Agile and Dev Ops Links

Over time I have found a number of useful articles and videos on Agile Practices that I have included in this blog post. 

I have also included some articles I have written that are posted on the Scrum Alliance site. 

I hope you find them useful.

From the Web

• Product Ownership in a Nutshell - Excellent video on Product Ownership and agile delivery in general. We also learn a very useful way to track progress of software projects. This was produced by Henrik Kniberg who has a very creative way of visualizing processes.

• Spotify Culture - Part 1 - This was also created by Henrik Kniberg. He works at Spotify and describes the culture there. Hendrick describes how large teams successfully work together to deliver complex software.  Spotify Culture - Part 2 completes the story.

My Articles

• What Does The Agile Manifesto Mean - This article covers the four main points of the Agile Manifesto and my view of how they relate to the real world.

• The Agile Manifesto Principles - This article continues exploring the Agile Manifesto and covers the twelve principles.

• Scrum is Simple but not Easy - When I was at the Global Scrum Gathering® New Orleans in 2014, they handed out t-shirts that had "Scrum is Simple but not Easy" printed on it. This article explores why we should stick to the tenants of Scrum and what happens when we diverge from them.

My current assignment involves using Dev Ops to a large degree. I have learned that Dev Ops is a logical extension of Agile software delivery. Software has no value until it is in the hands of users and Dev Ops helps do this faster.

• Devops Where do I Start Cheat Sheet - This is a very comprehensive set of links to articles and videos on Dev Ops. It is very Microsoft and Azure focused but will be useful to anyone attempting to understand where to start on this huge topic. I particularly liked the book The Phoenix Project. It is a fun and easy read similar to the One Minute Manager.

• Lead an autonomous DevOps team at Scale: a true story - This presentation was done at the Microsoft Ignite 2016 conference. It describes how Microsoft was able to change from a delivery cycle of every two years to delivery into production every three weeks. 

Best of luck to all of you in your delivery of great software.

Plan and Schedule You Sprint Meetings With This Handy Template

In large corporations, everyone's schedule is packed with meetings. This makes is difficult to schedule the important meetings Scrum needs.

I have created a template that I have been using that is simple and easy.



It includes the name of the project and the sprints contained in a given release. Dates of important activities and meetings are also included.

Once the dates have been established, I schedule All Of The Meetings well in advance. Normally schedules are more open weeks in advance. Once these meetings are on the team's calendar, they schedule other meetings around the existing sprint meetings.

You may access a copy of the template here.