Agile Otter Blog

(note: I added a 15th, but was worried that changing the title would invalidate links, so you get a bonus observation at no extra cost) I frequently have to address questions about velocity, so in the interest of time I present all the answers here in a short post: Velocity is a gauge, not a control knob. You can't just turn up the velocity -- you can only break the gauge by trying. Velocity is (frustratingly) a lagging indicator. It primarily tells you about the fundamental process and technical work you did weeks, months, or years ago. You seldom get an immediate, true improvement. Though velocity is a gauge, it is subject to  Goodhart's Law . It is rather dodgy when used as a basis for governance. Velocity value is highly derivative of many factors, chief among them being the work structure of the organization. The more governance and procedure (permission steps, queuing and wait states, official limitations,  risk of personal blame, reporting and rec...

Today we held the first ever Puzzle Challenge at my client's site. The goal of the challenge was for each team to pick a work style that aided them in getting the greatest number of puzzles completed in a very short time (10 minutes per sprint). The set of puzzles to solved was a mix of crosswords, mazes, word-search, sudoku, word jumbles, and number blocks. The teams were told that there was no partial credit at the end of the ten minute sprint. The teams were given a menu of practices to choose from: Team members could one mode of adaptation, leadership, teamwork, noise level, and task switching. A style of 11111 would mean a 1 in each of these categories, a style strongly resembling an "ideal" organization in the buttoned-down 80s. A style of 33333 is basically a productive chaos, which might have been more widely recommended in the free-spirited 60s. Teams made an initial selection, then were allowed some adaptation. In initial selection of work s...

  This is the result from asking a team of scrum masters what their duties entail.  What do you think?