Self-sufficient teams

A number of years ago, a client of mine had a new feature request come to one part of the company. It was a significant change that would touch quite a few teams to get done and when they asked those teams how long it would take, the answer was somewhere between 10 and 12 weeks.

When we do everything right and it still doesn’t solve the right problem

The Choluteca Bridge, in Honduras, was built in an area known for hurricanes and other strong weather. It was designed to withstand the destructive force of a hurricane so when hurricane Mitch came through later that same year, it was no surprise that the bridge sustained only minor damage. Clearly, it had been designed and implemented well.

Horizontal scaling

When we think of scaling the work, we’re typically thinking of stories that are grouped within features or epics, which might be grouped inside even larger items. This is vertical scaling and is fairly common. There is another type of scaling, which we need to also consider, and that is horizontal.

Book recommendations

I’m often asked for book recommendations on various agile topics. There is no single best book to start with so I’m giving you a bunch of categories to pick from.

Monte Carlo under the covers

Monte Carlo forecasting is the most common form of probabilistic forecasting that we see. It’s compelling because it can provide a highly accurate forecast of when work will be done, with relatively little effort.

What is Probabilistic Forecasting?

Do your customers ever ask “When will it be done?” When dealing with the future, there’s almost never an accurate deterministic answer (Tuesday, exactly at 3:45pm) to that question but there is an accurate probabilistic answer (85% chance of completion on or before October 1) and in most cases, it’s a lot easier to calculate than you’d expect.

Jirametrics 2.0

Jirametrics version 2.0 has been released. What is it? A tool for extracting metrics, and generating reports from Jira.

Forecasting projects

Weather predictions are probabilistic, not deterministic. That means there isn’t a single right answer that we can calculate. We can’t say it will rain at 11:05 but we can say that there’s an 80% chance of rain today. Forecasting when we’ll be done is also probabilistic, in exactly the same way. We can say based on past throughput data that we have an 85% chance of being done on or before May 12.

Data Accuracy

We have a tendency to believe that anything we see in a chart is 100% accurate, although that’s often not true. To understand the accuracy of the chart, we have to understand a couple of things:

  1. How accurate the initial data was.
  2. How much of the original data set was used in the chart.
  3. How good the chart is at communicating the right message.