Interview - Doug the Tech Lead

Not all agile developers are created equal. Some have more experience and have people skills. We call these developers Tech Leads. Doug and Jack interview an agile Tech Lead. His name is Doug and he agreed to do an interview as long as he got to talk about Wisconsin sports. We end the podcast with talking about badger and Packer football. All Scrum Under Siege podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com  

Hiring a Scrum Master can be difficult due to the work experience Scrum Masters have. Do they understand what servant leadership is? Did their former companies even allow them to be servant leaders? Doug and Jack pontificate on how to look for a Scrum Master. Doug also points out that Scrum Masters seeking a job can use this advice as well.

Erin is a Business Agility Coach. Doug and Jack were curious what a Business Agility Coach was so an interview was conducted. Erin tells us what she does, what value she adds and who her customers are. Since the interview was done on Jack's porch, you also get to hear Jack rattle ice in his drink, airplanes, and possibly some kid riding his bike. Besides finding all of our podcasts on your podcast app, our podcasts can be found at www.scrumundersiege.com 

Product Owners should have a roadmap to help get funding and let the organization know what they plan on doing. Good roadmaps need to be somewhat realistic. So how do you make a realistic roadmap? You need to figure out some t-shirt sizing for the future work. Doug and Jack share some thoughts on how to do this.

Jeremy Mann is a professional contractor who hangs his hat on the BSA hat rack. While Jeremy's passion lies with BSA work, don't let that fool you. He is a Scrum Lord who can talk and teach scrum with anybody.  This interview is geared at the work BSAs do in the Agile world. Jeremy makes his case for why BSAs are important. Here is list of questions asked and answered. What is the difference between a BSA and a BA? What value does a BSA bring to an Agile team? Who does the BSA work on a team with no BSA? What makes a BSA a good Agile BSA? Story formats. What does Jeremy use? What are keys to keep story mapping from spinning out of control?  

Agile by the book says there are no hard deliverable dates. Teams figure out the work and the work drives the delivery date. This happens a lot but we have been faced with hard deadlines many times. Listen to what causes hard deadlines. We will propose our solutions to help you survive the deadline perils. Ensured to make your commute go by fast. 

They say that the velocity of a team is the Holy Grail for agile metrics. We think that velocity is cool but not that cool. King Arthur would be disappointed in us. Velocity is filled with false positives that we will discuss. Working with velocity is an art, not a science or simple math equation.

We had Sabine, a organizational change agent focusing on business agility, to talk about why Organizational changes are so difficult from a leadership level. Come tune in to hear about challenges every company will face when adopting Agile and what exciting new items are being explored in the Agile world. 

We have data all around us, sprints, story points, velocity... Your team will be asked for all sorts of reporting and metrics, but when should we really use the data at our disposal? Come join us and hear our take on this topic. 

Beware of the good intentions that distract from delivering whatever you are working on. We go into details about things that we have faced that haven't worked as expected. 11 mins.