[teampractices] Updated Scrum Guide

I just came across this article[1] where Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland describe recent updates to the Scrum Guide. Ken says: There are five main changes to The Scrum Guide: a greater definition on the uses of Scrum, a more refined definition of the role of Scrum Master, clearer

Re: [teampractices] Team Canvas: a process for forming (or re-forming) teams

meant ongoing team working agreements, not just for a short event like an offsite. However, the basic version is aimed at short projects, and only takes half an hour, so it could be used for an offsite. Kevin ​ > > On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 2:01 PM, Kevin Smith <ksm...@wikimedia.org> wr

[teampractices] Team Canvas: a process for forming (or re-forming) teams

m/BeyondAgile/events/243808919/ [2] http://theteamcanvas.com/ Kevin Smith Engineering Program Manager, Wikimedia Foundation ___ teampractices mailing list teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices

Re: [teampractices] No questions allowed!

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 5:30 PM, Jeroen De Dauw wrote: > It seems like for such a policy to not result in disaster, everyone needs > a good amount of empathy and willingness to cooperate. > ​Agreed! It would probably also require everyone to have strong communication

[teampractices] No questions allowed!

end of the night, I felt mostly at peace with it. I'm not advocating that we adopt this policy. But I encourage you to take a few minutes and reflect how different your work life would be if you weren't allowed to ask questions. For me at least, it was an interesting thought experiment.

[teampractices] Article: Improving Corporate Cognitive Performance in IT Organisations

probably not a surprise to most of us) My favorite quote (which is also one of their key takeaways): *Software engineers should consider themselves 'cognitive athletes' with an attitude of doing everything possible to make themselves as fit as possible for their roles.* Kevin Smith Engineering Progr

Re: [teampractices] Juicero as a case study supporting Agile methods

now if that's true or not, but it's what she claimed Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 11:57 AM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufre...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > While that's not the specific point of this article from Bolt about > Juicero's hardware developme

Re: [teampractices] Request for input: how do your teams provide feedback to team members?

feedback that would help them know what areas they should focus on improving. Thanks for starting this thread. I hope to learn from it. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 10:03 AM, Grace Gellerman <ggel

Re: [teampractices] Phab: Support added for task subtype (bug, feature, etc)

That's good news for some teams. I have some concerns about the proposed solution, so I commented in the upstream task. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Max Binder <mbin...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > https://secure.phabricator.com/T12314

Re: [teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

s, empathy is now dangerous? No problem, I'll just have compassion. Did I actually change anything other than the word? I just proposed a Tea Time topic for this. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 3:09 PM, Natalia Harateh <nhara...@wikimedia.org>

Re: [teampractices] My experience at Agile Games West 2016

types. I'm thinking the thrill you might get from skydiving, gambling, or public performance. For some people (not me!), that's the best kind of fun there is, but it doesn't seem to be represented by any play personality type. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Oct 20,

Re: [teampractices] How to best track the work within Phabricator Epic tasks

ic owner/shepherd should serve as a reasonable source of that information. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 11:13 PM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufre...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > TPG is struggling with practices for having lists of sub-tasks within > Phabricator tasks. S

Re: [teampractices] FYI: Phabricator workaround for manually selecting tasks to bulk-edit

Cool! Can you (Joel) add it to our phab docs, so I'll be able to find it later, if/when I need it? (If not, hopefully someone else will.) Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 5:35 PM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufre...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > I saw this w

Re: [teampractices] Healthy discussion: A couple of articles against scrum

to die.” To which I say AMEN! Yes! And then I immediately claim that agile is, in fact, a remedy for terminal juniority, a complete cure for low autonomy, and is incompatible with aggressive management. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia

Re: [teampractices] Retrospectives: Getting deep and personal

Thank you indeed, Guillaume. I have added my interpretations of these to the Planning Offsites page[1]. It's great to have more tools available! I look forward to hearing about the "adjective game". [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Planning_offsites Kevin S

[teampractices] [FYI] Changes to Phabricator project creation policies

ki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Types_of_Projects> . Of course, you'll want to put some thought into what your new project should be called. Informally running your thinking past a couple other people wouldn't hurt. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Creating_and_renaming_p

Re: [teampractices] Google Calendar Gadget for tracking total weekly hours

If there is a tool to dump a week's worth of my calendar into a text file, I could write a ruby script that would give me some cool (and hopefully valuable) insights. I haven't looked to see if such a tool is available, but I would guess there probably is. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia

Re: [teampractices] Google Calendar Gadget for tracking total weekly hours

ts. People who color-code their types of meetings might want a bucket per color. It sounds like Max just wants One Big Bucket(tm), which would be easiest of all. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Max Binder <mbin...@wikimedia.org> wrote: >

Re: [teampractices] Article on prioritizing bugs

om/the-broken-window-theory/ Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 10:23 AM, Max Binder <mbin...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Via Corey on the iOS team: > https://hackernoon.com/bugs-priority-3b5cf5f6aadd?source=lin > kShare-3607e4b9ed19-1473801964 > &g

[teampractices] [FYI] Planning offsites

://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Planning_offsites [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138777 Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation ___ teampractices mailing list teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org

Re: [teampractices] IT projects almost as prone to overruns as the Olympics

modern mega-projects have come in on time.) Presumably hitting that date adds to the expenses, and especially to unplanned expenses as one delay leads to another. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Max Binder <mbin...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Re: [teampractices] IT projects almost as prone to overruns as the Olympics

I would also be interested in cost overrun comparisons with other *international* projects. I mean, that has to add to the confusion and unpredictability, right? The chunnel came in at 80% over budget, according to wikipedia. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Mon, Aug 15, 2016

Re: [teampractices] 2 interesting articles about design

se MY preferred fonts. Instead, I (probably) have to live with whatever crappy font the web page creator felt like shoving down my throat. That means that I'm (probably) stuck with Helvetica/Arial most of the time. Ugh. Whew. Feels great to drag that rant back out of the attic and give it some

[teampractices] [FYI] "Five finger retrospectives"

[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Five_finger_retrospective [3] https://swanthinks.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/2-5-1-storytelling/ Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation ___ teampractices mailing list teampractices@lists.wikimedia

Re: [teampractices] Phabricator terminology change (blocking->subtasks)

t of terms is very awkward, as one of my examples demonstrated: "implement X" certainly doesn't feel like a subtask of "document X", but that's how it will appear in phab right now. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 11:27 AM, Max Binder

[teampractices] Phabricator terminology change (blocking->subtasks)

le editing a task, you can change its subtasks or its parents. Previously, you could only edit one direction. I created T139181 as a task to update our wiki phab documentation. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation ___ teampractices mailing list teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices

Re: [teampractices] Good article on why we don’t like what we struggle to categorize

ot;[1]. To beer fans, there are a thousand subtle variations. Meanwhile, I can distinguish at least dozens, if not hundreds, of types of boardgames. (Thinking in terms of tags, not taxonomies.) [1] I mostly put beers into 2 categories: "eww", and "OMG NO get this out of my mouth!" Kevin Smith Ag

Re: [teampractices] Good article on why we don’t like what we struggle to categorize

rustrating, because so many things really can't fit into a single bucket. Even today, it seems like rigid taxonomies remain overused. I'm not sure where I'm going with that, but it seemed relevant somehow, and I needed to rant. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Jun 9, 2016

Re: [teampractices] Keeping track of activity in tasks in phabricator

It's not a helpful answer, but I use email, and just hit delete a lot. It would be interesting to hear from product managers, since they touch boatloads of tasks. I think a few are on this mailing list. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Joaquin

Re: [teampractices] A tool for keeping action items accountable?

boards up in their office, some use gcal. Others rely on memory, random emails, etc. This discussion has tilted me in the direction of using phab more than we have, at least in cases where it's reasonable to do so. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 1:58 AM

Re: [teampractices] A tool for keeping action items accountable?

meone owns an action item, I trust them to create a phab task, or not, as they see fit. Often the action item is "Create a phab task for X", and adding a task to create another task would be silly. I think most action items are along the lines of "Convene a meeting about X", or &quo

Re: [teampractices] [ANY] Looking for live example of a Phabricator custom form

I never saw replies to this. I thought forms were a hotly-requested feature. Are teams using them? If not, are there implementation problems, or is it just a matter of not having the time to get to it yet? Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 4:23 AM, Max

Re: [teampractices] Code review social norms

://selfdefinedleadership.com/blog/?p=158 Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 11:00 AM, Subramanya Sastry <ssas...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On 03/16/2016 01:33 PM, Kevin Smith wrote: > >> I'm curious what the inherent benefit is of having multiple people >>

Re: [teampractices] Patch review culture of Wikimedia teams

something either because it's a critical internal thing, OR because we would want to avoid disappointing a volunteer. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 5:21 AM, Andre Klapper <aklap...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hej, > > thanks for the reply!

Re: [teampractices] Code review social norms

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Gergo Tisza wrote: > some large changes simply cannot be broken up into independent small ones > due to circular dependencies, unless you want to leave the code in a broken > state between commits (in which case you lose most of the

Re: [teampractices] Patch review culture of Wikimedia teams

integrating code review into phab will give us some new tools to help teams more easily monitor the flow of patches. I don't know what tools are available in gerrit. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 6:19 AM, Andre Klapper <aklap...@wikimedia.org>

Re: [teampractices] Code review social norms

changes than one monolithic commit that does 10 different things. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 12:20 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemow...@gmail.com> wrote: > https://secure.phabricator.com/T10584#164843 to me sounds like a big pile > of logic

Re: [teampractices] Better names for Project and Milestone in Phlogiston

w.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Types_of_Projects Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 11:53 AM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufre...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi, > > Phlogiston uses the term Project to refer to *all of the work that a team >

[teampractices] Phabricator: Column task sequence bug should be fixed

A new version of phab was deployed, which at least in theory should fix https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T127905 ("New tasks are not defaulting to the top of the default column"). Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation ___ teampractic

Re: [teampractices] [FYI] connection between great teams and psychological safety

ere skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues." "But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work." Kevin

Re: [teampractices] Setting norms for points field in Phabricator

summary on wiki nicely avoids that trap (yay!): "The person or team who estimates a task should be the ones who will eventually do the task". Works for me (although I might replace that final "task" with "work". Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On

[teampractices] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Phabricator Update

Forwarding since I don't think all TPGers are on wikitech-l, and this seems like news worth spreading. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation -- Forwarded message -- From: Mukunda Modell <mmod...@wikimedia.org> Date: Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 4:30 PM Subject: [Wiki

Re: [teampractices] Interesting logistical experiment in London Underground

instead of walk would be safety, but the experimenters didn't seem very interested in that. Tying it back to software development, I guess I would take away this lesson: Look for, and eliminate, waste. It's hard to go wrong doing that. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Tue, Jan 26

Re: [teampractices] [Wmfall] Please help define the term "core work"

ll of that is really a better discussion for the wiki page, so I encourage you to take it up there. But I hope this helps. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian <canan...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > It definitely seems

Re: [teampractices] [Wmfall] Please help define the term "core work"

gic. For that work, I think it would be dysfunctional to try to jam it into one of the two buckets that it doesn't really belong in. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 11:21 AM, C. Scott Ananian <canan...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Kevin: your response

[teampractices] Please help define the term "core work"

features working smoothly. Please continue this discussion on wiki, or email me (or just the Team Practices list) if you have process questions or concerns. [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan/Questions_and_Answers [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Pract

Re: [teampractices] [Wmfall] Please help define the term "core work"

gic" bucket. 3. Other, which is stuff that doesn't fall into either of those categories. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 12:34 PM, Oliver Keyes <oke...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > So we created categories with values we don't know the me

Re: [teampractices] interesting read on the problems with KPIs

make it worthless, but healthy skepticism is needed. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 12:01 PM, Anne Gomez <ago...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-kpis-other-corporate-bullsht-liz-ryan > > This floated across my int

Re: [teampractices] [TOOL REQUEST] A way to "raise your hand" as a remotee

> The way the WMF engineering team solved it is that all members are > attending the meeting remotely. Despite 3 out of 7 members are based in > SF, albeit frequently working remotely. That might sound a bit extreme > though. > I had thought about that in the past, but seeing it in this thread

Re: [teampractices] [Discussion] Term for always prepping for the next thing

y contributing to this problem. If tasks are days or weeks long, that greatly increases the odds of an emergency popping up before the current work is completed. I would look for opportunities to reduce the batch size to help work flow through the pipeline more smoothly. Kevin Smith Agile Coa

Re: [teampractices] [Discussion] WIP limits: story points vs task count

if the WIP limit fails to trigger due to [math], anyone on the team could notice that too much work/too many tasks are in progress, and guide the team to make corrections. Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 1:48 PM, Max Binder mbin...@wikimedia.org wrote: I've

Re: [teampractices] Maintenance vs New work

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 10:20 AM, Bryan Davis bd...@wikimedia.org wrote: I think I would personally invert Kevin's assertion and say that most teams are (or should be) spending a non-trivial amount of time performing both maintenance and responsive correction work. Hopefully this doesn't rise

Re: [teampractices] Maintenance vs New work

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: Whereas I think RelEng is probably[0] closer to only 20% in new. RelEng and Ops are the groups that to me are pretty obviously heavily weighted toward keep the lights on and maintain in the face of external forces (e.g.

Re: [teampractices] Maintenance vs New work

Distinguishing between maintenance and new work seems very gray to me. Roughly as gray as bug vs. improvement. I guess a working definition for us right now might be: Either it's part of a project in the MPL, or it is maintenance, or there's a reasonable chance you shouldn't be doing it. Kevin

Re: [teampractices] [TPG/URGENT-ISH] Thoughts on Gerrit Cleanup Day

Great notes. I don't see any red flags. I agree with Kristen's Friday concerns (while appreciating the concept of a fun day). And I agree that the wording will be very important, along with buy-in from managers. Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every

[teampractices] [FYI] Coloniality (a presentation from Wikimania)

/File:Coloniality_of_power_in_Wikimedia.pdf Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.* ___ teampractices

[teampractices] [FYI] Analysis of Public and Private email lists

and transparent. Team Practices has had some discussions about these results, and generally raised our awareness, but we have not explicitly declared any changes to our norms. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Mailing_list_analysis Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia

Re: [teampractices] Make a tag for quarterly goals?

In case anyone missed it, Greg has proposed dropping the #Roadmap project. He also proposed creating a new project for each quarter which would contain all the department/team goals for that quarter. Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human

Re: [teampractices] [Engineering] The end of the Roadmap Phabricator project

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: I would prefer, instead, to have canonical eg #201516-Q1 projects that are for tracking quarterly goals across teams (with columns for either ETA month or status (in-progress/done)). I know some teams already do

Re: [teampractices] Grooming: ongoing and asynchronous

they communicate what they had done, or did you just notice it next time you looked at that column? Could you estimate how much of the grooming was performed that way? Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum

Re: [teampractices] MVP or MMP?

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:14 AM, David Strine dstr...@wikimedia.org wrote: Is the current usage of MVP in context with other levels of done? - MVP - truly MVP, barely consumable by users - Competitive - meets or slightly exceeds competitors - BATMAN - yes, all caps. this should

Re: [teampractices] Email naming in Google Apps Mail

info first, but still make sense to less technical folks. [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make

Re: [teampractices] Code review before writing new code

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 9:25 AM, James Douglas jdoug...@wikimedia.org wrote: staying focussed on their teams' priorities may in fact contribute to code review queues growing I disagree, unless the team's priority is add to the code review queue. :] I think Arthur's comment was based on the

Re: [teampractices] Code review before writing new code

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 1:10 PM, James Douglas jdoug...@wikimedia.org wrote: This prioritization then makes it trivial to decide between reviewing (or fixing, testing, deploying, etc.) feature Foo vs. coding up feature Bar. Exactly. And thus a team prioritizing Bar might continue coding on

Re: [teampractices] Tracking team member calendars?

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Anne Gomez ago...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 11:50 PM, Kevin Smith ksm...@wikimedia.org wrote: Being able to enter, say search-team as a guest, and have the system auto-expand that as if I had entered 10 names is a reasonable feature

Re: [teampractices] Fwd: [reading-wmf] Time Off Procedure

could instead send an email to an internal team list (if there is one), or just to the specific people who need to know. [1] I don't see it listed here, even though other team internal lists are shown: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation

Re: [teampractices] Tracking team member calendars?

see problems, and I see solutions that cause other problems. I don't yet see a panacea. Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.* On Wed, Jun

[teampractices] Tracking team member calendars?

a little self-hosted app that was pretty cool. It showed where everyone was in the world, as well as whether they were working or out. Oh, and I'm asking mostly for teams into which we are embedded, but the same question would apply to TPG itself. Especially as we grow. Kevin Smith Agile Coach

Re: [teampractices] Why are WMF Department/team pages on mediawiki.org?

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 9:33 AM, Guillaume Paumier gpaum...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi, [I see that Kevin has responded to say that his original question was about the Team Practices pages specifically, but since the scope of this thread has expanded beyond that, and since I'm almost done

[teampractices] Why are WMF Department/team pages on mediawiki.org?

pages (such as CirrusSearch) make sense to be on mediawiki.org. Are there historical or cultural reasons to keep the team pages on mediawiki.org? Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge

[teampractices] What does coach mean?

people who both have it in their job title. Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make it a reality.* ___ teampractices

[teampractices] Agile coaching and the drama triangle

conflicts, and I'll be more aware of it moving forward. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Help us make

[teampractices] ANYONE: Phab, burnup charts, and double-counting

-counting. I only started thinking about this an hour ago, but so far I am perplexed as to how to work around this. For what it's worth, solutions could include technical features, or socially-enforced conventions. Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation *Imagine a world in which every single

[teampractices] Offsite meetings

together a recommendation? Kevin Smith Agile Coach Wikimedia Foundation Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. ___ teampractices mailing list teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org