Agile*Product*AI

After much prodding from Jeff McKenna, I finally got around to reading “Software By Numbers” by Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang.  It’s an interesting read that focuses the software development process on delivering value to customers.  Denne and Cleland-Huang introduce minimum marketable feature (MMF).  The MMF represents the smallest possible decomposition of a feature/capability to which business value can be attributed.  The authors go further to define a software development value chain that is designed to optimize value delivery to the customer.  While I of course have some concerns with the model, I found the underlying financially driven approach very interesting.  It aligned very well with prior work that I’ve done in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM). Software by Numbers got me thinking about Agile.   Specifically around incremental development and how it has an inherent advantages over traditional methods in delivering value to cu...

Sometimes I worry that we are wringing all the agility out of Scrum with the high degree of prescription that I see some teams follow. At times I see backlogs rigorously maintained and scrubbed. Product Owners tightly managing how/when/if the backlog items flow out of the backlogs into a team's sprint. And the team maniacally focused on delivering exactly what was specified in each sprint. The irony here is, that more often I am coaching my teams to execute exactly as I just described! I struggle though with prescriptive scrum on how we can deal with innovation. In my 20 years building software I have seen most interesting innovation come from the individual, not the team. Yes, this will be heresy to the agile zealots. But good Scrum Masters (team leaders) must find a balance between the team and the individual. We must build a culture and environment where not only the team is empowered but where the individual is encouraged to innovate.  Innovation can be encouraged with varying ...