and identify how to speed things up Main Points There are two main elements of how a Scrum team works - the "sprint" and the "daily stand-up". A sprint is a time box of a set duration (e.g. two weeks). It also has to be consistent - you don't do a one-week sprint and then a three-week sprint.  At the end of the sprint, the team needs to deliver something that can be used by the customer. A key part of helping to team achieve this is the daily "stand-up". this is a 15-minute meetin...