We understand how traffic jams impact our day to day life ranging from frustration, waste of time/resources, to not being able to reach our destination for critical work, to catastrophic impact of losing someone's life on Road. Similarly how bottlenecks/jams in Agile software development/Organization impacts the throughput of teams, to impacting the product development lifecycle/timelines/resources, to catastrophic impact hindering organisation transformation/growth/sustainability.

Assessing, analysing and identifying the root cause/impact of the bottlenecks, System thinking enables the Agile coach to look/approach problems differently and provide suggestions, guidance, optimal solutions and create learning environment enabling individuals and organizations to evolve from the bottlenecks and helping in growth and transformation.

In this presentation, Sumeet would like to highlight the key root causes of the traffic jams/bottlenecks and role of an Agile Coach applying agile-lean mindset/principles/techniques to evolve solutions, optimizing the whole.

" You Are Not Stuck In Traffic

You Are The Traffic "

The main objective of this talk is to highlight the key Quality contaminations and challenges that impact the Agile Scrum Teams and the remedies. It also mentions how scrum teams struggles for Quality assurance while implementing scrum and how defining Quality strategies helps.

Quality contaminations:

• No QA strategy/Plan or checklist or milestones defined for Project
• No Gates/Checkpoints defined
• No Metrics defined, measured and tracked.
• No Defect guidelines for Defect severity/priority clearly defined.
• No Defect RCA and Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) prepared.
• Not able to fit QA in same sprint as Development
• Don’t think before Test- No upfront test planning or defining/understanding of Test cases/scenarios
• QA part of Development Team- QA efforts not estimated, QA resource considered separate hanging entity in scrum team only responsible for QA
• No Technical Debt assessment and Reduction Plan

SCRUMming: “The Photosynthesis of Agile TREES (SCRUM Teams) for Software Development”

Photosynthesis is one of the nature’s most sustainable production lines, the minuscule sugar/glucose Factory, by utilizing the energy of the Sun along with inputs of water and carbon dioxide

Similarly SCRUMming act as “working software” factories , with well defined/refined Product Backlog(derived from Vision/Strategic Themes), along with right Agile cultural mindset and Enablers(Practices/Tools)

Carbon is chemical backbone for Photosynthesis, like Culture for SCRUMming.

And Team (TREEs) gets it from the Environment, surroundings, values embraced and the principles followed, around and within the organization. It is one of the most important ingredients for Agile team to function efficiently and transform into high performing teams (the photosynthesis efficient Trees/plants).

The Correlations:

Photosynthetic organisms are the primary producers of SUGAR on the planet. They also produce oxygen gas as a byproduct and thus serve as the foundation of life providing food and oxygen for the complex food webs.

Scrum Teams/Scrum is one of primary holistic approaches/framework to produce working software for complex Projects. They also produce O2 “Operational efficiency” and “Optimized Whole” as byproduct and thus serve as the foundation for High performing Teams and Optimized Organizations for complex Market Needs (Projects)

Food for thought

“The Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit”

Build a strong team foundation. Even as per Tuckman’s model, let the team go through the various stages of “Forming, storming, norming, and performing” to get the best results, resulting into high performing agile teams.

“Don’t cut down the TREEs”

Don’t break the scrum Teams, as reaching performing stage is difficult if the scrum teams are cut or their make-up shifts a lot, as when a change is introduced teams reach back to forming stage to start over again and adapt to the change.

“Storms make Trees take deeper roots”

Let the team struggle, fail small and storm, to “inspect and adapt” and “continuously learning and improving”, this leads to strong team foundation.

“Be Eco friendly, Save Trees and let them GROW !!”

Build and preserve the environment/culture for SCRUM teams (trees) and let them GROW!!

“Love the trees until their leaves fall off, and then encourage them to try again next year.”

Letting the teams fail small and encourage them to learn and adapt, instead of penalizing them.

The C4 plants (C4-pathway), the High performing agile Teams …..