Name
Towards a Lighter Methodology
Date & Time
Wednesday, June 14, 2023, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Federico Zuppa
Description

This is a report of an experience I had last year with the apprentices of 10Pines using a light agile methodology, moving away from tools that are mainstream in Agile development teams. Let me first tell you a little bit about the reasons. Lately, I found in many contemporary Agile teams sources of waste that are repeated. For example: Discoveries made without the engineers that end up in an unfeasible (or more expensive) solutions Discoveries made with the right people that are ‘transported’ to Agile Management tools losing a lot of information in the middle Discovery conversations held in front of Agile Management tools, a very uncomfortable tool to have these kinds of conversations User Stories written only by Product Owners or Analysts in an uncomfortable format that is not well understood later Teams forced to do estimations in story points that are not well understood and not used later These are only a few examples. I am sure you can find many. With these in mind, we devised our own methodology, trying to eliminate these sources of waste. The most important points are as follows: We only used 1 tool, a board where we captured our working agreements, team details, our DoD, our discovery and our delivery. Everyone on the team works on discovery from the first moment. We used example mapping to tell and remember user stories. We split our stories in small increments that we could finish in 1 or 2 days. We didn't estimate, but we counted the stories we finished each iteration to understand our capacity We felt very well with the results. We had everything that we needed in just one place. We could recall all our conversations very easily. We talked about the outcomes all the time. We designed the smallest experiments that allowed us to test our assumptions. We wrote our stories together. We broke the stories and organized our work as well. We made 1 week iterations having running tested functionality at the end of each iteration that we showed to a few colleagues and receiving valuable feedback. We were able to estimate our capacity just by counting the cards we finished. In conclusion, we used a very light methodology where many of the sources of waste that I see in many teams were eliminated.

Location Name
Grote Zaal, 2nd floor
Full Address
Pakhuis de Zwijger
Piet Heinkade 179
Amsterdam 1019 HC
Netherlands
Session Type
Experience Report
submissions_id
5214
Track Color
Yellow
Session Length
20
Keywords
Agile
Lean
Waste
Learning Objectives
(anti-) patterns in scaling
General Topic
Process