Anand (@anand003 on Twitter) works as an Agile Coach , Project Manager with Thoughtworks where he started his career as a Java and .Net developer way back in 2002. Anand actively consults and executes Agile projects for clients all around the world. He also blogs about his experiences from the trenches at http://blog.anandvishwanath.in/
Double-loop learning can be a great model for encouraging transformational improvements in teams by challenging key assumptions and strategies. Retrospectives and Lean Startup provide a framework to incorporate this learning model.
Scrum community leaders recommend Product Owners to deliver an Enabling Specification as a part of a User Story to improve the efficiency of the development team.
Mike Cohn recently suggested that the Daily Standup (or Scrum) is not a status meeting for the Scrum Master, but a forum where team members are synchronising their work. Techniques such as breaking eye contact are helpful for Scrum Masters to fix this anti pattern in their teams.
A recent Harvard Business Review article highlights the importance of finishing one task at a time and hence getting more work done. Some of the core Agile practices help minimize context switching and bring a similar task focus while building software.
Agile experts suggest a slow ramp up, thinking beyond Scrum of Scums, and using techniques like Feature teams, for scaling Agile projects. A feature team takes responsibility for one or two features at a time and works on them as a whole until they are done. Once the features are delivered, each team member signs up for the next feature by joining another feature team.
Scrum community leader Jim Coplien proposes One Piece Continuous Flow as an alternative to Kanban. He believes that a cross functional team should work together as a single unit instead of sub teams waiting for work items to arrive from previous stages. Kanban practitioners find their framework to be more usable in an environment where cross-functional teams are not readily feasible.
