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What’s our focus for improvement?

Here’s a story.

A development team was thrashing as they attempted to use Scrum to help them build a new application. They had numerous defects, some of which escaped to production and others that were caught within each Sprint. Many defects they thought they had fixed popped up again in production.

Their stakeholders had high expectations, as the team’s velocity was high. After several Sprints, it became clear they were not going to deliver all the planned features by the defined deadline. The news came as a surprise to stakeholders.

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What does a collaborative team work space look like?

The following passage from a generally good article by Jon Evans struck a chord with me:

Open-plan offices, in particular, seem an impressively terrible idea. "Open plan layouts create massive distraction, damaging productivity," according to a recent analysis by the U.K.’s Channel 4. See also the related Hacker News commentary, which includes gems like "Most modern office layouts seem to be designed to screw with people’s fight or flight instincts all day," and "I’m a quiet type, and I often need time alone to think and write code and documentation. The ‘rah rah’ social types railroaded us…I am becoming bitter and resentful."

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