Returning to the time I was told by my team manager I was going to form a new team to work on a new product, I’ve never thought that in almost 4 years, my team has grown and sustained in a way different than other teams in the company. When I was in my previous team, many people struggled using Scrum. People are obsessed with Story Pointing. Some team members refused to attend the Sprint Review and Retrospective. Everyone works without a clear goal but only emptying the backlog and fighting the deadlines. Arguments like Code Refactoring versus meeting the deadlines and estimation versus actual were everywhere. There were times that I doubted if Scrum brought us a tough time. There were times that I almost wanted to quit the job due to the burnout. ...

“Have you ever read the Scrum Guide?”

“Do you code during your leisure time?” the consultant asked my team while coaching us towards the Agile journey over 6 years ago. “Coding is fun,” the consultant continued, “I code a lot during the weekend.” As a software developer, coding is our daily job. We’re already tired of facing the computer and the console. If we code during our leisure time, it looks like we can’t rest and leave the “daily job” on the table. ...

Adopting Story Points as a measurement tool is now one of the anti-patterns in the Scrum world nowadays. However, many product teams are still using this. The majority of them, even worse, emphasise the accuracy of their plan by comparing the estimated story points with the actual completed story points. They’re afraid of carrying over the unfinished Product Backlog Items and upsetting the stakeholders. The more time the team spends in planning, the less time they can work on the actual items. Their overplanning creates an illusion that they know everything about the upcoming Sprint. When it deviates, they feel nervous and only think of fulfilling the estimated story points. In the next Sprint, they put even more effort into planning. ...

When I travel outside of town, I always bring my camera, mainly using focal lengths of 52.5mm and 135mm. Half a year ago, I bought the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8. I was unsure about taking photos with a 28mm equivalent focal length. I decided to add an enabling constraint to my recent journey – using only the 18mm side of the lens (equivalent to 27mm). As a result, all of my photos in Fukuoka and Oita were taken at the 18mm side. During the 8-day journey, I attempted to use the 50mm side twice, but I only treated it as a telescope. I became confident and can take creative shots using this focal length. ...

During the product development, some people often seek for the perfect solution. “How do you ensure the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is unique so the system won’t crash?” A developer asked me recently during a discussion on a RESTful API. “We have to fine-tune the UX,” said a developer from another product team, “I don’t feel comfortable delivering this UI to the users.” He then spent plenty of time explaining his imagination to build the perfect UI. ...

In traditional software development, a business analyst is responsible for gathering the users’ requirements, translating them into other formats like requirement specifications or user stories, and requesting the developers to commence the development work. When a team adopts Scrum, they often feel unsure of where to start. In most cases, the business analyst will assume the role of the Product Owner. This decision is based on the intuitive similarity between the responsibilities of a business analyst and those of a Product Owner. ...

As a coach, trainer and blogger, I need to read a lot to refresh my knowledge and apply it in my daily life. Every month, I read two to four books in various areas. In the past, I didn’t take notes. After finishing a book, I would then move on to another one. When there came a time that I wanted to retrieve something, I could identify the books, but I could hardly recall the pages. ...

Finally, I have launched the new version of my blog, moving from WordPress to a static website version generated by a static site generator. Visit https://oscarhkli.com/ for details. Recalled two years ago, I relaunched my blog. I tried both WordPress and Medium and eventually landed on WordPress. A friend suggested I host the blog in GitHub with Markdown syntax. I was unsure whether I could manage the setup, so I put this matter aside. ...

Several years ago, I participated as an observer in a Sprint Retrospective of a team. The Scrum Master facilitated the event with beautiful drawings to encourage active participation from the attendees. The Sprint Retrospective ran smoothly. They gathered the data, generated insights and decided what to do. In the subsequent Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Master introduced a Mario Kart theme as part of the facilitation process. The event, again, ran smoothly. The Scrum Master reviewed that facilitation was successful and decided to keep applying the fun elements during the Sprint Retrospective. However, when I revisited the team several months later, the team barely kept the “fun” style, and the attendees were not energetic anymore. ...