I attended Agile Yorkshire last week and saw two great talks by Tom Hoyland and Jon Fulton. I really enjoyed both but a few points in Tom’s talk really interested me and I’d like to take a few minutes to share them.

Tom is a Scrum Master at Sky Betting and Gaming, I’ve heard good things about the company in the past so I was interested to hear one of their success stories. It turns out that Tom was part of a team of twelve who really stripped Agile “back to basics” and conducted a series of experiments on the road to continuous delivery. Working in a regulated industry myself I was intrigued how they’d got on.

One of the first things Tom talked about was how many different people in the team came to the table with ideas of what was agile best practice. We all laughed at his “my guru is better than your guru” but it makes a lot of sense! I am heavily influenced by Jez Humble, Gene Kim, and Clarke Ching but many of my colleagues may watch talks and read blogs from very different thought leaders. Tom explained that one of the first thing they had to do in the team’s formation was break many of the concepts down to their fundamental concepts and understand what worked for them.

Something else Tom discussed was how the team consolidated their own backlog. This was not controversial, how else would you prioritise the work against it? It was only when he gave examples of some of the different backlogs they’re identified that I became intrigued. Risk Logs, Retro Actions, and Design Session – all of these moved onto the board and each became visible and prioritised.

It’s dangerous out there – take your buddy! I’ve heard many of the advocates or pair programming before but the idea of your buddy following you into meetings, design sessions, and CABs!? Tom explained that if your buddy went with you to these sessions not only would they learn how to design, and walk work through the CAB but they’d also know the current state of everything you were working on. If you were sick or the proverbial bus came along the team wouldn’t need to bother you because everyone would know what was going on.

There were many other good ideas (and I intend to borrow quite a few of them myself) but the final one I’m going to mention was the idea that Velocity is in fact a vanity metric (read The Lean Startup if you have no idea what I’m talking about). Velocity is just a number, like Number of Users or Number of Page Views). What we want are actionable metrics, like team predictability and accuracy of forecasts. As a Development Manager I frequently use the team’s average velocity to forecast delivery dates, Tom recommended that there are better measures out there such as a temperature check of the team’s current mood (which would often dip before any reduction in velocity). It’s an interesting idea, and one I intend to think more about over the next few weeks!

A big thank you to Royd and the guys who put Agile Yorkshire together each month. An equally big thank you to Tom and Jon for their great talks!