#effectivescrum — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #effectivescrum, aggregated by home.social.
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Sprint Planning is the canary in the coal mine. It reveals dysfunction building all Sprint long.
These problems are fixable. Start by inviting everyone to Refinement—offer popcorn if you have to. Treat the underlying issues, not the symptoms.
Full breakdown: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/sprint-planning-from-hell/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=archive-reshare
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Sprint Planning is the canary in the coal mine. It reveals dysfunction building all Sprint long.
These problems are fixable. Start by inviting everyone to Refinement—offer popcorn if you have to. Treat the underlying issues, not the symptoms.
Full breakdown: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/sprint-planning-from-hell/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=archive-reshare
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Sprint Planning is the canary in the coal mine. It reveals dysfunction building all Sprint long.
These problems are fixable. Start by inviting everyone to Refinement—offer popcorn if you have to. Treat the underlying issues, not the symptoms.
Full breakdown: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/sprint-planning-from-hell/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=archive-reshare
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Sprint Planning is the canary in the coal mine. It reveals dysfunction building all Sprint long.
These problems are fixable. Start by inviting everyone to Refinement—offer popcorn if you have to. Treat the underlying issues, not the symptoms.
Full breakdown: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/sprint-planning-from-hell/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=archive-reshare
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Sprint Planning is the canary in the coal mine. It reveals dysfunction building all Sprint long.
These problems are fixable. Start by inviting everyone to Refinement—offer popcorn if you have to. Treat the underlying issues, not the symptoms.
Full breakdown: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/sprint-planning-from-hell/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=archive-reshare
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A skills matrix is a self-reporting system where team members provide their own
estimate of their skill in a specific area. To create a skills matrix, get the
team to set aside a couple of hours and run a workshop. You can follow the
step-by-step in my article "How to Build a Powerful Team from Scratch" here 👉🏻
https://buff.ly/ygpkCli [https://buff.ly/ygpkCli]#EffectiveScrum [https://agilealliance.social/tags/EffectiveScrum] #SkillsMatrix
[https://agilealliance.social/tags/SkillsMatrix] #Team… -
A skills matrix is a self-reporting system where team members provide their own estimate of their skill in a specific area. To create a skills matrix, get the team to set aside a couple of hours and run a workshop. You can follow the step-by-step in my article "How to Build a Powerful Team from Scratch" here 👉🏻 https://buff.ly/ygpkCli
#EffectiveScrum #SkillsMatrix #TeamBuilding #Agile #Scrum #Collaboration #Teamwork #HighPerformanceTeams
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What are your biggest Challenges with Leadership?
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In the Product Ownership Category, what hurts most?
I'm looking to see what pain(s) resonate most for Scrum, Kanban, pick your flavour.
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I perceive that I am the fittest I've ever been. If the data doesn't back my perception, then it doesn't matter.
The DORA 2024 State of DevOps report (https://buff.ly/3Ab2YNe) has missed the boat. The report measured Developer's perceptions about AI: feel more productive and that they have reduced complexity. Measuring perception and not the code itself, leads to false conclusions.
The data shows that duplication is increasing and refactoring is decreasing.
1/4 #EffectiveScrum
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The data tells us that perception doesn't match reality. (Data source: GitClear AI Copilot Code Quality: 2025 Look Back at 12 Months of Data https://buff.ly/3QvIBPy
Here are the effects we can document about AI/LLMs
- Code Complexity is going up, not down
- Deployment Frequency has slowed, and Rollbacks have IncreasedThe Theory of Constraints says that any improvements that don't affect the key constraint are an illusion.
2/4 #EffectiveScrum
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Since the bottleneck was never the rate at which we write code, generating code faster with AI is a waste.
I will say it out loud: LLM-generated code will be a leading source of quality problems in 2025. Today's duplicate code and additional complexity will be a source of problems in 2026 and beyond.
3/4 #EffectiveScrum
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#EffectiveScrum Teams find where their real bottlenecks are and address those problems. (AI may not be included). Sign up for our newsletter to learn how to be more effective. (Sadly, I know that I'm as fit as I was playing rugby when I was in my 20s)
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As we learned with many 4 a.m. drives, in competitive swimming, coaches put a lot of effort into reducing the number of strokes it takes to cross the pool.
- Micromanagement betrays a lack of trust in the ability of the team to get things done.The list of cultural issues is infinite, we can’t cover them all. Which other ones would you highlight that affect your team?
Sign up for our newsletter to see how I coach teams through this problem.4/4 #EffectiveScrum
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Culture is hard to change; these issues are the ones that often get addressed last. Of course, failure to address these issues from the start makes the real change much harder.
## Cultural Issues:
- Pressure to go faster - we have a culture focused. We change lanes dozens of times in our commute despite knowing that it has a marginal effect at best. This shows up in Sprint Planning, where teams, even without external pressure, focus on cramming items into the Sprint.1/4 #EffectiveScrum
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People will forgo time to make improvements, fix technical debt, cross-skill to cram another item into a Sprint, even though this is counter-productive.
- Too often, the pressure also comes from above. The pressure to finish more features and meet meaningless deadlines worsens the self-imposed problem. Arbitrarily determined deadlines become immovable goal posts. Team members contort themselves to achieve these goals.2/4 #EffectiveScrum
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- Speed over Quality and Learning - Speed comes from focusing on Quality and Learning. Not the other way round. This principle holds true whether you're developing software or competing in sports. Ask any competitive athlete. They all want to go faster. Most know that speed involves improving technique (learning) and expending less energy (quality). ...
3/4 #EffectiveScrum
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Worse, they combine both into one role, assuming there isn't much going on for either role. It’s a bit like combining the role of coach and manager on a professional sports team.
- When there is no Definition of Done (when teams ignore it), then product quality is subjective. “Well, it worked on my machine” becomes the quality standard. This is the classic Docker joke, but it's an awful quality standard.2/3 #effectiveScrum
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Last time we looked at how limited collaboration harms quality, this time process comes under the microscope.
## Process Issues:
When I started working on this series, I assumed most problems would be process related. Nearly at the end of “Poor Quality causes in Scrum", very few of our challenges are process related.- Poorly defined roles - Many orgs use Scrum as a coat of paint on their existing process. They add SM and PO as additional responsibilities to busy people.
1/3 #effectiveScrum
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- Insufficient Stakeholder Feedback - I’ve witnessed Sprint Reviews where the Product Owner gives a polished 20-minute demo (snooze). Stakeholders/End-Users nod politely and leave, or worse, don’t show up. Without real user feedback, we’re developing the product with a blindfold.
What Process issues have you noticed that affect Quality? Sign up for our newsletter to see how I coach teams through this problem.
3/3 #EffectiveScrum
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..focusing on happy path implementation and not considering failures and not getting perspectives from Usability, Security, Testing, etc. Isolation harms psychological safety, making it harder to raise concerns. In turn, problems are likely to fester. This may not directly affect quality. It makes it harder to address the problems that affect quality.
10/11 #EffectiveScrum
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...together to tackle this problem and find out why it keeps happening." At a minimum, Scrum Teams should achieve Cooperation. However, teams only become truly effective when they achieve Collaboration. Lack of communication among team members leads to...
5/6 #EffectiveScrum
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...out at the lowest level of teamwork and communication. They share information during the Scrum events and little outside of that. Cooperation comes next; they start work together towards a common goal. However, most work tasks will still be completed...
3/6 #EffectiveScrum
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..inspires that. (cough, JIRA, cough). (Sidebar- Feature Factory is a software development environment where teams mindlessly churn out features without understanding how these features relate to the Product Vision or Strategy.) Most teams start...
2/6 #EffectiveScrum
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We move from Technical issues that affect quality to Collaboration and Sprint Execution.
Work in Isolation over Collaboration
Many Scrum teams think that working in isolated silos is the expectation. Perhaps it's a side effect of the infamous Feature Factory, and its ticket-focused mindset...
1/6 #EffectiveScrum
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Lacking psychological safety makes it harder to ask for help. We fear if we do, we will be seen as "weak" by our peers. Loss of psychological safety increases feelings of isolation, which, of course, reduces safety. A vicious cycle. (In Systems Thinking, this is referred to as a negatively reinforcing feedback loop.) 11/11 #EffectiveScrum
Which of these do you recognize? What else? Sign up for our newsletter to see how I coach teams through this problem.
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..Knowledge silos harm because we don't understand what other parts of our system will harmed when making a change. For example, if a developer changes a behaviour in one part of the system, the change seems safe because no unit tests have been broken... 7/11 #EffectiveScrum
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...independently.* Collaboration is working together in a joint effort towards a common goal. Example: A Production support issue: Communication is: "I will work on finding the bug"; Coordination: "Let's split the problem into parts"; Collaboration: "Let's work...
4/6 #EffectiveScrum
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..Each person solves a code problem in their own way in the code base without realizing other versions already exist. Building good products requires many viewpoints. When that is missing, we have the classic developer problem alone problem... 9/11 #EffectiveScrum
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...However, they don't understand how the system is tested; this creates more work that could have been avoided if they worked directly with a tester. Knowledge silos, also increase the likelihood of creating multiple solutions to the same problem... 8/11 #EffectiveScrum
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could spend an entire workshop day covering this mess. Without delving into solutions, what other technical factors affect quality?
Next time, we will work on the Team and Collaboration. (I'm not promising tomorrow)
Sign up for newsletter: https://agilepainrelief.com/newsletter
7 of 7 #EffectiveScrum
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Long-lived code branches and their partner in crime Pull Requests. The longer the branch lives, the harder it is to merge into main. The delays of both branches discourage refactoring. Missed opportunities for refactoring increase our technical debt.
6 of 7 #EffectiveScrum
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Some clever wag will respond that most of this boils down to the fact we've ignored the XP Technical Practices for too long. Both true and unhelpful at the same time.
The biggest sin by far? Building on Technical Debt without making any effort to remediate it.
2 of 7 #EffectiveScrum