An Agile Learning Taxonomy
In the recent past, I’ve created many internal Agile Playbooks, using Atlassian Confluence. This article describes a set of categories that I started with when constructing the first of these playbooks. My use of the indefinite article (“an”) in the title of this article, rather the definite article (“the”) is important, because this taxonomy represents categories that made sense to me, as a starting point, as a means of organizing content for consumption by those I was working with at the time. Other Playbooks I’ve built since then have evolved considerably in terms of their structure and content.
Here are the top level categories that I started this particular Playbook with:
- Agile Values and Principles
- Alignment
- Collaboration/Facilitation
- Continuous Improvement
- DevOps
- Flow / Kanban / Lean
- Planning and Estimation
- Product Management
- Scrum
- Technical Practices
Agile Values and Principles
Some topics that were covered in this category:
- Agile in a nutshell
- Agile values (Agile Manifesto)
- Psychological Safety
- Trust
Alignment
Some topics covered in this category:
- Rapid Alignment Framework (I used this term to describe usage of three techniques to guide conversations to help teams achieve early alignment: Inception, Product Canvas, and Story Mapping)
- Team decision making techniques (examples of things mentioned here include Roman voting, fist to five, dot voting)
- The importance of working agreements (the initial iteration on this topic started with the Modern Agile meeting agreement poster, and then listed some examples of things that can potentially be included in Team Working Agreements)
- What alignment looks like (using the “I’m glad we all agree graphic,” which you can find in Jeff Patton’s article Read This First); this started as brief post covering some examples of what things tend to look and sound like when teams are truly in alignment)
Collaboration/Facilitation
Some topics covered in this category:
- How to have effective meetings (this posts introduced concepts from a Meeting Facilitation Workshop, such as what is facilitation?; what is the most important thing for a facilitator to do?; What are the most common problems with meetings?; etc.)
- Important responsibilities of facilitators (here I referenced some points from Martin Alaimo’s book Agile Team Facilitator: A Coach’s Path Towards Enterprise Agility (Chief Agility Officer), such as facilitators need to “… foster an inclusive, safe, transparent, efficient communication process”)
Continuous Improvement
Some topics covered in this category:
- Continuous improvement board
- Continuous improvement via retrospectives
DevOps
Some topics covered in this category:
- Continuous Delivery
- Loosely coupled architecture
- Small batch size
Flow / Kanban / Lean
Some topics covered in this category:
- Kanban board examples
- The importance of flow in software development (covers some of the same concepts that I wrote several years ago on the topic of improving flow)
Planning and Estimation
Some topics covered in this category:
- Affinity estimation
- Capacity planning
- Agile planning from start to finish (my particular way of articulating the process of discovery and progressive elaboration that teams go through)
- Perspectives on what to estimate (a summary of the various perspectives that exist on the topic of estimation, and ways in which estimation can be done, for teams that choose to estimate)
- The difference between a forecast and a commitment (similar to what I wrote here)
Product Management
Some topics covered thus far in this category:
- Agile product ownership in a nutshell
- Prioritization: the art of knowing when to say “no”
- Prioritization techniques (a few that I have included as a start are $100 Test, 20/20 Vision, MosCoW)
Scrum
Some topics covered in this category:
- Daily standups: patterns and anti-patterns
- Definition of Done
- Sprint Planning Guidelines
Technical Practices
Some topics covered in this category:
- Collective code ownership
- Continuous Integration
- Incremental design
- Pair programming
- Technical debt visualization techniques
- Test automation
- What we can learn from Extreme Programming (much like what I wrote about XP and Scrum)
