It is travelling time

 

 

Photo by Egor Litvinov on Unsplash
  

One of the benefits of Agile development is to get value earlier to the customer. This gets this benefit, companies started to introduce framework like Scrum. This is journey starting point, it is not an event! Depending on the structure of the organization and the teams, be prepared for a longer journey and keep on going. You are not finished when Jira is installed the board is configured.

Today I set the focus on the team’s responsibility of getting things done. Even that is still a big topic, lets further zoom what a team needs to get issues done and reaches the Sprint goal. Let's zoom in even more to set the spot on the resource allocation within the team. At the beginning of an Agile journey all teams will face the issue that knowledge is hidden in silos. Spreading knowledge is the key to success as a team. This does not mean getting everybody everywhere on the same level. Beware of that as you will lower the experts’ skills while and you will lose technical excellence and you get for that medium technical awareness.

Have you ever heard about the bus factor? What if somebody is hit by a bus? Can you still deliver value and reach sprint goals? Last one probably if you are not in a feature factory. The bus factor indicates a risk of missing shared information and capabilities. Draw your needed team skills like Javascript, Java, SQL, Testing and check how many members have these skills. Skills with only one person are very risky as even holidays will block your team in getting it done.

To do this more in detail, you can use stars how familiar you are with a topic like 1 star for basic knowledge up to 3 stars for deep knowledge. As a team goal, reduce highly risky areas by knowledge transfer or define how many stars you want to have on a skill.

In my experience I saw teams where Waterfall within the team was quite common, where developing starts after finished requirement and testing starts after finished developing (and finished code review). If you are trapped in that situation look for pair sessions or engage to start with testing earlier and gets developers to the tests.

Team members needs to jump out of the silo mindset and management needs to stick on that the minimum time effort is not the primary goal as the getting it earlier is more important.

Remember getting it earlier does not mean that the issue is faster coded or faster tested. The team members did also before the great job what they do it within Agile development. With the bus factor greater than one you are on a safer side to get something at all.

Happy travelling in summer!