Speaking at Startup Weekend Seattle Nov 11th - 13th
I've gotten the honor and privledge to speak at Startup Weekend Nov 11th to the 13th about Agile development! I created a special version of Scrum called "Startup Weekend Agile" that's adapted to work in the condensed 48 hour timeline. The whole goal is to help teams improve their ability to deliver a functioning and working product in the condensed weekend. Readers of my blog get a special sneak preview of what Startup Weekend Agile is and how it works. Thanks for reading!
The Presentation
Goals of Startup Weekend Agile
- Reduce the risk of taking too long to deliver a solution by the demo on Sunday the 13th.
- Reduce the risk of executing on the wrong idea, wrong solution or something that doesn't matter to the customer.
- Facilitate discovery of the unknown. If you don't know what you need to build, there needs to be a structured way of discovering how to build it.
- Allow the team to quickly change directions when new information becomes available.
Agile for Startup Weekend Crib Sheet
- Startup Weekend Agile in a Nutshell
- Roles: Elect people to roles in the team
- Planning: Setup a backlog and a plan to execute using what you know
- Execution: Execute against the idea, adapt as you discover
- Discovery: Inspect how things are going, regularly sync
- Roles
- Elect a Product Owner:
- Responsible for talking to customers
- Responsible for updating and prioritizing the product backlog
- Elect a Scrum Master:
- Responsible for running the planning meeting, stand ups, and discovery sessions.
- Team Members:
- Making things happen!
- Elect a Product Owner:
- Planning
- Build a backlog of things that need to be done by Sunday’s demo
- Order the list by business value
- From the backlog, decide how much can fit into 1 day and who will do what.
- Estimate each task in hours in how long it will take to finish
- Make sure each task can be completed that day
- Build a backlog of things that need to be done by Sunday’s demo
- Execution
- Meet up every 2-4 hours and ask the following questions:
- What did you do?
- What are you going to do?
- What’s blocking you from making progress?
- Product Owners
- Update or add items on the backlog according to feedback from customers
- If there is a big change, stop and ask the team if they can re-plan
- Meet up every 2-4 hours and ask the following questions:
- Discovery
- Show off what was completed that day to the team.
- Ask the team how they can improve the next day.
- Repeat planning, execution ,discovery until the the Sunday demo.
- Top 4 Tools for Startup Weekend Scrum
- Post it Notes!
- Google Spreadsheets
- PivotalTracker.com
- AccuNote.com
