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Showing posts from April, 2015

The Empirical Manifesto - taking continuous improvement seriously

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Recently I have been using the scientific method in a small team in a large program. When I say using it I mean all the time. Previously I paid lip service to an empirical approach, but I decided to make it the base of everything the team do. In this I was quite lucky that the team I'm in were keen and immediate management didn't resist. I am working in an environment where we are a snow-plough for a whole program. We don't know what does work, wont work, how to do things, where to sit etc. May sound familiar.  Our response was to Guess, Test and Refine really rapidly. Scrum says Inspect and Adapt, but this is not enough, in fact it isn't science. This is one of the reasons I was not getting hard evidence for what I was doing and sometimes had to persuade stakeholders to go along with what the team were saying - "Just trust us, we've done this many times before". Clearly this is subjective and open to challenge and rightly so. It often means change 

In sprint cumulative flow in Jira

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I wanted to experiment using cumulative flow in Jira on a Scrum project. I tried it on my last 2 projects, the first time manually and the second time using Jira. We found it was a good addition to Burndown charts. I also found that it was a great predictor of completion. It also exposed work in progress (Inventory) and start to end time (throughput). In Sprint Cumulative Flow It is one of the tools that I use to reduce reliance on estimating. It was labour intensive when done manually, however it was zero effort to maintain in Jira, just a bit tricky, so here are the steps How to do it? You need to go to Board configuration Click on Configure then select Quick Filters and create this filter: Click the "Add" button then select your Agile Board and Select Reports: When you have done this select the Cumulative Flow report as follows: Now configure the report to set the start and end dates to match your current sprint as