Let's improve our Daily Stand-up

I found Scrum as a perfect solution for managing in my current project. Even if at first it was very difficult to implement it and our knowledge and understanding of this framework was poor. Day by day, week by week, sprint by sprint we gained more experience and everything became obvious and natural. We became agile team.

Are we resources or not?

There was many discussion on this topic. I heard so many times complaines whenever I used word "resources", when I were talking about group of people. And, as I repeated it many times, it was not about disrespecting someone or treat him like a thing. No, it's all about terminology.

Never postpone meetings

Recently, one of my friends asked me a question:

"What will you do if your's daily stand-up starts at 9:30 and one of your teammates, who went half hour ago to the shop and should already back, is still absent?"

I told him that answer is simple - I will call him and ask how long it will take for him to get back to us. If it won't be long, we will wait for him.

Nothing is obvious...

once upon a time there was a feature...

Recently we had hot discussion with product owner about one of the feature, that we are implementing right now. But let me start from the beggining.

What is feature about? Configure application through GUI.
Right now everything is in config file and configuration process isn't not as easy for our customers as it should be. That's why we decide to do first step to change it - first move the configuration of the most critical and important things.
After few conversations when PO explain what needs to be done, we created prototype to show him how it will look like. And that was it...

become a challenge seeker

another thing to do

So, you are starting. New feature to implement, complex modification, improvements in performance, user experience in UI or something completely different.

You got everything what you need to start, you got it from customer. Is he/her difficult with cooperation? Doesn't matter, you talked with him/her so many times, so many hours spent on learning his/her way of thinking, behavior. There is nothing unexpected in gathering requirements (or however you will call it). Even if it isn't easy job to do. You been there, you know what to do.

fails are not the worst thing on earth

failures happens

Almost everyone in IT knows that "the only constant is change", but I strongly believe there is another constant - failure.
If you never failed before, I got bad news - you will, that's for sure. One day, sooner or later, but it will happen. But, don't worry, everyone fails from time to time and there is nothing bad in this. Well, maybe there is, but it's not so tragic as someone can assume:)

The problem is not failure itself, problems comes after it. And this "after" defines either you will lose on this situation or not.

sometimes it's better to let go...

when your work is what you love...

Personally I'm someone who can't work for 100 percent, it's impossible for me. Why? Because I always giving even more, I just really like what I'm doing. I always looking for new, better solution, I must improve my skills, increase my knowledge etc. It's just stronger than me.

And, as I notice, in IT this is common approach. We, developers, managers, designers, love what we are doing, this is our passion, this is not only 8 hours work, this is something more. We love challenges, we love problems, bugs, because these are the things, which gives us opportunity to test ourselves, to verify our skills and learn something new.
This attitude continues until we're motivated. And here comes the problem...