| The most important agile practice, imho, is far and away the Retrospective. A good retrospective process will fix all other problems. In the post, you sort of dismiss it out of hand because it is supposed to be a discussion limited to scrum, but that is an arbitrary and self-imposed restriction. You are doing it wrong. Remove that restriction and the doors will open up. The retrospective is about creating time for the team to review what works and what doesn't about the software development process in general (no need to limit to scrum). I've seen retrospective discussions veer into company culture, the need for faster hardware, testing processes, etc. Anything related to making the software, the software development process, or the team better should be on the table. A good retrospective enables the team to use its sprints as experiments to try different things, to evolve the practices to better fit the needs of the team and organization. If stand-ups aren't working, go a sprint without them, or doing them differently -- whatever change would address the weakness identified by the team -- then in the next retrospective reflect on whether it actually improved things. Rinse and repeat. Done properly, a good retrospective will enable your team to evolve and get better and better with every sprint. Points can be frustratingly fuzzy, but they serve a valuable purpose. They give a measure of team productivity (e.g. velocity), even if imperfect. Yes points can be gamed, but a team should learn quickly that gaming only serves to fool themselves. Because of they can be gamed, I'm not a fan of using points as an externally visible "vanity metric". They should only be used or shared within the team. They should not show up in performance reviews or presentations to management. But points can be very useful as an internal metric for the team to measure whether or not tweaks to the process made a positive impact. You need some way to objectively measure the success or failure of your process experiments. Of course, any metrics used are themselves certainly deserving of scrutiny and fine-tuning, as poor metrics lead to poor decisions. To me the benefit of points (or t-shirt size estimates) over something like hours is that in software development, hour-precision estimates give a false sense of accuracy. It requires more effort to provide more precise estimates, yet they won't be any more accurate (given the inherent non-repetitive nature of software development). Thus, the use of a coarse-grained measure like points serves to re-enforce the notion that the estimate are inherently imprecise and that we don't want to waste effort on greater precision estimates. All that said, whether or not to use points or any measure of team productivity at all is a team decision. If the measure isn't serving the goal of improving the software and the software dev process, then change it or get rid of it. That's the beauty of the retrospective -- it explicitly encourages this sort of process-hacking and fine-tuning. Embrace the Retrospective! |