• Why teams revisit situations
• Disclosing what you know
• Decider Protocol

• When Facilities won’t help
• When Developers can’t set up their environments
• When continuous deploy doesn’t work for marketing

• If agile faster
• What it means to be better

• Lean Startup in the enterprise.
• Vanity metrics
• LeanPub
• Mike’s Childrens Book

• How to deliver news
• How to help your team if they know they’re doing the wrong thing

• Executives in Agile
• The Big Rewrite
• Ignoring information Radiators

• The emperor has no value.
• What is value?
• Different types of value

• Agile Metrics
• Releasing Often
• Organizational Debt

• Confusing Working Agreements
• Working Agreements as Policies
• Values and Principles over Working Agreements

• A Culture of Learning
• Fear of Failing
• Having too much fun?

• Technical Scrum Masters
• Team Workspaces
• Working from Home

• Team Culture
• Alpha Developers
• Retrospective Safety

• Product Owner Availability
• Delivering Value
• Continuous Delivery vs Deployment
• Backlog Gardening

• Sprint Zero
• Working Agreements
• Performance Testing
• Backlog Gardening

• Moving from cubes to team rooms
• Collaboration
• Self-Organizing teams

Update: We found a problem with the published podcast recording and have uploaded a new copy of this episode 1/24/13

• Agile in Design
• Pen Sketching
• Ideation and collaboration

• Agile in Education
• Scrum in the classroom
• How software developers are like pre-k children

• Disrupting Agile Teams
• Hiring when the product expands
• Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing

• Staying sane in the face of massive debt
• Bighting it off one bite at a time
• Cutting your losses and starting over

• One day sprints
• The Checkout Protocol
• Promiscuous Pairing

• When a team has lost its motivation
• Personal Alignment and Team Alignment
• Hard Work

• Typical class systems of organizations
• Cowboy Coders
• The real leaders

• When a Product Owner oversteps bounds
• Where are the boundaries of a Scrum Master?
• What is the realm of a Developer?

• Lean UX
• Developers and UX designers working closely together
• Working Software vs Valuable Software
• Finding and doing what the customer wants
• Role of the Product Owner

• Agile in a non-software environment
• Working directly with the customer
• Trust and collaborative teams

• History of The Agile Manifesto
• Embedded TDD
• Estimates

• Subset of Scrum
• Top-down vs. bottom-up Agile introduction
• Organizational Culture
• Agile Development: A Guide Toward Putting a Toe in Agile Waters

• Spike and research stories
• Estimating stories during planning
• Blocked stories in a sprint
• Failing sprints

• Is Technical Excellence Still Relevant?
• XP Practices
• Pair Programming
• Agile Coaching

• The Leadership Mindset
• Being a leader
• Taking Responsibility
• Situational, State, and Servant Leadership

• Leanpub
• Agile in the publishing world
• Advice for publishing books
• Minimum viable product

• Managers and Developers communicating together
• Development practices have changed faster than Management practices
• How QA integrates with a Scrum Team
• Mistakes that most managers make

• Distributed teams
• Working with teams in non-software situations
• Scrum as a learning framework
• Scrum in different industries

• Lean Startup
• Customer Development
• Fear of releasing
• Innovation labs
• Lean Startup Teams vs Lean Startup Organizations
• Horizon Planning

• Agile Success
• Questioning the Agile Manifesto
• 3 new Agile mantras
• The importance of clean code
• Agile Open SoCal

• Less Everything
• Lean startup
• Lean mentality at Less Everything
• Agile and Lean in big corporations

• Role of Managers
• Working with vs managing
• Hierarchical Management Model vs. Flat model
• Bringing managements’ role into the fold
• Team decisions and managerial decisions

• How to work with management that has traditional culture
• Working with vs changing a company’s culture
• Trying to sell process opposed to something deeper
• Historical revolutionaries

• Agile 2012
• Technical development tracks
• Iterative Development
• Gaining buy-in from developers

• Scrum vs. eXtreme Programming
• Learning practices
• All About Engineering
• Most important XP practices
• Software Craftsmanship
• Introducing pair programming
• TDD and Mocking

• Cognitive Bias
• Estimation versus estimates
• Estimation accuracy
• PlanningPoker(tm)
• Group think
• Meaningful estimates
• Story points interpreted as money or time
• Story points vs cycle time
• Estimating new projects

You can find Jim on twitter @ourfounder and learn more about his company Modus Cooperandi, Inc.

• Design Thinking
• Ideation
• Iteration and re-work
• Potentially shippable product
• Lean Startup
• Split Testing

• What is Deloitte’s Digital Agile?
• Alex’s Agile vs. traditional Agile
• Agile in a consulting environment
• Forecasting and estimating
• Overview of the entire backlog
• Estimating velocity
• Benefits of mobile application life cycles
• 1-week iterations

• ScrumMaster Tales
• Storming, Forming, Norming, Performing
• Disrupting teams with new members
• Team hazing rituals and on boarding new members
• Dealing with crises in Scrum
• Avoiding conflict in Scrum?
• Working agreements
• Part-time Scrum Master
• Neutral Scrum Masters

• What is the 100% utilization myth?
• Kanban and WIP limits
• Slack time
• What’s a good amount of slack?
• Experimentation with slack and utilization
• What does a team do with slack time?
• Should slack time move the team/work forward?

You can find Pawel on twitter @pawelbrodzinski and on his blog Software Project Management.

• Using personal Kanban to manage the job search
• Breaking down tasks into small, manageable pieces
• Collect feedback in small iterations and pivot
• How do you hold yourself accountable?

• How can you tell if a senior developers is acting in a way that befits their title?
• Should we reward the hardest worker for working hardest?
• What makes a senior developer better than other developers?
• Should we ever care if the developers are working hard?

• Is the process really the issue?
• Process only highlights culture problems, it doesn’t solve them
• How do you know when it really is time to change the process?
• A short feedback cycle is important to evaluate the problems that are being highlighted.

• 10 behaviors observed over 25 years
• Deb’s book, Power Teams VIP
• Why is lip service so prevalent?
• How can a manager keep good team members while helping everyone improve?
• Dealing with culture and millennials
• What’s the worst behavior for the team?
• How to improve bad behaviors
• Are some people just not right for the team?

• Transparency in compensation
• Using Scrum to run a Scrum consultancy
• Elements of Scrum and Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction

• Kanban in your personal life
• Kanban in work life as a one-man team
• Personal kanban can help save your marriage
• Personal insights from Kanban
• Personal Scrum?
• Personal Kanban boards
• Burnout

• Star teams over star individuals
• Need for individual performance reviews?
• Team decisions
• Individual and team compensation, now and in the future
• Cultural change in organizations
• Ways to give individual feedback

• StrengthsFinder 2.0
• Playing to your Strengths
• Introducing Strengths to your team
• Strengths and self-organizing teams
• When Strengths go wrong

• Lots of companies dealing with unknowns
• Product teams
• Release early, release often
• Validate, Experiment, Iterate
• Culture preventing engagement?
• Executives communicate with teams
• How to get the “C” level to change
• Eric Ries “Lean Startup” / Steve Blank
• Is it a panacea?
• Radical culture problems abound
• Confusion about what lean startup means
• Risk adverse culture problems when you have golden egg to protect?
• Alignment across enterprise
• Cross functional teams
• How do you maintain it?
• Give freedom, be creative
• Innovation team (I’m a special snowflake)
• Executive support mandatory

• Do we estimate defects?
• How do I get “credit” for doing defects?
• What counts as a defect?
• New defect comes in what do we do with it?
• How should defects effect velocity?
• Why so defensive?
• How to deal with predictability?
• Definition of done factors in.
• Transparency is what is important.
• Use the retrospective Luke.
• Please don’t punish me.
• Person that writes the check decides.
• Zero defect mentality.
• Hardening sprint.  Say What?
• Developer Hat v Scrum Master Hat

• Managers in Agile
• Environments to enable innovation
• Experimentation in Agile
• Self-organizing teams
• How to help organizations change
• Stoos

• Agile outside of software
• Lean in healthcare
• Lean as management principles
• Lean is not cost cutting
• Risk and quality in Lean
• Bad processes and lean improvements
• Improving flow

• Getting kids interested in programming
• The Microsoft stack
• Traveling pair programmer
• Meandering programmers
• Software Craftsmanship
• TDD and experience
• Global Day of Code Retreat
• Code Retreat Community Contribution Fund

* Impossible!?
* How do you define what is potentially shippable?
* Does the product need to be pollished and perfect?
* Focusing on small problems (rather than the whole system) helps us deliver value sooner.
* It’s not an excuse to code yourself into a dead end.
* Value does not necessarily have to be targeted at Users, it might be the CEO or some other stakeholder.

* What do you do when someone clearly doesn’t fit in with the team?
* How do you get to the point where you can let a team be self organizing and still mitigate the associated risk?
* Should you hire quality people or try to get the most qualified people for a particular position?

* Do you throw out the process?
* How do you break it to the product owner owner?
* Would removing the overhead of the process make things better?
* At what point do you, as a Scrum Master, step in and prevent the team from self organizing themselves in to fatal failure?

• Obtaining feedback
• Encouraging continuous learning
• Feedback vs praise
• Just jump in and do it
• First Lego League
• People are people
• Understanding and detecting patterns
• Iterating, engaging and stabilization
• Collaboration for tighter feedback
• Leadership makes a difference
• Learning is joyful
• Layered learning / Video Games

References:

Mindset by Carol Dweck

First Lego League

Teaching Kids to Program

Lost in Space

• Inertia against change
• Leadership matters
• Self-Organization
• It’s okay to fail
• People matter during transition
• Managers tell people what to do.. Any objections? Compliance.
• Guilt trips
• Mindless drones
• Self selection
• Using games
• Observe and learn from other teams/organizations

• Benefits of physical vs digital boards
• How our brain wiring works
• Visibility instead of hidden data
• Mind playing tricks on me
• Visual speaks volumes
• Don’t have to fight tools to try new things
• It takes a long time update the board
• Overhead, saving paper, distributed team
• Historical data
• Lack of team trust
• Lines of code and function points
• Self Organization should rule
• Working with other teams
• Serendipity happens
• Simulate colocation

References:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

Forget Why You Walked Into the Room?

• Last years reflections
• Early adopters dig deeper than process
• Leadership will come into focus
• Companies will become aware industrial age is behind us
• Training will have more depth and options
• Community will fracture further before it gets to good stuff
• Increased competition will raise the bar for Agile
• Training for the wrong things
• This is the year of storming…
• Alan commits to writing more
• Perry is going to read 30 books this year
• Derek is going to explore leadership/systems thinking frameworks
• Saving the Scrum Alliance
• Jade is going to champion creative culture creation

• Kanban, Agile, Scrum are among top trends of 2011
• What do you get a ScrumMaster for Christmas?
• Getting turned down for a ScrumMaster role because you are too experienced
• Water-Scrum-Fall and ScrumerFall
• Scrum is a diet, Kanban is a Mirror
• When do you use Agile Methodologies and Techniques like Scrum
• Is it nuts to invest in specialization when Scrum is generalizing the team
• Are story points a proxy for time?

• Treating people as resources can cause long term problems
• Specialization can discourage team members from taking ownership of a project
• Team members complaining of too many meetings is a red flag indicating that developer is probably on too many projects
• Product Owners are not exempt from suffering in capability and quality from working on two many projects
• Human beings do not context switch as easily as we pretend to be able to

• How can we encourage customers to participate more?
• Do we really need customers to participate more?
• Are there things we can do to mitigate lack of product ownership?

• Managers promote people that are most like themselves
• Both positive/negative traits start to feedback on themselves
• Innovation decreases as the organization becomes Homogenous
• Larger organizations have greater inertia so the culture needs to have more disruptive members in order to change
• It is extremely difficult to try to eliminate inbreeding within an organization from within
• Reckless attempts can be met with blacklisting

• Is it better to have a shorter iteration and close the feedback loop
• Is it better to have a longer iteration to decrease the overhead of the Scrum Ceremonies?
• Sprint Review seems to be the only ceremony not proportionally decreased with sprint length
• Retrospectives do not have to occur every week, or perhaps have an extended retro every other sprint
• The cost of deploying is sometimes an argument for longer sprints
• Deployments and releases should be unhinged from sprints
• The team agrees that shorter sprints are generally better

• The Scrum User group is a monthly meeting of people interested in Scrum
• Non-Scrum related User groups can also provide lots of value by providing alternative viewpoints
• XP groups are also available in most locations
• Agile 2011 had many community building activities
• Scrum Alliance has “Find a user group in your area” functionality
• If there is nothing available, start your own
• Open Spaces force you into interacting with new people

• Resources for software craftsmanship have increased in availability
• Measure the results so you know if you improve
• Industrial Tourism – exchange program between companies to refresh perspectives
• Important to be disciplined to work in tiny increments

• Formallizing the start of a project or team
• Chartering a team increases the communication
• Helps align the team around the project vision

• Implementing Scrum causes impediments
• Technical Excellence practices can remove these impediments
• Sometimes the leader can mandate some practices if they can demonstrate the benefits
• Leaders should know how to do the practices they advocate

• Displaying a sense of urgency to the customer so they feel important.
• Creating a sense of urgency to the developers so they stay focused.
• No urgency is unmotivating
• Perpetual urgency is unsustainable

@PMOObserver: “Always deliver what you commit to. No more; no less.”
@elizabethraley: “Scrum Rule: No Additional Requirements Can Be Added to a Sprint!”
@scrumology: “Comparing velocity between teams: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything th…”
@rslawrence: “In case you missed it over the weekend: ‘Why Longer Sprints Probably Won’t Help’”
@rramirez4444: “What are the TWO best qualities of a good Scrum Master? #agile #scrum (non-SM respondants given more weight on this one..)”
@alechardy: “Purpose of sprint review is to inspect and adapt. Demo during review is to prompt inspect and adapt conversation.”

• Manifesto says to not favor tools and process
• Tools remove the “Human-ness”
• Distributed teams are often a big reason for wanting to use tools
• Digital tools severely decrease visibility
• Tools can prevent/impede conversations
• Writing something physically forces your brain to engage
• Blank index cards are more flexible than any tool
• Tools become a crutch for bad decisions

• Compare stats against planning poker
• 80 stories
• 5 minutes to discuss process/application
• 25 minutes to do estimation
• 10 minutes to get velocity
• Team is moving around and more enganged
• Everyone had to be active
• Nobody can set the tone
• Disagreements were resolved quickly
• Made easier by having a trusting team
• Link to blog post: http://blog.mikepearce.net/2011/05/02/how-do-i-estimate-how-long-an-agile-project-will-take-before-we-start/

• A leader bring the people around him/her
• Teams can have multiple leaders
• Leadership is based on trust
• People will step up to fill a leadership vacuum
• What is the value in identifying the leader?
• Having trust/respect makes it easier to lead
• Improving the team can be to the short-term detriment of the leader
• The more self organizing a team is, the less important the leader is.
• Leaders are willing to take responsibility for the team

• Rigid up front
• Flexible with experience
• Inspect and Adapt
• Breaking rules is usually to avoid a deeper issue
• Learn through imitiation, then improvise
• Set in stone Scrum is not ideal
• The uncomfortable parts of Scrum will expose issues
• Culture can stand in the way of Scrum adoption

Enjoy this video as we talk to Alix Holmes about her Open Space on integrating user experience design with agile processes.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Chris Scripca about his Open Space on Game Programming for Fun and Keeping Thousands of People Happy.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Ainsley Nies about her Open Space on “Agile Chartering“.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Scott Dunn about his Open Space on Strengths Based Team and Personal Growth.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Jason Kerney about their Open Space on using creative processes to drive development.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Julie Smith about her Open Space on reluctant team members and participants on agile teams.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Marsha Garczewski about her Open Space on ”Getting Started with SCRUM“.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Woody Zuill about his Open Space session titled “Intro to Agile“.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

Enjoy this video as we talk to Darrin Ladd about his Open Space on How Can I Help My Teams Continue to Improve?.

For more information on this event or their sister event Agile Open Northern California check out the site at www.agileopencalifornia.com.

• Retrospectives
• Define the roles
• Scrum Primer
• Roles and Ceremonies
• What is necessary to improve
• Strict SCRUM
• Without experience it’s difficult to know
• It’s not about experts, it’s about learning
• SCRUM in 10 minutes
• It’s not a panacea
• User Stories Applied, Agile Estimating and Planning, Succeeding with Agile
• Don’t get discouraged, focus on improving

• why people don’t want to do standups
• what if they go longer than 15 minutes
• core protocols
• avoid status meeting mentality
• take things off line
• how are you exposed
• dealing with people that are late
• sit or stand?
• talking token

• “The Development Team”
• Commitment vs Forecast
• Burn down charts
• Release planning not necessary
• Sprint backlog items bye bye
• Ordered vs prioritized

Roy van de Water, Derek Neighbors, Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Drew LeSueur, Chris Coneybeer and Jade Meskill discuss John Hagel’s article on “The Trust Paradox“.

• Patrick Leonici’s Five Dysfunctions of Team
• Trust is important
• Way we try to build trust is backwards
• Perfection not the way to trust
• Mike Cohn’s pair programming story (as recounted over a few beers)
• Availability to express vulnerability
• Never let them see you sweat?
• Expose strength, show weakness.
• Vulnerability unlocks creativity and bonds the team
• Climbing corporate ladder encourages for self preservation
• Lead by example.. Be transparent to others..
• People believe success is in their ability instead of increasing the ability of those around them.
• Management needs to model open behavior and reward authentic behavior
• Team members be a beacon of humanity for your peers

Clayton Lengel-Zigich, Roy van de Water, Derek Neighbors and Jade Meskill talk about an experience playing paintball as a team and how it relates to agile principles.

• Inspect and adapt
• Iterations felt natural
• Focused on us not external factors
• beat ourselves not the other team
• exposing vulnerabilities
• bite size
• self-organizing
• accountability
• communication
• hitting impediments before they show up through using “i feel exposed” during standups
• getting to point where vulnerability is okay
• core protocols – check-in protocol
• perceptions can be reality
• feelings aren’t facts
• shared vision minimizes politics
• learn healthy conflict

• Accountability
• Requirements
• Cover your ass
• Avoiding conflict
• Turn over safety blanket
• Alternatives
• Documentation isn’t bad
• Communication trumps documentation
• Trust helps prevent need for documentation
• Siloing / Lack of cross functionality
• Team members are people not widgets
• Limiting communication pathways
• Documentation as a wall to avoid interaction

• Obie Blog Post
• Crazy Bob Martin
• Test everything all the time
• To what degree
• Not breaking things
• Verifying value delivered
• Market vs quality
• What’s right level of coverage
• BDD as a technique
• How much risk can you tolerate
• Prototyping
• Technical debt
• Whats your testing comfort level
• Communities have different testing tool competency levels
• Irresponsible?

• Retrospectives
• Pairing
• Continuous Integration
• Warning Signs
• What is effective
• What is quickest
• Deployments are a pain
• Can haz confidence
• XP & TDD
• It depends

• There’s always money in the banana stand
• Linked to purpose
• Why it’s so important
• Shared vision unifies the team
• Decision making is easier with vision
• Vision plus implementation is magic
• Cost of misalignment

• What is an interruption?
• Culture of interruptions
• How does it effect prioritization?
• Planning impossibilities
• It has to be on fire to get done
• It kills teams
• Poor decision making
• It’s contagious
• Loss of innovation
• Balloons for everyone
• Solutions

• Individual, Team, Organization
• Human Resource priorities
• Rate of change
• Performance reviews
• Emotional response
• Personnel turnover
• Conflict
• Champions

• Is it necessary (to have a single product owner)
• Problems with multiple product owners
• Priorities
• Who determines done
• Proxy product owners
• Accountability issues
• Delegation of authority
• Dealing with multiple products and a single development team

• Padding
• Precision vs. accuracy
• Hard conversations
• Assurances
• How to get better at estimates
• Hours vs points
• Story estimates vs estimated velocity

• What are some smells?
• Using same activities all the time.
• Bad facilitating
• Use the “F” word more
• Why does it take so long to get peoples guard down?
• Inspect and adapt applies to retrospectives too.
• SMART goals crossfire style
• Things to remove
• Speaking on behalf of others
• People not expressing themselves
• Phrase questions to get the most out of participants
• Tips and tricks
• Read more (GameStorming, Agile Retrospectives, Thinkertoys, Coaching Agile Teams, Innovation Games)
• Take a risk
• Add alcohol

• Should we certify people?
• The WOW factor
• When does it jump the shark?
• Broken hiring practices
• HR vs real community
• Who is doing the certification?
• There is a demand…
• Scalability
• Certification mill problems
• Why not in universities/schools
• Certifications will evolve

• What does it mean to do BDD?
• Agile as the Hope killer, the tools give you hope
• Diving In vs Deliberate Discovery
• Are we too focused on tools instead of the reason’s they exist?
• Tactile Tools and their benefits over Digital in the Process
• Tools as a blame catcher
• Assuming you’re wrong

• Historically products were projects
• Release planning
• Lean methodologies
• Team management
• Organizational changes
• Overnight competitors
• Things have to change

• Deliberate practice
• Mentoring team members
• Practice new skills
• Mentorship
• Openmind
• What’s the motivation
• Saturated market
• Culture
• Shared goal

• What is a code retreat
• Sometimes wrong is better
• Mocking, flow and learning new languages
• Microsoft cloud offerrings and exposure to new tools

• Challenges of design in iterative development
• Pace and lead time
• Mutual respect
• Everyone’s a designer
• Design tools suck
• Backlog overwhelms
• Ship early and often
• Crossfunctional teams
• Style guides
• Light weight wireframes

Notes:

Thoughtbot article on Everyone’s a Designer

The Mike Cohn’s “I’m always right card” is a joke from a training session with Mike.

• What is done?
• Works on my machine.
• Real data.
• Workflow verification.
• UI/UX completeness.
• Responsibilities.
• Whole product thinking.
• Planning Meetings & Acceptance Criteria

• Is agile just for teams?
• Pairing good traits
• Pitfalls found while pairing
• Good pairing habits
• Pairing in a chaotic environment
• Various pairing techniques
• Physical pairing station setup
• Remote pairing
• Dealing with distractions

• Reading recommendations for SCRUM Basics.
• How do I recognize a dysfunctional team?
• How do I deal with team members with wildly different schedules?
• What is the agile response for a Request for Proposal?
• What happens when the team is agile but the company is not?

• Getting specific information
• Dealing with multiple small teams (2-4 people)
• Problems doing retrospectives using the lowest common denominator amongst teams

• What is the most promising concept/idea?
• What do we see in the way of Agile community?
• Who will be the biggest winners/losers?
• What are new things you plan on trying this year?