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Surviving Scaled Agile - Jenga!

I’ve recently been working with project teams who are attempting to remain effective after their organisation has chosen to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

I’m trying capture & refine the common patterns I’ve observed across several SAFe implementations that have helped those involved in the implementation remain effective after they have been left wondering where they fit.

I’m hoping it will help others who have been in touch with me who are trying to understand what it means to be a practitioner in their newly formed SAFe organisation.

Jenga Blocks Tower
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Testing The Leading SAFe Certification

Several projects I am working on within my organisation are adopting SAFe in order to build software solutions, so I thought I should perform some SAFe testing!

With my Agile background, I am able to provide a lot of value in helping the teams follow an iterative development lifecycle (predominantly Scrum), but I have little experience of processes outside of the development teams themselves.

I also seem to struggle to get my message across to senior stakeholders within my organisation who are new to Agile & SAFe.

My hypothesis is that achieving the Leading SAFe Certification will help me

  1. with the process knowledge gap
  2. improve my communication with senior stakeholders

This post aims to outline what happened in the experiment…

Question-4-Level-SAFe-Big-Picture-4.0

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Experiments in Harmonic Mixing #1 - Round The Clock

It seems I have been living under a rock when it comes to what appears to be a fundamental tool in DJing (a side hobby of mine)

It’s called Harmonic Mixing which is the implementation of the Circle of fifths found in music theory.

This post is about my first foray into harmonic mixing & how I can improve my DJing by incorporating the skills into my toolbox.

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What has the CDT Community ever done for me?

There’s been a lot of commentary on Twitter & in the blogosphere about the Context Driven Testing (CDT) community & in particular James Bach & Michael Bolton.

I wanted to take some time to reflect on how influential the CDT community has been for me, including the help, input & advice from James & Michael.

Obviously, there are so many in the CDT community I need to thank for helping me get to where I am today, but that is not the purpose of the post.

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Single Source Of Truth Is A Lie

This is the 2nd post in my series on Truth. It builds on the first post by hopefully demonstrating how my opinions on truth & “Living Documentation” have changed after some research into what is truth.

This research was done in preparation for the fabulous MEWT conference. Here is a link for the slides of my “Single Source Of Truth Is A Lie” talk - this post aims to follow the structure of that talk.

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Why was that bug put in code?

I need to fill in some gaps regarding the quote taken from my recent talk at the BBC Develop 2014 conference.

I told a story of when I was asked the question:

“Why wasn’t that bug found in test?”

I responded:

“Why did you put that bug in the code?”

I have to confess, this isn’t my default response to that question, but as always there’s a story behind the story…
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Dissecting The Testing Quadrants

I’m a fan of the (Agile) Testing Quadrants, first described by Brian Marick back in 2003 as a matrix & later popularised by Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory.

James Bach helped me to break down the quadrants in order to get a deeper understanding of what each quadrant meant. It was during this conversation I realised I had a very shallow understanding of the model & I was effectively diluting (& even twisting?!) the message the quadrants were trying to get across.

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