Justin York – Simdesk

“Del's leadership was instrumental in bringing agile methodologies to our development team. While transitioning to scrum, I often consulted with Del about how to handle things in the scrum framework. Once our team was fully running on scrum, I felt that we were at least twice as productive as we had been in the past.”

Matt Willson – Pervasive Software

“As Delmar's manager for over a year, I was very impressed with the simplicity of his designs, the quality of his software, and the tenacity he brought to problem solving, especially customer issues. Delmar provided strong leadership for the developers who worked under his tutelage.”

Steve Mook – Pervasive Software and Simdesk

"Del is experienced,enthusiastic and tenacious - an excellent team lead with expertise in UI design and development and Scrum project management. He is willing to learn new technologies, challenge assumptions, take risks, and be accountable for results. His skill and leadership would benefit any team that seeks to improve its ability to deliver value to customers and to the business."

My Agile Experience

What was really exciting was to see the Scrum methodology adopted company wide at Simdesk. Because of the success of our team I was able to train and mentor other team leads, managers and corporate executives to use Scrum. This lead to increased productivity and better communication among the teams, support, product managers and upper management. Goals are well defined and consistently meet.

Tags

adoption architecture books build change collaboration deploy design integratoin learning management performing productivity quality release safety sprint team Team Member team safety training user stories

My Reading List

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)) by Lyssa Adkins (Paperback - June 14, 2010)

Available on safaribooksonline.com as a Rough Cut.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum [Book] by Mike Cohn - Addison Wesley

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders - Paperback (Jan. 16, 2006) by Jean Tabaka

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) Roman Pichler

Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Book Shelf

Apr
23

When it all comes together

By Delmar Hager

We all know the different phases of team development: forming, storming, norming and performing. In this last sprint I saw the team go from norming to performing.

In my 6 years of Agile practice this last sprint was as close as I seen a team do all of the best practices of a Scrum team.

It started with an excellent planning session at the beginning of the sprint. We actually took 3 hours to do our sprint planning. The product owner did an excellent job of clarifying the requirements and the team came up with a very comprehensive set of tasks for the sprint. Our testing engineers participated and helped us understand the issues we would face in testing our code.

The sprint started on a Wednesday and by the next Monday we were completing the first of the user stories and QA was doing their final testing. The user experience designer (UED) was constantly updating the high fidelity wireframes to reflect the necessary changes in the user interface. We had a hour of the product owner’s time each day to clarify ambiguities in the requirements. Through the rest of the sprint we were finishing new user stories and they were accepted by QA, UED and the product owner.

Our velocity actually increased during this sprint. We brought forward two user stories from the next iteration into the current iteration.

Team members stated that the last days of the sprint did not seem like a mad rush to finish the user stories. We only had two user stories out of 16 that needed to be finalized and tested in the last two days of the sprint.

The sprint demo was flawless. It was the  climax the hard work and excellent team work of a performing team.

Categories : Agile