More in Agile & Scrum — page 21
Throughput: Measuring What Gets Done
Throughput measures how many work items a team *finishes* in a time period, not how busy they are. It's used for forecasting future work and spotting bottlenecks. The footgun: never compare throughput between different teams, as item sizes and context vary.
Hypothesis-Driven Development: Stop Guessing, Start Learning
Hypothesis-Driven Development treats new features as experiments, not foregone conclusions. It's used to de-risk major changes by first testing the core assumption with a minimal product. The biggest footgun is writing vague, untestable hypotheses.
Five Whys: From Symptom to Root Cause
The Five Whys is a root cause analysis technique that traces a problem to its origin by asking 'Why?' repeatedly. It's used in post-mortems to find the underlying process failure, not just the surface-level symptom. The footgun is stopping at human error.
Agile Facilitation: Guiding Teams to Outcomes
An Agile Facilitator is a neutral guide, designing the *process* for a team to reach its own conclusions, not just running the meeting. They are crucial for sprint planning, retrospectives, and conflict resolution.
Evidence-Based Management (EBM): Measure Value, Not Just Velocity
Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is like a fitness tracker for your organization, using data to guide decisions instead of gut feel. It helps you measure progress toward goals and improve outcomes.
The Kano Model: Not All Features Are Created Equal
The Kano Model classifies features by their impact on user satisfaction, separating "must-haves" from "delighters." Use it in product planning to prioritize impactful work. The footgun is misclassifying a novelty as a core need, starving basic functionality.
Product Vision: The Why Behind Your What
A product vision is your team's North Star—an aspirational goal answering 'Why are we building this?' It guides the roadmap and aligns stakeholders by describing the future you're creating, ensuring everyone pulls in the same direction.
Scrum Master Stances: A Situational Toolkit
A Scrum Master isn't just a meeting facilitator. They're a situational leader who adopts different roles—teacher, coach, impediment remover—to serve the team. This toolkit helps them decide when to teach, when to coach, and when to clear a path for the team.
Shu-Ha-Ri: A Model for Mastery
Shu-Ha-Ri is a model for mastery: first follow the rules (Shu), then break them (Ha), and finally make your own (Ri). It's used to guide agile adoption, starting with strict adherence before innovating.
Lean Portfolio Management (LPM): Connecting Strategy to Execution
LPM connects strategy to execution by applying Lean thinking to funding and governance. It manages a portfolio of development value streams—like an e-commerce site—to ensure work aligns with business goals.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): Requirements as Tests
BDD turns requirements into executable tests using a shared, human-readable language. Use it for complex features where business and tech teams need to align. The footgun is writing BDD scenarios *after* coding, missing the collaborative design benefit.
Feature Teams: Ship Value, Not Layers
A feature team owns a customer-facing feature from start to finish, unlike component teams that own a single tech layer. This reduces handoffs and speeds up delivery.
Agile Transformation Backlog: The Roadmap for Change
An Agile Transformation Backlog turns a vague vision for change into a concrete, prioritized to-do list for the entire organization. A dedicated team uses it to roll out new practices to specific departments, one small, measurable change at a time.
Work Item Age: Don't Let Your Tasks Spoil
Think of work item age as the time elapsed since a task started, like food in a fridge with an expiration date. Kanban teams use it to spot delays and bottlenecks. The biggest mistake is tracking age without acting on aging items to unblock them.
Kanban Replenishment: Pulling Work, Not Pushing It
Instead of a manager pushing tasks, a replenishment meeting is where the team pulls work into their active backlog. This cadence refills the 'Ready to Start' column, ensuring a steady flow of well-understood tasks.
A3 Problem Solving: One Page to Clarity
A3 Problem Solving makes your thinking visible, using a single-page report to map the journey from a problem to a solution. It's used to diagnose bugs or strategic issues like falling market share. The footgun is using it when options are already decided.
Sprint Capacity Planning: Committing to Achievable Work
Sprint capacity planning is like checking your team's fuel tank before a road trip. It calculates your team's actual available work hours for a sprint, accounting for time off, to make a realistic commitment.
Kaizen: The Art of Continuous Improvement
Kaizen means "continuous improvement," making small, frequent changes instead of big, risky ones. In Scrum, this is the heart of the Sprint Retrospective, where teams inspect their process and define concrete actions for the next sprint.
Agile Maturity Models: A Map, Not a Race
An Agile Maturity Model is a report card for your process, assessing adherence to Agile values through defined levels. Teams use it to benchmark progress and find weak spots.
Disciplined Agile: A Toolkit, Not a Prescription
Disciplined Agile (DA) is a toolkit, not a rigid framework, for choosing your own process. It helps teams blend practices from Scrum and Lean when one method doesn't fit. The footgun is treating DA as a prescription instead of a decision-making guide.