What are /r/agile's favorite Products & Services?

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I would highly recommend Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins

I have used https://skribbl.io/ (free) or geoguessr (cost) as a remote/social/beer event with my scrum teams. or if the team is young and digital affine you can setup a game session with normal games on pc/ps etc.

I’ve tried a variety of tools, like Things 3, Trello, and even OneNote (yeah, I know). I’ve been using Notion for the past few months and it has a Kanban style board template that I find pretty useful. Plus it’s cross platform. It’s quite a powerful tool. The team behind it seems genuinely caring and responsive to support and inquiry requests.

I’ve also been using it extensively for personal documentation, including blog posts and other personal research stuff.

For OmniFocus, it was a little too much for me. I like a powerful solution, but it’s overwhelming at first.

My close second is probably Things 3. It’s simple, clean, and gets new features pretty regularly.

Hope that helps!

I always recommend Learning Agile since it covers a lot of ground and combines theory and practice with tangible and practical examples

Try Kanban with value stream mapping.

BTW, Agile is not a methodology, it’s a mindset embracing a set of values and principles that enable you to respond to change, and deliver value early and often. :) ... the frameworks give you some structure that might be described as a methodology.

I recommend reading a Kanban in Action - https://www.amazon.com/Kanban-Action-Marcus-Hammarberg/dp/1617291056

Edit: added book link.

Interesting problem. In a regulated environment, you have constraints: ie, you can't get work Done until it comes back without some kind of approval.

So the main thing about working in a regulated environment is that very constraint: the regulators.

A few suggestions:

1) have a public planning board that includes colors for ROAM analysis goes out as far as you need to, and put milestones on it for delivering and receiving work (horizontal) vs teams (vertical). Put stickies on the board for everyone to see where those milestones are.

2) put string (literally: yarn or string) in between the things that depend on deliverables from teams

3) accept that regulatory means constraints

4) make sure you have everyone on a team that the team needs to complete some kind of releasable/deliverable work completely (ie do you need a compliance person per team? what about a secretary? etc.)

So part of this depends upon your teams, the other part depends upon your tools.

1) Use Scrum if you have complex work and frequent deliverables, use Scrumban if you need a lighter weight framework that allows you to publish work more frequently, use Kanban if many of your work items are the same size and you don't need to go too deeply into why things succeed and fail

2) do you meet and think about your tools, people, processes and relationships?

3) do you have executive buy-in?

4) do you have program goals?

5) do teams set goals?

6) ask people to read the Scrum Guide to see at least what is available to them.

Happy to discuss, I would learn a lot. Best regards.

With the time difficulty I would also recommend giving persistent chat tools a try so you can communicate asynchronous. One on my list to try is Slack but haven't used it yet https://slack.com/ Although once in a while I would do video chat! Good luck :)

If you're looking for a platform to run your sessions on, check out https://metroretro.io/ great multiplayer functionality and loads of templates to get you started if you don't want to make your own.

This book is based on studies/evidence:

• https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations-ebook/dp/B07B9F83WM

There is some sad truth behind your question: Our industry is based on gut feeling. We do tons of things, even after the evidence tells us that it does not work. Software estimation comes to mind.

The Principles of Product Development Flow. This is nuclear powered awesomeness.

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development https://www.amazon.com/dp/1935401009/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_F3QtFb8WAP9WK

My current gig uses the Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, the only oddball is Jenkins instead of Bamboo), and most of my team have been nagging the IT department to consider migrating to either Github projects or Gitlab. I am personally biased towards the latter.

Atlassian is burning the candle at both ends; they snapped up Trello for small organizations that don't need the complexity of Jira, and AgileCraft (now Jira Align) for big enterprises adopting SAFe.

There are some interesting niche players out there. Intland Software GmbH of Germany makes codeBeamer ALM, which is targeted towards safety-critical industries like automotive, aerospace, and medical devices. These industries have heavy traceability and compliance requirements that codeBeamer caters to.

The people behind Targetprocess are good people, I hope they don't get crushed by the Atlassian juggernaut.

I might be self promoting here but Favro is a great alternative to both Trello and JIRA. Its free for as many users as you want, forever. There is a catch, the paid version of $6.80 gives you extra power and functionality in the form of apps such as slack integrations, google drive, github and many more. If you still want all that for free, we do have a very generous referral program which could set you up with a free version for a good couple of months. check it out. https://www.favro.com

looks like an attempt to define language for what htey feel the 4 major components to an agile organization are:

the internal people the internal tools the internal culture the external impacts

and yes without a doubt after trying to show that they have knowledge on Agile facts, they shamelessly attempt to use that as a springboard to advertisement. As they put it "Self-identified experts"... Here is his resume if you really want to know about him: (https://www.slideshare.net/GervaisJohnson/gervais-johnson-agile-coach-details-resume-52031068)

There are some simple tools you can use, MS Project is not really appropriate, especially if you have to buy it.

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You can start with Trello, this is free and is often used by small teams. I can recommend it for one team setups.

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I have also used https://taiga.io/ this is a pretty good tool as well.

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If you use Gitlab or Github cloud, then you can also use their project boards which are perfectly fine for single teams as well.

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If you need to manage lots of tasks and different teams, then JIRA is really the best product hands down. if you have a low amount of users, then it is pretty cheap for the cloud version.

Not sure you'd call it a "reference" here are the two most useful resources I've used:

Corey Ladas book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0578002140/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_aCXuFbZ81039J

The YouTube channel "Development That Pays" with lots of great videos on this: https://www.youtube.com/c/Developmentthatpays

I'm inferring a little from how you've described your situation, so correct me if I'm wrong.

One thing to remember is that being agile is a mindset, not a methodology. Lots of people think of "agile" as something you do rather than something you are.

Mindset -> values -> principles -> practices -> tools

When you're learning about the subject it's good to start with the mindset and work along the chain. One thing about being lean and agile is the focus on respect for people. As a scrum master, you'll find that your job is actually about being an expert in individual and organisational psychology. Your choice of language is quite revealing: you describe your role as "overseeing" two teams. As a scrum master you're practicing the discipline of servant leadership, not supervising them as a Taylorist manager.

Books go deeper than blog posts and while both are useful, I'll recommend a few books here, in order for your situation:

"Succeeding with agile" by Mike Kohn - a really good start. He's the author of the Mountain Goat Software blog that another post mentions.

"Scrum Mastery" by Geoff Watts

"Coaching agile teams" by Lyssa Adkins

"Agile Retrospectives" by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen

"Liftoff: launching agile teams" by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies

"The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries

"The Lean Enterprise" by Jez Humble, Barry O'Reilly and Joanne Molesky

It's worth reading all of them but start at the beginning. Best of luck on your journey.

If you want to prepare for the SM interview, I suggest exploring various interview questionnaires. Feel free to use my questionary, I tested it on 40+ candidates. It covers multiple related topics like behavioral questions, process design, communication, technical proficiency and more https://www.notion.so/sashhimi/Agile-Coach-Interview-questionary-2e4c975d04d24903ad0ac6df329ab3e3

There was a recent very good Meta Cast podcast episode precisely on this topic

Agile Architecture

I like the story Lukas Klose tells, because it ties in not just the splitting but the vertical slices. It helps frame the mindset which can be the real barrier to story splitting.

You ask the group to imagine they need to build a highway from Village A to Village B. Traditional construction techniques would be ordering materials & tools and laying a road, etc. But what about, send a guy to walk there (and preferably, back again!). That guy is going to know so much more about this, is there a canyon in the middle? A mountain? Does Village B even still exist? How are the people there feeling about Village A? Maybe next time, the guy can take a ball of string to leave a path, then maybe he can take a stick and clear the path... etc etc.

https://www.slideshare.net/LukasKlose/incremental-delivery-benefits-of-vertical-splitting

You can run this as an exercise in splitting, but generally only with inexperienced groups.

There are two that I like personally:

• The WARP retro: I like this one simply because it has an Appreciations section. People get to thank one another for things they've done well and that's an underrated part of building a good team IMO. The Wishes part can be quite productive too, you get to hear what people think as an ideal state for the project.

• The Sailboat Retro: I tend to use this one for deeper strategic retros, maybe for a team that hasn't done one in a while, as the outlook for the topics is a better fit for longer term objectives.

Also, are you using external facilitators? That can be great input to break the mold and have more effective retros.

There're good tools out there, but none fit exactly well. They were either too feature rich, pricey, too busy, had too steep a learning curve, etc. We ended up building our own.

We felt there was an opportunity to build a great open source tool, so we've spent the better part of a year, and we've just now launched. It's called Taiga (www.taiga.io) It's incredibly easy to use, and very powerful. It's free as well...

Give it a try: https://taiga.io

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JI54HCU/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0

This doesn't account for the new scrum guide in 2020, but its a good read from Jeff and JJ Sutherland. Also available as an audio book through your library via the Libby app.

My firm run a ‘coach up’ 3 month programme which was great, but in the end, the practice is the thing.

I would say look up coaching techniques, using leading questions, tools like GROW method and reasoned argument. There is lots on YouTube and TED talks about what good looks like. https://youtu.be/W5qQJhe7sLE

Also books like

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Overcoming-Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Facilitators/dp/0787976377/ref=nodl_

Further, the knowledge that you have of Agile ceremonies and methodologies which presumably are already recognised will be honed in the new role.

Assuming there are current Agile coaches in your company, they should coach you (we have a group session where we practice techniques, and try new ones)

I highly recommend reading "Continuous Discovery" - the business and product value should be the no 1 priority and should deeply influence design - to do that effectively we need constant communication with customers, asking more useful questions, and have Product managers, tech leads and team leads on those calls to directly understand pain/use cases, etc that drive value, and then they can translate that into testable hypotheses that you can methodologically work through before your write any code

By the time you're writing the code, you should have a decent understanding of the forest and the trees and you can work quickly and confidently

Start using sprints that run at least 2 but not more than 4 weeks, ~15 minute daily stand ups, and implement retrospectives. I highly recommend Agile Retrospectives

Read and embrace the agile manifesto.

If your dev teams are too large, split them up. What’s really important is team buy-in. So before you start selling agile, really get a good grasp on its concepts.

Personally, I’ll never go to waterfall! I love agile and I hope you will too.

Maybe this helps?

A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware (Agile Software Development Series)

(man the title is even longer than the URL ...)

• Have a look at "User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product" by Jeff Patton and Peter Economy on how to cooperate with the developers to find out what to build and in which order. Doing this as a team should also help to bootstrap good communication among the team. The whole success of your project depends of this because all shortcomings of the team will show in the software it will build.
• I you haven't already, maybe watch "Monster University" to see what makes a good team. Seriously! Pixar's history is rooted in Software Development, Lean Management and the Science community.
• I recommend to go with Scrum, with you in the PO role. See http://www.scrumguides.org/ for an overview.
• Since you are hiring the developers, you'll need also to check not just the quality of the product they are creating, but also the quality of their code. Have a look at Robert C. Martin's "Clean Code". In short, you should be able to read your developer's code and get a basic idea of what it is actually doing.

Well... there are different interpretations of what "Agile" means. I define it as the four preferences listed in the Agile Manifesto. Also the so called "Waterfall" has different interpretations and in its purest variant, it had only been used as an example for a model that does not work.

Generally I would say the best: It depends.

Flappy Bird could have been done in pure Waterfall but the higher the complexity, the tools used in the Agile community become more and more beneficial. Eg. Unit Tests, Incremental-Iterative-Development, MVP, Team Retrospectives, Limiting Work In Progress, Visual Management, Servant Leadership, Flow, Team Jell, Floor Plan, User Stories, Personas, Lean Start Up, Cross Functional Teams, Implicit Knowledge, Gemba, Kaizen, Systems Thinking, Clean Code, etc.

Do I agree with you? When you say what you described works for you and your team and your customers, then yes. Otherwise: Not quite. :)

Yep. One has to grok People to get it right. Which is very hard because human brains are neural networks with only a small rational reasoning extension, which additionally idles most of the time in power safe mode and no one has any idea what years of life programmed into them.

But as the building blocks of organizations are people, there is no other way around it.

Some books which I found helpful and inspiring:

• "Thinking: Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
• "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie
• http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-irrational-side-of-change-management
• "The New Why Teams Don't Work: What Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right" by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley
• "Scrum Mastery" by Geoff Watts

And two books I basically grew up with:

• "Phule's Company" by Robert Asprin
• "Peopleware" by Tom DeMacro and Timothy R. Lister

• "Agile Product Management with Scrum"

• "Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction"

• "The Lean Startup"

• "Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale"

• "Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works"

• "Rework"

• "Agile Estimating and Planning"

• "Succeeding with Agile Software Development"

• "User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development"

• "Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process"

Developers I've worked with in the past recommend 2 books that might be helpful resources for you as well:

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

and

Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests or GOOST for short

Assuming the team has a scrum master in place, you should only need to pick up a working knowledge of scrum initially (I.e a couple of hours reading and some practice). Based on the role you are picking up I'd focus more on what it takes to be a really good product manager in an agile environment.

Specifically around keeping a backlog of requirements ready to play and ensuring the right thing is delivered (rather than delivering it right)

I've not read it, but this gets good reviews and covers the right topics http://www.amazon.co.uk/Agile-Product-Management-Scrum-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321605780

couple books off the top of my head:

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Explained-Embrace-Change/dp/0321278658/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=extreme+programming+explained&qid=1671207235&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Implementing-Lean-Software-Development-Concept/dp/0321437381/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=implementing+lean+software+development&qid=1671207425&sr=8-1

With regards to bugs, there are 3 types.

1. Bugs found by the dev while they are coding. No-one else sees it. The dev writes a unit test to cover and it stays their dirty little secret.
   
2. Bugs found by the QA during the sprint. No big deal. Create a bug report, inform the team, get the PO to triage (is this bug something that should block us from releasing to the customer?). Fix the bugs on the story, close the story, declare victory. Discuss bug metric (how many bugs did QA find on stories this sprint) and countermeasures in the sprint.
3. Bugs found by the customer. Gross. Tie it in to your team-level metrics (see accelerate. Put it in your backlog to prioritize against other bugs and user stories. Pull into the sprint as normal. Discuss during retro.

I recommend against story pointing anything except user stories. Ultimately what you want to forecast for planning is "amount of user value" (velocity). Teams naturally start estimating bugs or tasks, but all that overhead is actually already measured just by the user stories. If bugs and tasks take up more time, then the Velocity goes down. It is key here to measure output for the customer NOT amount of work done by the team.

Missed that one but anything Agile, I upvote !
We're fans of this subject and what gravitates around it, in our team. We wrote an article on the subject and we'd love your opinion:
https://zenkit.com/en/blog/kanban-vs-scrum/

I manage my team using Taskade. It's a task management/project organizer app that can be used for keeping everyone on track.....Been using it for a while now and its great!

Although I've read a number of them, there are two books where the knowledge within them made an almost audible click (to me, at least).

The Goal - Eli Goldratt. This book is a surprisingly easy read, written as a story rather than a textbook, leads the reader through many of the foundational principles that led to the Lean Manufacturing revolution. The click for me was that the concepts of Lean and Agile are very closely intertwined. I would go so far as to say that Agile is a rediscovery of Lean in a software context. Concepts of Inventory, Utilization, etc. and how they apply to Throughput is key to breaking down many of the "why doesn't this work!?" outcries of faux-agile.

Accelerate - Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim. This is an amazing book that is written backwards, starting at the conclusions and then explaining them and the working. That means that if you just read to page xx before the preface, you will already have a list of things to implement that will make your organization better. The thing I really love about this book is that it is based on the largest set of empirical studies ever done in the software world. It really is evidence-based and thus trumps anyone's (including my own) gut feel or special pleading of "but that won't work here".

Highly recommend this book. These two fellows really explain it well

https://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Your-Scrum-Practical-Solutions/dp/1680506978/ref=sr_1_1?crid=4MOE5UE81IUW&keywords=fixing+your+scrum&qid=1650908802&s=books&sprefix=Fixing+your+%2Cstripbooks%2C124&sr=1-1

That's a good question, it's not exactly the opposite but one could see some kind of reflection in here.
On that matter, we wrote an article that could be a good complementary, hope you like it :)
https://zenkit.com/en/blog/agile-vs-waterfall/

Great to have 'real life' examples like this, helps to understand the power of each.
Thanks for the insights, we love this kind of article in our team, we also wrote on the subject and we'd love your feedback:
https://zenkit.com/en/blog/agile-vs-waterfall/

It's all about methodology and how tools adapt to it, once you know the game you can even tweak the tool ;)
On that matter, we wrote an article that could be a good complementary, hope you like it:

https://zenkit.com/en/blog/agile-methodology-an-overview/

You are way to stressed out over this. Relax.

Sounds like you have domain logic in the data layer that you want to move back into the domain layer. You guys need to read Enterprise Integration Patterns and Domain Driven Design.

From a code organization view that's not a story. A more realistic story would be like "A user submits payroll data with invalid XXXX, and the submission is not accepted". That assumes you're accepting some work that fails later, and you don't like that.

When you negotiate with your scrum team or ask for a raise.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0062407805/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_38Q6KHJ6TB6VW16DQGP0

This is a great book on the subject and covers how to avoid anti-patterns that crop up with SAFe:

https://www.amazon.com/ART-Avoiding-Train-Wreck-Practical/dp/1094752282/ref=sr_1_16?crid=KKWQ970HD27X&keywords=scaled+agile+framework&qid=1646619566&sprefix=Scaled+ag%2Caps%2C122&sr=8-16

Epics are just larger user stories, not categories or labels or "buckets" where a bunch of somehow related stories should be clumped into. Epics can sometimes be split into two or more smaller stories. Please read https://www.amazon.com/User-Stories-Applied-Software-Development/dp/0321205685 for Mike Cohn's original definition.

Many "agile books" don't talk about epics, because epics (and by extension user stories) are a niche tool for teams to use, not some universal thing that is required in order to be agile.

This video (and JIRA in general) seems to make the mistake of saying "epic" while meaning "project".

But certainly, if your team wants to define "epic" as buckets of tasks/stories, possibly with deadlines and dependencies and what not, and it works for you, then go ahead! But please do not spread information like this as an objective truth of our industry, when it is not.

Certainly a good video if someone wants to understand proje--epics within a JIRA context. Thanks.

Instead of a "certification", try this: - Read a good book, like Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time https://smile.amazon.com/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/038534645X/ - Join a local group of agilists. Do an internet search for "agile <your-place-name>", and you'll almost definitely find a group of people nearby who can help.

Very valid points. What I'm thinking of is kind of an 'oil stain' strategy, by letting only people join that are invited by others. Dribbble, a designer platform has been fairly successful with that method. I'd start by inviting people from some communities I trust, and let it build from there.

Another idea might be to use existing certifications. Like you at least need to have one certification in the Agile field (PSM, CSM, Less, SAFe, whatever). Dedicated professionals usually have at least one of those. I might combine the two, either invited by an existing member, or a manual check.

Thirdly, at a certain point, I might choose to remove the free option for new members. Sounds silly, but having a small monthly charge as a barrier, will mean that people joining are very serious. Only after I'd be really convinced though, and the early-bird members would remain free.

I realize for success marketing and branding will take more time. Luckily I like that as well, and have a light background in those areas too. Thanks for all your thoughts and input, if I carry through, you'll be the first to get an invite ; ) Belgium is great, I'm spending my summer holiday there in September. Cheers!

Here is the link to the questions and my answers by the way https://gofile.io/d/7yg2Bc Maybe we can start the discussion here and post answers with explanations that deviate from the document?

www.teamretro.com tracks prior retrospective feedback and even captures all previous retros. The actions can be seen at any time, as well as team agreements. If you like to see history, you can also record and see team health checks as well as all your retrospectives can see it. The team dashboard is good for that too. There is a 30 day free trial.

www.groupmap.com lets you create workspaces to keep track of your retros too so that's worth checking out.

good questions:

I personally look for “what metrics define success for this product”. I care less about “how”. Burn down charts in particular aren’t a measure of success, but if you wanted to add the the cycle time for new features decreases by “x” that would be ok for me.

Prioritization frameworks-here are a few to read up on, but it should be fluid based on product/opportunity etc, sometimes a simple “value/effort” 4 or 9 box can be useful. https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/release-management/prioritization-framework

Failing fast - determine a point in your product delivery to define “persevere, pivot or kill”, don’t keep building and define “delivered product” success. Define milestones/hypotheses and set guardrails of what would mean “kill it”.

RAIDs- simple SOS focused on what is slowing the team or impacting delivery. Risks/Assumptions (or Action)/Impediments/dependencies. My team does it weekly, with a clear escalation process (starts at team/awareness for me as PM, escalates to product family for support, then ecosystem if we need it).

The purpose is transparency and visibility on progress/impacts/impediments, thus enabling you as PO to message appropriately

Sounds like a crucial conversation needs to happen.

IMO they probably think what they're doing is for the project's best interest.. I'd be surprised if they're actually being malicious, right? Who would do that?

If they have some sort of technical vision, it's probably more productive (long term) to hear them out and let them pursue it within time and scope constraints.

Sometimes a small experiment can replace a large discussion. Also, for the future, it might be beneficial to have an M.O. for these situations. It could take an otherwise uncontrollable situation and make it more controllable.

Not that it should be happening regularly... It's not okay that they are just going rogue.

This is a great opportunity for you to define what kind of leader you'll be. I assume you're leading the project in some capacity? You can reign with an iron fist. However, I've found that less efficient than using trust AND responsibility.

Good luck!

It sounds like there's a lack of safety in the environment. Solving this kind of problem isn't really my area of expertise, but there's a TedX talk by Amy Edmonson, a Harvard Business School professor. She also wrote a book.

If people don't feel safe in doing things like disagreeing, saying no, and failing, you'll probably run into a lot of other issues with change and improvement.

Here's a 20 page book that's new $0.99 on kindle, and you can get it for free on many websites: Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction Paperback – April 3, 2012

Link to amazon listing

Definition of velocity:

>rapidity of motion or operation; swiftness; speed:

Literally, the common definition of velocity, is speed. They're synonyms anywhere that is not a physics class. http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/velocity

>How's the "importance" of Blocked & Random Practice reversed?

From the article you link to (emphasis mine):

>In simple terms, this means that random practice setups challenge the learner’s cognitive and motor systems to deal with the interference of each task on the next—an element that keeps him/her on his/her toes and allows for greater retention and skill transfer.

Blocked practice will help you memorize how to type the text "git rebase". You'll be able to type it over and over again, anytime somebody asks you type it. Random practice will help you understand what its doing and be able to apply it in ways not covered by your practice sessions. If you want to memorize something, use blocked practice. If you want to learn something, use random practice.

We solved that problem by allowing people to create retro items as they go easier. I wrote a blog post about our process here if you're curious: https://medium.com/@redheadjessica/a-step-by-step-guide-to-using-trello-for-team-retrospectives-da327daf7e47

I'm using WebWork time tracker to track my time and projects. It has integration settings so you can integrate your JIRA account to your WebWork account and track your projects using the time tracker.

Yes, but right now we are focused on adding GitLab, BitBucket, and CircleCI Integrations in the near future.

If you are a user of Jira, GitHub, and Jenkins though I'd be happy to show you around our platform and give you free access to the beta soon. https://calendly.com/jithen-shriyan/30min

Just the ticketing aspect for now, in the future we plan to add integrations to the whole Atlassian stack.

We can show you a demo of our product if you are interested in becoming an early adopter. https://calendly.com/jithen-shriyan/30min

We have CI/CD pipeline metrics and are working on deployment frequency and deployment lead time.

We can give you a demo if you are interested in learning more. https://calendly.com/jithen-shriyan/30min

I have shared some charts which I have used (Sprint Burndown, EPIC release burndown, CFD). Please check if you find them useful: https://www.slideshare.net/SaugataDas5/agile-status-reporting-primer

I’ve played with team https://skribbl.io/ at the end of virtual TB for fun and relax. Need to admit it works not for all teams, so just like an option. Keep talking and nobody explodes - try to research - this game really shows level of cooperation and ability to work in stressed situations. Again - works not for all teams. Good luck!

My biggest piece of advice is to remember that you’ve used software and websites before. You bank, shop, socialize and map online. What expectations for performance would you have as a user?

All too often I hear product developers claiming that aspects of the product that are not specifically the sexy UI/UX functionality should be driven by technology teams. Politely, this is your product. Act like a product owner. Set the standards that you want to maintain. Provide the direction as acceptance criteria in plain English and your teams your teams will make it happen. if you start by saying “page load times must not be slow”, one of your engineers will (hopefully) ask, what “slow” means to you. Thus starts the conversation.

You are all on a journey together. Failure is an opportunity to learn and become a high performing team.

That said, google has a tool that you can start using to bench mark your site against others and define your own set of standards.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Keep being curious, passionate and asking questions!!

PS: I think that being a part of this IT Revolution is just about the coolest thing ever!

+1 for Trello, there are also a number of plugins (free and paid) which can help if you are doing Scrum/Kanban/etc.

I've been collecting resources for people doing Scrum with Trello, including those plugins here https://trello.com/b/VliA4Xzm/scrum

Historically I've used a combination of:

• Google Calendar
• Google Keep - small item Todo list ( shopping lists, pay bill etc)
• Trello - personal kanban for little projects.
• Paper notebook - drawing pictures of how ideas might work.. I'll attach pictures to trello

More recently I've added OneNote to sort of replace the paper book.

The thing I've been looking recently is https://www.notion.so/ which seems to do most of it, I've mainly used it for a little diary at the moment.

I'm not great at streamlining everything.. the thing I've got the most value out of honestly is the paper notebook to write down / explore ideas. I try to write a Todo list the night before for the small things.

My issue has been focus, my trello board just has a written WIP limit on the column title which I've found very helpful.

I've got a shared calendar and keep with my wife, but a set standup time is a challenge with her varying shift patterns.

I've yet to try this stuff on the kids yet but I think it could help but they're still quite young.

I was checking a couple of tools for creating a summary of collaboration tools, and I found this one: PlanITpoker. Let me know if you already tried it.

Hi all

I created a sort of checklist and added some of the tools mentioned here. I think it could be useful especially if a team needs to work remotely but doesn´t have experience with that.

I had a lot of fun testing these tools, I found some very interesting. I'll add more tools/criteria, happy to update or correct anything.

Take a look at this book or one of his talks https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08S3DHJJW/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=allankelly-21&amp;creative=6738&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B08S3DHJJW&amp;linkId=6f184e330d1e3a54ce6654abeafbf967&amp;ref_=d6k_applink_bb_marketplace

I'm far from alone in my assertion. Take this for example:

> More teams are managing larger projects—and multiple projects—with people scattered across different offices and regions. It's really easy for the scale of Agile projects to outgrow the whiteboard.

> But wait, there's more. Agile increases the pressure on QA and testing* teams to manage more tests and handle more complexity. Oh, and do it all in less time, too.

http://smartbear.com/agile-software-development/agile-testing/

While you're at it, do a Google/Yahoo/Bing search for &quot;how does qa fit&quot;.

Agile eschews testing focus in favor of developer focus. Go figure, it was invented by a room full of developers without a single tester in shouting range.

Oddly, companies still care about releasing software that works right rather than just spewing out new half-broken crap every two weeks. So they still expect an effective and thorough QA process. Except when devs are dropping story code at last day of sprint, it's not going to be the devs that are up all night scrambling to test it, or blamed for it missing the sprint because it failed testing and got thrown back.... and especially not for the bugs that the testers miss because they are pressed at the final minute.

> Essential Scrum

it look pretty comprehensive, I'll give it a look. The Scrum Guide is only 16 pages and covers the basics, which are quite simple.

As it was mentioned, if people don't look at Excel, it's either not useful or people are not interested in it. As an indie I'm building shipit which is a simple tool for visualizing your roadmap, connecting initiatives to your OKRs, and managing the inflow of ideas. Much simpler (and also more limited) than alternatives likes Productboard, Productplan, or Aha (and also cheaper).

A big revelation for me were product requirements documents which we didn't use in any of the companies before. Think of a very detailed epic in Jira which describes the target audience, technical details, marketing plan, etc. This makes browsing roadmap way more useful for everyone.

Thanks for the reply! Clubhouse.io seems awesome def seems the closest to what im looking for, im sad they dont have time tracking but it enables third party integration. I like that clubhouse has velocity reports.

Thats something I definetly require.

Notion also came up but doesn't have reports at all.

Do you use any time tracking plugin for <strong>clubhouse.io</strong>?

Super valuable actually. Thanks for sharing that!

Have you tried doing them with async videos? I think it would solve lots of those issues:

- people can focus on what they're going to say: if they said something wrong, they can reset their video and start again, when they're sure, they'll send it over to the team
- fixed order? when doing them with async video, it doesn't matter, whenever a team member starts their day, they can submit their update when they like it: can always also be around a fixed time, but always in the user's time zone.

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I see lots of teams (at companies of all sizes) are looking to do them asynchronously. This way you get rid of connectivity issues, dropping calls, having to switch in the middle of the standup to a last-resort tool like Skype (from Cisco Jabber), etc.

By the way, for background noises, with async video you can always just go into a small room and send your video standup from there. But in case you just can't do this (you're in a coffee shop, co-working), you can try try Krisp.ai: it works wonders.

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OK. The tricky part is that neither the client nor the web agency I advice are very familiar with Agile. As for me, I read and discussed a lot about Agile but I a not certified or specifically trained. I am currently catching up through a MOOC called Agile in 100 minutes to get my facts straight.

But when you put everybody around the table, we are all pretty convinced that it's the way we will get things done, and that it can really make a difference. And that's not common in my field, at least in France. So I do not want to miss this opportunity.

I guess what we need is more experienced agilist to help us at least in the early stages of the process, I have some names in mind.

Defining Done an Agile Discussion Meeting Details:

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I agree OKRs are quite a good way of stating these kinds of things, but everybody does this a bit differently, however the form you see in "Radical Focus" by Christina Wodtke is very outcome-focussed and at the right kind of level for the top of the business in my opionin.

Other references that are pretty good on this kind of thinking are "Escape the Build Trap" and The North Star framework (https://amplitude.com/north-star).

A user story is a placeholder for a conversation, and you and the author having that conversation is a good thing, IMO.

In Agile, you should never be in a situation where you can turn off your brain and only do what the "requirements" have documented.

A well written user story will describe the user, their goal, and the benefit to the user. Usually in the format of "As a [User Role], I want [Feature], so that [Benefit]" and acceptance criteria are written in Given/When/Then format. See https://www.pivotaltracker.com/blog/principles-of-effective-story-writing-the-pivotal-labs-way for a good article.

The ticket should not, for the most part, describe the "how" of the implementation. Developer implementing the story is the best person to determine "how" to implement it. The technical decisions should never be made by non-technical people.

Pivotal Tracker -- Our clients' product owners are expected to keep the backlog up to date at all times. As an added bonus, they have a fantastic iPhone/iPad app and it integrates nicely with Google Apps, allowing the team to easily share numerous project artifacts throughout the sprint.

As mentioned in another comment, JIRA/Greenhopper has a similar capability but in my experience of using that combo for several years with multiple teams, it's not the best tool. We found it to be a fantastic bug tracking system with a poorly written agile-like overlay. We also reported numerous bugs up to Atlassian regarding burndown calculations that were written off or ignored.

I've seen a few tools or ways to do it. Currently I'm using Miro.com on an account I pay for myself. It's about $ 15 a month and I use ideas from Fun retrospectives. I really like the combination and miro allows for things to be reusable between teams (or between like-minded people - I'll gladly share my boards).

I'm looking forwards to go back to the office and try some out on paper. I've recently ordered some high quality stickies and a bunch of sharpies to get creative.

As some here mentioned, there might be issues with security or budget or signatures or ... that's why I chose to buy them myself. Also I don't mind investing into my current employer as they have also already invested a lot of (time and effort) into me.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿 - 𝗗𝗮𝘆 5 - The Grinch movie retrospective

On the fifth day of Christmas, the virtual agile coach gave to me.. Another festive retro for freeeeee.

Try the Grinch movie retro to focus a little more on the 'WHomanity' within your team. Identify together what acts would make your teams heart grow three sizes. Now downloadable in both Miro and MURAL.

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_leaUqb0=/?moveToWidget=3074457351855723551&amp;cot=12

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿 - 𝗗𝗮𝘆 4 - A festive Christmas scene - A game about outcomes vs outputs

On the fourth day of Christmas, the virtual agile coach gave to me.. A festive agile game for freeeeee.

Try the Festive Christmas scene game to explore the difference between outcomes and outputs in how teams work. Template now downloadable to be downloaded in Miro, link below;

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https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_leaUqb0=/?moveToWidget=3074457351855723550&amp;cot=12

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿 - 𝗗𝗮𝘆 3 - Retrospect ya filthy animals!

On the third day of Christmas, the virtual agile coach gave to me.. A nostalgic retro entirely for free..

Try the Home Alone movie retro to find out what is making you scream AHHHHh! Like Kevin & What your team needs to give up on, or are thirsty for more of. Now downloadable in both Miro and MURAL.

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_leaUqb0=/?moveToWidget=3074457351855723549&amp;cot=12

I think which tool you choose depends on what you are trying to do and what your needs are.

I completely agree that Windows Teams isn't a good platform for retros. However, there are so many great tools that have different strengths and benefits.

As mentioned, Miro is great for experienced teams with a great facilitator who has the time to set up the experience before bringing the team in. I would recommend Retrium for a team that is learning/early in their team maturity, or if your facilitator doesn't have the time to pre-create the environment for the team.

If you have specific needs or follow up questions, please let us know so we can help find you the right tool/mix of tools for your needs. All the best!

Yes, they're 100% correct here. The JIRA error is technically called a 'fob off'.

But seriously, they've just waterfall with the silos called 'scrum teams'.

In no way is this organisational structure scrum. There's no cross functional teams, organised around the bits of functionality they're delivering.

You know you can get a free licence to use JIRA at home for non profit purposes. Get a licence and have a play around setting up projects. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/free

You'll see that JIRA doesn't specify things like a BA can only do this, or a QA can only do that. It might be that each silo'd team only has permissions to create things like tickets in their JIRA area, but that's a limitation in how they've set up JIRA, not with JIRA.

The only thing I can think of is that they've set up a convoluted structure, and don't want to spend the time creating a new structure and migrating people across into it.

Good luck.

As far as I understand, the official Atlassian tool to do that is "Portfolio for Jira" https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio. I've used it on different missions, it's a very powerful tool, but also kind of tedious (you have to detail the team members availability precisely for instance), and there's a learning curve to account for as well. It'll definitely do the job, but might be overkill for what you need...

Definitely have a look at JIRA. It's very popular (and you can get a free trial for 1-10 users to play with it).

That should also help you find other similar and more lightweight tools.

Your tool likely won't be and/or doesn't need to be as full-featured or complicated or scalable (don't build what you don't need!), but it will give you an idea of what kinds of features other people have found valuable in a tool like this.

TargetProcess looks really cool, but their pricing model is absolutely atrocious.

For a team of 100, total cost of ownership (TCO) over 3 years is $25k to host and $90k to rent.

With JIRA, TCO is $6k to host and $16k to rent.

I just don't understand how TargetProcess can be twice as expensive as JIRA. Am I missing something?

Guys, what do you think about it?
"If you think that nothing new can be added to the good old Texas hold'em — you are mistaken. The original version of Texas hold'em poker in Utopia busts this myth and offers you the chance to play poker with your friends, opponents, or choose a single game and just relax. No platform has ever offered such wide opportunities for its users as Utopia https://u.is/en/ "

I like Restya, an excellent free Trello alternative, especially if you want to have Kanban and Gantt in a single solution. Here is the comparison between Restya and Trello.

https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/timelines/402603838554644480

WHOA. Check out Slack! Its been in private alpha for a while but they just went public yesterday. It looks exactly like what we'd all want as group developers.

https://slack.com/is/team-communication

I'm salivating to do this. I just got HipChat up and running with a small team though, and the screeshotting and file sharing has been really helpful so far.

Here is what I've used in the past, paid services but something like roadmunk gives such a polished result you'll look like a super star its worth the price, everything I've ever done in PowerPoint or visio takes hours and if you try to move one item everything has to be resized

https://roadmunk.com/

https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/product-roadmap-visualization

I disagree that this is the best solution. Would you like a more newbie friendly planning program? If so, try this: hygger.io Otherwise, contact an expert. I think we should remember that the functionality must be simple enough for newbies to understand.

At work we use KADOS : http://www.kados.info/en/

They have a demo on the website, it's opensource PHP based so you can install it localy, or better have it working on your network or online for your whole team to use ;)

I'd recommend www.groupmap.com for facilitated brainstorming and customised online workshops. Great for working through things in order and lots of customized features when it comes to running a team workshop. Been really important when it comes to working remote and having a collaborative meeting tool that is a bit more structured.

For remote retrospectives, www.teamretro.com is awesome. Really easy to use, not distracting and allows you to integrate your action items in to Jira amgst others. Simple and straight forward but still powerful in terms of being able to track history, create anonymous brainstorms and add reactions to ideas.

As a totally biased recommendation (I'm part of the team there), have a look at Ideaflip. It's basically a shared online board with sticky notes and few other elements like dots, tags and stickers - the simplicity sounds ideal for your use case? It's pretty easy to build whatever workflow you want, and you could have everyone drop in sticky notes with the topics they want to bring up, and then use the dots to do the dot voting. Let me know if it works for you!

I like to try to frame it as 'the team against the problem', not a conflict between team members. When the problem is something like a breakdown of communication between two people, or a clash of personalities, it's trickier. But you can still frame the problem as the dynamic between the people (i.e. external to them), rather than any person being a problem. Then make sure that everyone involved are now in conflict with the problem, which is actually your process or the dynamic that exists between people, not anybody personally.

(This is also the right way to approach conflicts in personal relationships in my experience. It's 'us vs the problem', not 'me vs you')

To quote what I wrote in a [recent blog post](https://ideaflip.com/blog/3/retrospectives/):

&gt; A retrospective is not an opportunity to moan and complain about your teammates, or things you don’t enjoy. It’s a constructive, mutual feedback session, and the tone of the meeting needs to reflect this. Focus on more than just the negative aspects of your process, and also highlight and praise the things that are working well.

&gt; Retrospectives are not about finding fault with people, they are about improving your process. Problems should be framed as the team against the problem, not teammates against each other. If you’re struggling to work with someone else, focus on the process around this, not the person themselves.

Nice read. We are also a partly remote team and have some experiences. But this crisis made it almost impossible to meet each other and I had to search for some ways. Here is a good website for retrospectives: metro retro (this was created by a redditor and its completely free.)

Hi there, I'm the creator of https://metroretro.io which is a free, realtime collaborative whiteboard tool built primarily for facilitating retrospectives but can also be used as a general purpose sticky note simulator. It includes voting, grouping, comments and some other more fun features like confetti and emojis. There is a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtP1UUTvA3U

Cheers!

Take a look at https://metroretro.io/ it's free, loads of features and great for real time collaboration. You can also create any style of retro you need or start with a template and then customise that.

Hey all

I posted https://metroretro.io when I first launched it back in April this year. Since then I've added a few new features but the most signifncant is the new visual grouping feature. It allows you to visually group your stickies together and identify your retrospective themes. The group information is included in the exports for your achiving needs. This went live last week so if anyone of you are looking for a new (free) retro tool please check it out! Any feedback would be appreciated.

Cheers!