Hello 2016

After a short hiatus (vacation and a bad case of man-flu) I’m back in the saddle. First of all I want to wish you the best for 2016. And although I don’t believe in New Year resolutions, I do have plans for this year.

First of all I want to continue down the road of the Professional Agile Coach I’ve taken. My professional year will be devoted to finishing my training, write my white paper and promoting the Agile culture within Sanoma.

I’m also going to take my sport shooting more seriously; I will practice more and participate in more competitions than last year, and curb the amount of time I spend on my administrative duty as secretary.

Finally, I hope this year will be better for my family. With all the health issues going around it would be nice to have some reprieve from that, and I hope to welcome my little nephew into this world.

Self-Organisation and Happiness

One of the twelve Agile principles is working with self-organising, cross-functional development teams. Self-organisation is possibly one of the most difficult Agile principles to implement. It sounds easy enough, but is often misunderstood and underestimated how difficult it can be to create self-organising teams.

Luckily there are methods to stimulate self-organisation, one of which I will elaborate on in this article.

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Defect Management in Scrum

One of the key aspects of Scrum that makes teams perform better is organising the flow of work. The backlog of a team is its only source, and because it’s prioritised the team is guaranteed to always deliver valuable features. So much for theory. In reality a team has to deal with a lot of distractions that make it hard to focus on delivering the sprint goal: issues, outage, bugs, changing requirements; stuff that “absolutely cannot wait”.

Indeed, defects need to be dealt with. As a Scrum Team you face the daunting task of making sense of it all to come to a decision how to deal with a request. Luckily there are some guidelines to help you make a decision how to deal with these things.

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Agile Take on Game Development

If you are into gaming, and space games specifically, you cannot have escaped the tumult that’s surrounding Star Citizen, probably the largest crowd-funded games to date. Questions have risen whether Roberts Space Industries can deliver on the promise of a Utopian sandbox space game, the pinnacle of which was delivered through a much debated article by The Escapist.

As an Agile Coach I’ve watched this unfold through a different set of eyes, and I want to share some insights on how some of this could have been prevented.

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I am becoming a Professional Agile Coach

Keeping up with writing on my blog seems to be something I am not good at, but I believe this is about to change. It has to do with the fact I am training to become a professional Agile coach, a process I am very much enjoying right now but also something that makes my head spin with possibilities and ideas. In short, enough fuel to feed the fire.

I feel like I should take you back a few months to explain what has happened.

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