When on the Scrum Master Podcast, I was asked a very important question: How do I get a systemic view of the organization. This is worth going deeply into. Let’s start with why this view is valuable. The more I work with teams, I find there’s a limit of change I can make. Or, rather, they can
To improve we need transparency. We cannot solve problems we don’t see. We can’t improve an invisible process. We need people to speak out about how they feel, how their work is affected. In order to improve, my team needs me to admit I’m late, and not hide I’m working for two weeks, digging a hole, and find out
At Agile Israel conference, I was recruited to a “Hit The Experts” panel on engineering practices. Ok, I didn’t put too much of a fight. Most of the questions were not of the engineering nature, though. One of the questions went like this: We’ve adapted the Spotify model, and now there’s no specialization, expectations from
When we think of regression, we think of bugs. That’s the first thing that pops into our minds. As with many other things, there’s a deeper meaning, if we just look closer. We have two kinds of usage for the word regression. We use it to describe a test suite (unit tests, integrgation tests, end-to-end
Last month I was in Huib Schoots’ testing workshop. He talked about being asked “What’s the ROI of testing?”. To which he replied “I don’t know, what’s the ROI of management?”. We are really obsessed with ROI, aren’t we? We use it a lot as a tool for decision making, but are we using it
Every time and again, I go back to the “4 ways that agile is declining post” to see if it is still relevant. I don’t get disappointed. Now that I am a full time agile coach, I’m in a kind of a fix. Agile has crossed the chasm, and scrum won as we all know.
From childhood, we are taught that in order to achieve big goals, we need to work together towards them. Most of the time, however, what we were taught does not come into play. We may want different things, and have different goals. Or we might agree on the goal, but not on the way to
Why do we keep trying to attain control? Looking at reality with agile glasses (and even without them), we don’t like uncertainty, and control over a piece of reality relaxes us. A controlled environment is good for our health. In fact, it seems that when we are in control we don’t need to do anything.
So this came up a few days ago: “Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die In A Fire”. My first thought was: “Of course scrum is failing him, he’s not actually doing scrum.” Second thought was: “He doesn’t understand agile at all, does he?” Third thought was: “Gil, you’re an idiot.”. Because I have been saying
We like numbers because of their symbolic simplicity. In other words, we get them. They give us certainty, and therefore confidence. Which sounds more trustworthy: “It will take 5 months” or “It will take between 4 to 6 months”? The first one sounds more confident, and therefore we trust it more. After all, why don’t