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9 Qualities of Scrum Master the Servant Leader

Values diverse opinions Cultivates a culture of trust Develops other leaders Helps people with life issues Encourages Sells instead of tells Thinks you, not me Thinks long-term Acts with humility Source- http://www.skipprichard.com/9-qualities-of-the-servant-leader/

7 Steps for Leading Lean with Respect for People

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source- http://www.industryweek.com/lean-six-sigma/7-steps-leading-lean-respect-people 

another Process culture - CMMI

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CMMI is a sophisticated method for performance management. It helps companies predict costs, create schedules, and ensure quality. There's a whole  CMMI culture  that can train someone on the CMMI models and how to use them.

Definition of Agile - spot the keywords

Agile is a cultural change that impacts people, processes and tools in different ways across the organization; based on iterative, time boxed and incremental approach , where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing and cross-functional teams , Agile promotes adaptive planning , evolutionary development and delivery and encourages a rapid and flexible response to change . 

Scaling Scrum and Agile

Some of the approaches to scale scrum are mentioned below: - Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), by Dean Leffingwell; - Disciplined Agile Development (DAD), by Scott Ambler; - Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. Each has pros and cons and suited for different types of organisations or projects. What's more important is when we implement any practice is to track the impact of the change using hard direct evidence and see if the change is positive or negative. Look at evidence based management  to help track it.

DevOps in Agile environment

DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support. DevOps is also characterized by operations staff making use many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work. “Ops” is a blanket term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other subdisciplines and job titles. “Dev” is used as shorthand for developers in particular, but really in practice it is even wider and means “all the people involved in developing the product,” which can include Product, QA, and other kinds of disciplines. DevOps Practices  –Specific techniques used as part of implementing the above concepts and processes. Continuous integration and continuous deployment, “Give your developers a pager and put them on call,” using configuration manage...

Technical Debt in Agile environment

Ward Cunningham  coined the term , and Martin Fowler has some  good takes  on the subject, and  Ron Jeffries  as well. Technical Debt includes those  internal  things that you choose not to do now, but which will impede future development if left undone. This includes deferred refactoring. Technical Debt doesn't include deferred functionality, except possibly in edge cases where delivered functionality is "good enough" for the customer, but doesn't satisfy some standard (e.g., a UI element that isn't fully compliant with some UI standard). During the planning or execution of a software project, decisions are made to defer necessary work. For example: It's too late in the LifeCycle ?  to upgrade to the new release of the compiler. We'll do it next time around. We're not completely conforming to the  UserInterface  guidelines. We'll get to it next time. We don't have time to uncruft (refactor, see  RefactorMercilessly ) t...

Requirement gathering in Scrum

Scrum framework is deliberately light in defining this as there are many existing practices is requirement gathering that work well. Scrum does not want to impose any one style and allow the organisation to choose what is best for them.  Product Owner should  - Establish a vision for the project to constrain the scope  - Talk to his/her users and get high level business requirements.  - Order them so they give value to the organisation and meet the scope of the project (or change the scope if not originally correct)  - Work with the team to define what is a "Ready" requirement.  - With team refine them into functional requirements that can actually be built  - Constantly adapt as more knowledge is learnt or gained  This is a continual process

Product vs Project

A project has a short lifespan, it has a start and and end. The product live is longer than a project.  A project may not necessarily deliver all Product Backlog Items, especially low value items. These may be postponed until a future date.  Defects and change requests happen post the project, these are added to the products backlog which can then be managed. A product backlog typically contains the following 3 types of stories  1. New features  2. Defects  3. Engineering - Stories for optimizing/refactor the current code, a effort undertaken to reduce the tech debt 

how Scrum master adds value

Neutral view points Inspection of Scrum implementation Coaching to improve Identify opportunities shield team from external disruptions remove blocks Facilitate communication Mediate conflict Incrementally help make changes to process Keep team focused