If you look at the Scrum Master as being the coach of both the Product Owner and the Dev-Team, what skills does this person need to coach them?
The Product Owner has to blindly trust the team to build the thing the right way, but the Scrum Master needs to coach them on this. Would you bet on a football or soccer coach who has never played the game?
No. I wouldn’t think so, unless this person has super powers that would balance things out in your favour somehow.
I like to think that Ron Jeffries says the same thing here. You cannot coach Agile software development if you have never experienced it yourself while being knee-deep in with the team. …
The more developers I teach about the testPyramid (as described by Mike Cohn in his book Succeeding with Agile) the more I think it should actually be a test-EiffelTower instead. Let me explain my reasoning.
So your teams love to work Agile and are in pursuit of finding the highest value for your clients and end-users. Still your clients live in a world where ‘buying features for fixed prices with contractual deadlines’ are the standard. This is very understandable as ‘What are we getting for our money?’ is a logical question upfront. Certainly if your leads want to compare vendors and decide on price.
So I keep questioning how do I sell the Agile way of working to a world that is just not ready for it…
The contract
Contracts with fixed scope often lead to Big Bang solutions. You get the product at the end of the deadline and with some luck it meets the contractual requirements. Shouldn’t the world know by now that requirements defined upfront are not actually what is required in the end. Around 65% of the features in most products are never used, so why do we build them? Just because of the contracts? I guess so… Instead Agilists focus on delivering the value that is most important NOW and then adapt the plan after every iteration as we gain more knowledge about what works and what is really valuable. …
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