Paul

0008 Salesforce Quick Actions

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Object-specific actions There are several types of object-specific actions. During set up of your actions, if you remove a required field, you cannot complete the saving of the action. Required fields must be left on the action layout. Practice Drills Global actions You create global actions in a different place in Setup than you create … Read more

LeSS: Retrospectives

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The Retrospective is a critical part of succeeding with software projects. I have seen many teams ignore this and as a result be less effective than they could have been. Other teams that do retrospectives just use it as an opportunity to say what went well, what didn’t go so well and what could be done better next time without actually doing anything to improve their process.

In the LeSS framework, you will undertake two retrospectives. The first will be at the team level where individual teams inspect and adapt their ways of working and processes, and the second will be at the product level where all teams (or suitable representatives from all teams) gather to inspect and adapt the whole system.

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Continuously integrate during development

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Once development teams have created their sprint backlogs they are ready to begin development. During a multi-team development effort, it’s important to integrate code continuously. This is one of the main differences between an agile and waterfall approach to development. First of all teams must be cross-functional feature teams. This essentially means that each team … Read more

LeSS: Sprint Planning Two

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If Sprint Planning One is for teams to clarify backlog items as a group and select which items they take into Sprint Planning Two (SP2), then SP2 is for agreeing design decisions and creating the Sprint Backlog. The LeSS approach to SP2 would look like this: Part 1 (Teams working on closely aligned items can … Read more

LeSS: Sprint Planning One

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When product teams use the LeSS framework, they will have two types of Sprint Planning (SP) events: Sprint Planning One (SP1) and Sprint Planning Two (SP2). Sprint Planning One is an opportunity for the whole product group to come together whereas SP2 is done on an individual team basis (although some teams can also opt … Read more

Doing a Daily Stand-up as a non-development team

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The daily stand-up is arguably the most successful export of the agile philosophy. It has become a feature of many delivery teams—even non-agile, non-development teams.
In these teams it is mostly used as a morning catch-up session to align team members and share updates related to ongoing work.

As such it is different from the Daily Scrum ceremony which is specific to teams using the Scrum framework. Whilst the Daily Scrum is a meeting for a Scrum development team only, a daily stand-up, as co-opted by non-agile non development teams, encompasses a wider group of participants and often include discussions beyond the famous three questions.

Some teams have experimented with and adopted practices that make their stand-ups useful, efficient and enjoyable. Whilst others perform the meeting in a way that makes it tedious and uninspiring.

Here are some practices to experiment with when performing a daily stand-up as a non-agile, non-development team.

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Car Crash Calendars

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The age of virtual meetings have turned most people’s calendars into a car crash. People were busy pre-Covid but post-Covid busyness is more due to the prevalence of remote work and heavy reliance on virtual meetings to get work done. It’s pretty normal now for calendars to be booked flat out from 8am to 6pm … Read more