Anyone got a good one they would share? My current client hasn’t got any more grown up options, so before I hand roll one and in the spirit of maximising work not done, I thought I’d ask on here.

Ta

Can you set a Kanban board up using Jira?

Dick, yes, I can and it is what I normally do,  but my current client hasn’t got any more grown up options (Jira, Monday etc.).

I’d question whether a company that has no tools in place and expects you to use excel for this really understands agile.

if cost is an issue then I think Trelli has a burn down plugin that is free (or very low cost)

Poly – everyone has to start somewhere. I’d forgotten about the Trello plugin, I’ll revisit that. Thanks.

Doesn’t everyone question if any company really understands Agile?

I’d say that we often just have to make do with what we have, and that Agile is about method and principles not tools, but then I probably just don’t understand Agile do I?

Agile is about method and principles not tools

Bang on molly – you might even find something about it in the manifesto

You might want to read the manifesto again – it’s about people and interactions not processes and tools.

excel does nothing to encourage interaction – time spent laboriously unpdating excel burndown charts would be better spent talking to the devs – if the company has no effective tools for producing burndown charts nobody except the scrum master is going to understand them anyway.

ive seen agile and scrum work well – using old school cards and whiteboards.    Anyway my point was if there are no existing tools in place around a scrum approach, I’d be focusing on getting those interactions working rather than the mechanics of burndown charts – once the organisation is ready then something other than excel should be easy to justify (after all they are paying a crazy day rate for a scrum master they would probably rather he was running things than fighting with excel).

Is there a visible board? If so, what is the burn down adding?

Nobody has said anything about laboriously updating an excel burndown chart. Setup correctly, it should take less than a minute a day.

Old school cards and whiteboards is the preferred option, but not possible in this setting. Thanks for the patronising lecture though.

You might want to read the manifesto again – it’s about people and interactions not processes and tools.

Yep, and this is where I see it go wrong time after time. More so with Scrum as companies can’t get their head around anything but having a process and Scrum to them is seen as a process so they introduce loads of rules based around it.

What are they using for source control and to manage/record code reviews and check-ins (git, GitHub, TFS, VSTS, etc…), Usually there is a plugin available.

Honest answer;  most people probably don’t have a template because they are lazy and using the tools provided by task management software.

Shouldn’t be too much pain to knock-up the ideal trend vs the day to day updated line. My experience is a straight line from day 1 to day X-1 where X is your sprint length, then half the tickets are deleted/discarded on the last day and Y things are left incomplete to take to the next sprint 😉

This thread is a bit like a game of Mornington Crescent – I can’t quite tell if its an actual thing or a bunch of people talking bollox. At the moment I could go either way.

I’m a scrum master and we recently moved from physical board with lots of post-it’s to doing everything through TFS. Would recommend if this is an option – it will produce the burndownn and countless other charts for you.

This thread is a bit like a game of Mornington Crescent – I can’t quite tell if its an actual thing or a bunch of people talking bollox. At the moment I could go either way.

Glad I’m not alone 🙂

physical board with lots of post-it’s to doing everything through TFS

And I’d recommend going the other way, electronic boards are things people are too easily able to ignore in my experience. Each to their own though 😉

If the company isn’t going mental for new tools and stuff then maybe they’re old school enough for post it notes to be the ideal technology, whereas, a whacking great big white board stood around in front of everyone ought to remind them that you’re “doing agile”, whatever that looks like for you.

PS I’m a scrum master.

PPS That means I’ve been on a 2 day course and built something out of Lego.

you might even find something about it in the manifesto

Perhaps I should read it 🙂

This thread is a bit like a game of Mornington Crescent – I can’t quite tell if its an actual thing or a bunch of people talking bollox. At the moment I could go either way.

You joke, but when you come to actually work on a project that’s exactly what it’s like.  People talking jargon and doing absolute bollocks.  Because they really don’t get it.  I’ve no idea why, it’s not really hard.

Yeah we just changed from a physical board as people work from home part of the week so it made sense.

I agree about the course…putting it into practice and taking the bits that work for you is the difficult bit. We have opted out of lots that didn’t make sense for us….and the 9 hours of meetings each Sprint. Not sure how the you are meant to get anything done if you stick to that.

Glad I’m not alone

I work in SW for an Agile company and even I can’t tell if it’s BS or not 😉

This thread is incredible. A lot of Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B candidates.
I bet you all get paid shit loads too.

I’m so glad that I haven’t a clue what any of this means

The client I work for pushed us into using Agile as the new normal for projects, only they don’t really want to engage with us during development and delivery so I think it’s just a case of one of there senior managers reading Agile was the next big thing without really understanding what it actually entails. And if one more person mentions a sprint when we’re actually just getting near a project milestone I’m going to lose my shit :p

I get to listen to this gibberish in passing when my wife is working from home – probably slightly terrifying that it defines people’s working day, but then yesterday I watched the light die in a student’s eyes as I tried to explain the acronym bingo of the Mountain Training awards structure…

and the 9 hours of meetings each Sprint. Not sure how the you are meant to get anything done if you stick to that.

Sigh …. if it’s working for you then great, if it’s not then don’t blame the process.

1 hour retro, 2 hours planning, 1-2 hours of refinement, a demo and stand-ups, doesn’t need to add up to 9 hours.

The whole point of the ‘meetings’, they aren’t really meetings they are about people talking to one another, is that it helps you ‘get stuff done’, i.e. people all understand the requirement, people discuss the solution, they know what capability will be available when it is ‘done’. Personally I’d rather see people standing round a board talking and planning something then them in a meeting, or busy making themselves look busy so no one notices that they don’t know what they are doing.

I have seen a lot of people not really do the process properly, then criticise it. They like the idea of cycling, but the new bike thing looks like it will take a lot of maintenance, so they put new tyres on the old rust bucket they’ve had for years with no brakes and then try and ride down Snowdon on it.

This thread is incredible. A lot of Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B candidates.

Absolutely, the older I get the more and more I’m convinced all management should be shipped off in a B Ark somewhere….

Sigh …. if it’s working for you then great, if it’s not then don’t blame the process.

1 hour retro, 2 hours planning, 1-2 hours of refinement, a demo and stand-ups, doesn’t need to add up to 9 hours.

When we started all suggestions pointed to a 4 hr Planning meeting and a 3hr Refinement. These were for two week Sprints and then the daily stand-ups were in addition…so the total was around 9 hours.

My point is that we have got a lot out of Scrum but we have done this by tailoring it to suit our needs. Why should something supposedly Agile be so erm….rigid😀

I’m glad I got out of it. Done everything from post-its on an office partition to full on, drag it out, specify it to within an inch of its life “Agile” process. A lot of the BS words and phrases are just to differentiate it from the last great SW process.

While there’s 20% “contingency” built in to everyone’s schedule, that isn’t meant to be Agile specific time like stand ups. Filling in “work done” in Jira or whatever is maximum five minutes at the end of the day.

My point is that we have got a lot out of Scrum but we have done this by tailoring it to suit our needs. Why should something supposedly Agile be so erm….rigid

Agree that it shouldn’t be, I got the impression that you took the 9 hours as ‘required’. While there are some things I think of as essential to the process, it should always remain flexible and be adapted for a team, provided it’s not at the cost of doing things well.

I may have some biases around people saying they are agile when they are anything but 🙂