Week in Review #7


  • Monday - Spent a large part of the day glued to the news feeds while finishing the documentation needed for this sprint's release. Got some bad news about my hoped-for shift at work.
  • Tuesday - End of sprint, sans any sense of accomplishment or celebration. The mood is grim. We skipped some retrospectives in favor of getting a release out the door, and had an "emergency" backlog grooming session for late-breaking stories. We are perpetuating a lot of unhappy patterns, and I'm not sure how to go about helping the logjam break. Everything seems to start far upstream of the team's ability to impact anything. 
  • Wednesday - Sprint planning. Velocity has steadied after last sprint's dip, so we have at least achieved a stable flow. Now to reduce that flow enough that we can spend some energy making things better. Release schedule is unfortunately also steady; since the teams were promised repeatedly that things would change come November, this is not being well received. We are making some time for internal improvements finally, so that's good. A mixed bag.
  • Thursday - Last week's personal retrospective and good cheer seem like a year ago. A day full of meetings, and I am feeling my split responsibilities keenly. 
  • Friday - Brought cider donuts, because when things are shitty, feed people.
A week of poor sleep, significant stress, and generally feeling trapped has left me with little energy for research or thinking. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handling Meetings with Remote Attendees

This is the third session in my brown bag series. It's not an "agile" topic really, but it was one of the things people requested a session on.  I hoped that people would bring their questions and be willing to discuss them. There were four topics proposed, and some conversation although it was mostly people in the room. Here is the outline:  Day before, set up a Trello board as an option for people to raise topics and added a link to the invitation. Recruited a co-pilot who would watch the WebEx chat and bring up anything that came in through that.  Five minutes before the session, dial in to WebEx, start camera, ensure that screen sharing is set up and the projector is working.  Noon - official start time. 
Read more

Hello, World

This is a new blog I'm starting in order to keep track of my thoughts about Agile practices and philosophy, and the Scrum Master work I'm doing at my own place of employment. I began this work approximately one year ago, and if I've learned anything since then, it's that there's always more to learn....
Read more

Manifesto Musings #3

Working software over comprehensive documentation This line seems to me to be the least useful of the bunch, if only because it is so obvious as to seem unnecessary. Software without documentation may or may not be useful; documentation without software is always useless. This line causes technical writers a lot of angst, though, so maybe I will approach it from that perspective as a straddle the career boundary. Part of the angst seems to be rooted in a tendency for people to approach Agile stuff in a restrictive, black and white fashion. Most tech writers being in the business of providing customer-centric documentation of some kind, there's a tendency to think that Agile means getting rid of that wholesale, and I don't think that's what is actually meant. It is fairly common, though, to see "X has more value than y," morph into, "So you don't do y at all then. Good luck with that." Cue rolled eyes. This is of course a straw man; I've y...
Read more