Kick-Off Your Agile Team With A Working Agreement Workshop

The canvas, created by Avi Schneier and the Scrum Inc team [1], encourages the team to ask questions that go to the heart of team dynamics, from the norms and guidelines they agree to abide by, to the skills they bring to the table and the skills they want to learn from each other, to how they celebrate success and learn from failure. In this article, I will discuss how I adapted Avi’s original canvas to the needs of the teams I was coaching, elaborate on the different elements of a working agreement, and share with you a step-by-step guide to facilitating collaborative working agreement development workshops.

The 8 Canvas Blocks In a Glance:

Team Name and Motto:

Having a team name that all team members can identify with is one aspect of establishing the team’s unique identity. A Team name should be created (and agreed on) by the team on their own. There are many anecdotal accounts[2] about how coming together under a common team name helps the team run much more smoothly and efficiently (Plus, it’s fun to come up with a great team name together!) In a recent working agreement canvas workshop I facilitated, and since there were so many Harry Potter fans in the group, they chose to be called _Team Slytherin. _You should’ve heard the laughs as they attempted to come up with that name!

The Motto is the team’s catch-phrase. Some teams opt for something that captures in a few words what they consider the essence of good teamwork, while others prefer something more tongue-in-cheek. I love to observe the dynamic of a team and how they learn more about each other’s personalities as they try to come up with a motto.

#devops #agile adoption #agile teams #agile and devops #agile adaptation #agile practices #agile application delivery #agile culture #agile applications #agile product development

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Kick-Off Your Agile Team With A Working Agreement Workshop

The canvas, created by Avi Schneier and the Scrum Inc team [1], encourages the team to ask questions that go to the heart of team dynamics, from the norms and guidelines they agree to abide by, to the skills they bring to the table and the skills they want to learn from each other, to how they celebrate success and learn from failure. In this article, I will discuss how I adapted Avi’s original canvas to the needs of the teams I was coaching, elaborate on the different elements of a working agreement, and share with you a step-by-step guide to facilitating collaborative working agreement development workshops.

The 8 Canvas Blocks In a Glance:

Team Name and Motto:

Having a team name that all team members can identify with is one aspect of establishing the team’s unique identity. A Team name should be created (and agreed on) by the team on their own. There are many anecdotal accounts[2] about how coming together under a common team name helps the team run much more smoothly and efficiently (Plus, it’s fun to come up with a great team name together!) In a recent working agreement canvas workshop I facilitated, and since there were so many Harry Potter fans in the group, they chose to be called _Team Slytherin. _You should’ve heard the laughs as they attempted to come up with that name!

The Motto is the team’s catch-phrase. Some teams opt for something that captures in a few words what they consider the essence of good teamwork, while others prefer something more tongue-in-cheek. I love to observe the dynamic of a team and how they learn more about each other’s personalities as they try to come up with a motto.

#devops #agile adoption #agile teams #agile and devops #agile adaptation #agile practices #agile application delivery #agile culture #agile applications #agile product development

Identifying Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) As Part of Your Agile Project Inception

NFRs:

In addition to the customer value-adding Epics and User stories you typically brainstorm in story writing workshops, the team needs to consider & plan for how to meet critical non-functional requirements that are also essential to the success of the product. These include things like performance, security, reliability, etc. To truly differentiate your product from the competition, think about NFRs not merely as compliance must-haves, but as distinguishing factors and essential contributors to the value proposition of the product. A big part of why our product is superior to the competition could be because it is more secure, more reliable, faster, etc.

NFRs include things like performance, flexibility, usability, maintainability, audit, logging, data migration, availability, reliability, recoverability, traffic/user volume, security, globalization/localization, etc.

In practice, we need to look at each of these non-functional requirements and answer 3 broad questions:

• What is our _Definition of Success _for this NFR? Exploring this question is critical in order to determine how much time and effort we need to dedicate to this NFR.

Let us take usability as an example: here is an excerpt of the Definition of Success for the Usability NFR from a team I coached recently:

1. the system should be accessible remotely via a virtual desktop
2. users should be able to customize the user interface
3. users should be able to use keyboard shortcuts to access frequently used features
4. response time for the system should be <n seconds
5. user should be able to have multiple instances of the system open at the same time
6. the system should have a usability score on the System Usability Scale (SUS) of 68 or higher.

#devops #agile adoption #agile teams #agile and devops #agile adaptation #agile practices #agile application delivery #agile culture #agile applications #agile product development

How to Install Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu 20.04

Microsoft Teams is a communication platform used for Chat, Calling, Meetings, and Collaboration. Generally, it is used by companies and individuals working on projects. However, Microsoft Teams is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems available now.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu 20.04 machine. By default, Microsoft Teams package is not available in the Ubuntu default repository. However we will show you 2 methods to install Teams by downloading the Debian package from their official website, or by adding the Microsoft repository.

Install Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu 20.04

1./ Install Microsoft Teams using Debian installer file

01- First, navigate to teams app downloads page and grab the Debian binary installer. You can simply obtain the URL and pull the binary using wget;

$ VERSION=1.3.00.5153
$ wget https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/ms-teams/pool/main/t/teams/teams_${VERSION}_amd64.deb

#linux #ubuntu #install microsoft teams on ubuntu #install teams ubuntu #microsoft teams #teams #teams download ubuntu #teams install ubuntu #ubuntu install microsoft teams #uninstall teams ubuntu

How To Develop Situational Awareness As a New Agile Coach or Scrum Master

Picture this: You’re a Scrum Master or Agile Coach who was brought in to assist a team embarking on a large and complex project. You’re new to the organization, perhaps even to the line of business they’re in. You feel like you need to get up to speed quickly so that you can start contributing effectively, and your years of experience have taught you that every organization and every team is unique. You understand that for you to truly create value, you need to capture the unique context of the team and organization you’re now supporting – that is, you need to develop _situational awareness. _You need to understand what it means to be where you are, the people with whom you are working, and the history, people dynamics, complexity, and many other nuances of the team and organization.

And to be clear, here I’m not talking about project Inception/Inception Sprint/Sprint 0/Project Kick-off, etc. All of that comes later. Rather, the focus of this article is YOU – ensuring that YOU have a systematic way of acquiring, analyzing, and compartmentalizing the information you need in order to understand your surroundings well enough so that you can start contributing effectively to your new team and organization.

This effort to develop a broad understanding of your new environment could also help you (and your team) design a fit-for-purpose project initiation (inception/kick-off) process that leverages what has already been done in the past to develop a shared understanding of what needs to be done in the future and identify areas where the team needs to pay special attention. Have there been customer interviews conducted in the past as part of an effort to envision what an enhanced version of the existing product would look like? Were there any agile success stories from other projects in the organization that could be used as part of your ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to help foster an agile culture and mindset? Have there been any efforts to map the end-to-end flow of work as things stand now? Etc. Content that has already been developed - perhaps for different purposes, be it maps, artifacts, retrospective summaries, etc. could streamline many activities during project kickoff and throughout the project.

#devops #agile adoption #agile and devops #agile adaptation #agile application delivery #agile team #scrum adoption #agile product development

Agile Testing: An introduction

When we talk about Agile the first thing that pops into our mind is Agile development. But here we are going to see and learn about an introduction to Agile Testing that how testers work in Agile, the contrast between Agile Testing and development, and traditional vs. Agile approach.

What is Agile Testing?

• In the world of software development, there are two very common terminologies, Developers (programmers) and testers. When we hear programmer we think of a person whose main task is to write production code. And when you hear tester you think of a person whose main task in testing and quality assurance.
• In Agile no one has only one task to perform, here everyone works on it with one aim in the mind that is to deliver the quality their customers need. In a traditional approach, this would have been the primary concern of the tester or the QA of the team. But in Agile even the development team tries to deliver quality end product to the customer.
• Agile is an iterative development methodology, where requirements evolve through collaboration between the customer and self-organizing teams. Agile aligns development with customer needs. Several core practices used by agile teams relate to testing.
• Test-driven development (TDD) is used for the development of the services. Where the programmer writes the tiny piece of test which fails. Then tries to write the code around it to make the test pass. It is an approach that many teams follows as it is a smart technique to avoid any bugs.

ROLES AND ACTIVITIES ON AN AGILE TEAM

The roles are divided into mainly two teams:

• Customer team
• Developer team

Customer team

• The customer team comprises business experts, product owners, domain experts, product managers, business analysts, etc. The customer team writes the stories for the development to work on. They provide examples and logic behind the requirements. Their main task is to clear any doubts and give clarification with real world use cases or examples. They are available in each iteration for guiding the Dev and QA teams as well.
• In a customer team, the testers have a crucial role to play. They help the customers express their requirements as tests.

Developer team

• The developer team comprises of Developer team includes programmers,system administrators, architects, database administrators, technical writers,security specialists. Each person in the team can be responsible for multiple roles. A developer can also be helping out in testing related activities and a tester could be helping the developers in debugging a issue.
• Testers are in the developer team as well because testing is one of the core tasks in Agile. Both the testers and the developers help each other in achieving the best quality end product for the customer.

Interaction between Customer and Developer Teams

• The customer and developer teams work closely together with a common goal to deliver value to the organisation. Testers does not have the sole responsibility for the quality of the product under development. The developer also helps them achieve this by trying to maintain the quality from the first phase of the development.
• The customer team with developer team prioritise stories which are crucial and are to delivered in each sprint. It’s totally up to the customer that what they want the developer team to work on. They can even request changes in between the sprint and the developer can work on it. If it does not affect the current scope of the story too much. Even if it does they can pick it up in the next upcoming sprint.
• It is not totally in the hands of the customer team to dictate how much work they want the development team to work on. The developer picks up work according to there bandwidth, estimates it and then starts working on it.
• Testers have a foot in each world, understanding the customer viewpoint as well as the complexities of the technical implementation. The testers or the QA team acts as a bridge between the customer and the developers. They don’t just understands the customer requirements but also looks at it from a technical viewpoint. and tries to see if it is feasible or not from the developers point of view as well.

**HOW IS AGILE TESTING DIFFERENT? **

• By now you must be wondering how is Agile testing different from the the other traditional approach? Let’s see how it is like to work on a traditional team vs. an Agile team.

Working on Traditional Teams

• In traditional team or approach the testers are not involved with developers from the starting phases of the software. Testers are involved in the last phases of the development where they get very little time to test the services on which the developers works for months.
• Each release cycle is for around 6 months where all the tasks are to be completed and released to the customer. Testers are involved in release planning and requirements definition.But after that they are involved in the end with rushed testing phase and sometimes a delayed release as well.
• The quality is the sole responsibility of the QA team only. If any of the requirements were missing or any other issue was found the testers were responsible. They didn’t even have the control over if the developer has even tested there code or not.
• The testers have the power to stop or postpone the release of they find any major issues in the release or if it is not according to the requirements.
• 6 months seems like a very long time but is not as even after this time the end result is not according to the customers expectations. Things gets deviated from the path and the end result is not covering all the requirements.
• The testers create there test plans according to the API specs but if the end product is not according to the defined requirements then the whole test plan simply fails.

#agile #api testing #integration testing #quality assurance (qa) #scaled agile #scrum #testing #unit testing #agile teams #agile transformation #test automation