Agile on Caktus Group

ShipIt Day Summer 2018 Recap

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:00:00 +0000

On July 27 - 28, we ran our quarterly ShipIt Day here at Caktus. These 24-hour sprints, which we’ve organized since 2012, allow Cakti to explore new projects that expand or increase their skill sets. The event kicked off at 3:00 pm on Thursday and we reconvened at 3:00 pm on Friday to showcase our progress. The goal is to experiment, take risks, and try something new.

Outgrowing Sprints: A Shift from Scrum to Kanban

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 12:00:00 +0000

The problem

The Scrum and Kanban frameworks are tools for development teams, and as with any job, it’s crucial to pick the right tool for the situation at hand. Caktus teams have been using Scrum for over two years, but one of my teams started to bring up in retrospectives that sprint deadlines felt arbitrary and were irrelevant to anyone outside the team. They also had to do some mental gymnastics to plan sprints that were so brittle they were likely to fall apart due to restricted monthly project budgets. As a result, I started to ask myself some difficult questions.

Avoiding the Blame Game in Scrum

Mon, 14 May 2018 14:00:00 +0000

The words we use, and the tone in which we use them, can either nurture or hinder the growth of Scrum teams. This is especially true for teams that are new to Scrum or that may be transitioning into a new Agile methodology.

Prioritizing Defects

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 13:30:00 +0000

A defect, or bug, in a software product can be defined as a flaw in the system that leads to a measurable or observable deviation from its expected result. During development, it’s part of the quality assurance process to prioritize defects in order to minimize the impact to the end product and meet the agreed-upon quality level for the product. This prioritization can seem like a dark art. How do we decide what gets addressed and what doesn’t?

5 Scrum Master Lessons Learned

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 13:30:00 +0000

March 2018 marked the end of my fourth year as a Scrum master. I began with a Certified ScrumMaster workshop in 2014 and haven’t stopped learning since. I keep a running list titled “Lessons Learned,” where I jot down thoughts I find significant as they occur to me so that I can go back to the list and draw from my little bank of personal wisdom.

Agile for Stakeholders

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 13:30:00 +0000

In Agile development, a stakeholder is anyone outside the development team with a stake in the success of the project. If you are a stakeholder, knowledge of Agile will help you understand how the project will be developed and managed, when you can expect to see progress, and what the team needs from you in order to deliver their best work. Understanding these basic concepts and what your role entails are essential to your project’s success.

Southern Fried Agile 2017 Recap

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 14:30:00 +0000

I attended the Southern Fried Agile conference in November 2017, where I heard some excellent talks and connected with local Agilists in Charlotte, NC. Southern Fried Agile is the sister conference of TriAgile, which I also attended this year.

Caktus Discovery Workshops

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 14:30:00 +0000

Before an app can be built, the development team needs to know what they are supposed to be building. How do they establish that? With requirements gathering.

Getting Started with Outsourced Web Development

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 14:30:00 +0000

In researching outsourced web development, you may have come across a few different ways to get your project built and have some questions as a result. How well defined do the project requirements need to be prior to starting development? Will Waterfall or Agile methods deliver the best results? Should you look for a consultancy offering team augmentation or in-house Agile-based work? What are the ramifications for your project of picking one or the other?

The Opera of Agile: A Striking Performance at Red Hat Agile Day

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Have you ever heard anyone sing opera during a tech-focused conference? Neither had I, until now.

Red Hat Agile Day, held in downtown Raleigh, recently provided this unique opportunity. The theme of the 2017 Red Hat Agile Day was “Agile: brokering innovation; bringing together great ideas.” The conference certainly lived up to that theme with a diverse line-up of speakers, including a former professional opera singer who bookended his presentation with songs. One was a creative, original ballad about being an Agile product manager (see the lyrics here), which he delivered at full blast, because how else can you sing opera?

Eliciting Helpful Stakeholder Feedback

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Client feedback is integral to the success of a project and as a product owner, obtaining it is part of your responsibility. Good feedback is not synonymous with positive or negative feedback. A client should feel empowered and comfortable enough to speak up when something isn’t right. If they wait to share their honest thoughts, there is a high chance it will cost more time and money to fix down the road.

Tips for Product Ownership and Project Management in a Client Services Organization

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Looking for some pointers to improve my own client management skills, I scoured the internet to find practical ideas on how to handle challenges better as the product owner (PO) in a client-services organization. I came up completely short.

TriAgile 2017 Recap

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 13:30:00 +0000

I attended the TriAgile conference in Raleigh, NC on March 30th, 2017 and wanted to share some takeaways from a couple of the talks I saw. Overall, the conference was a nice opportunity to network with some local Agilists and hear about their work and experiences. It was well organized, and I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the Agile community in the Triangle!

Using Tokens During Sprint Planning to Allocate Time

Mon, 08 May 2017 13:30:00 +0000

In January of 2016, Caktus transitioned from a general Agile development environment to a more focused Scrum environment. Part of this transition entailed moving from a targeted budget allocation approach per project, to a self-organizing, goal-based team structure with no obvious provision for tight, consistent control over project budgets.

Using Priority in Scrum to address team anxiety

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 20:13:42 +0000

In Scrum, the backlog of tasks is ordered by the Product Owner from highest to lowest business value - not merely prioritized - so that the team knows what the most valuable items are. This helps to prevent Product Owners/Project Managers from being able to say two or more Product Backlog Items (PBIs) are the “same priority.” And this makes sense for the most part. However there are times when this information is not enough.

Adopting Scrum in a Client-services, Multi-project Organization

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

Caktus began the process of adopting Scrum mid-November 2015 with two days of onsite Scrum training and fully transitioned to a Scrum environment in January 2016. From our original epiphany of “Yes! We want Scrum!” to the beginning of our first sprint, it took us six weeks to design and execute a process and transition plan. This is how we did it: