Agile for Humans with Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller

10: FAST Agile with Ron Quartel

Jul 30, 2015

51:11

Hosts

Discussion

Ron Quartel (@AgileAgitator) is an agile coach, blogger (blog.agileagitator.com) and the creator of the FAST Agile framework.

The FAST Agile (www.fast-agile.com) is a combination of Open Space Technology, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and Story Mapping. After watching hundreds of participants use open space technology to organize and hold a conference, Ron decided that such self-organization practices could also be applied to software development.

Rather than relying control mechanisms like SAFe and LeSS, FAST Agile is a scalable agile framework that relies and individuals and interactions along with pulling work in to teams. Utilizing a 2 day sprint, FAST Agile implicitly requires teams to break their work down in to small chunks and to swarm the work in a #MobProgramming fashion.

Documentation on the FAST Agile framework can be found at (www.fast-agile.com).

We then moved on to the pain points of agile coaching, including:

Fixing bad scrum implementations over and over again
Lack of XP usage on scrum teams
Mis-understanding of what makes scrum work

Especially surprising is the low adoption rates of XP on scrum teams. According to the Scrum Alliance State of Scrum Survey 2015, only 16% of scrum teams also practice XP. The Version One survey had the usage rate even lower. Ron is giving a talk at Agile 2015 about using Scrum and XP for Hyper-productivity. If you’re going to be in DC for the “big conference” this is a must see session.

Finally, we wrapped up with a conversation about agile certifications. While the classes are good, Ron questions the value of “certifying” CSM’s after a 2-day course. He started the #SayNoToAgileCertifications and hopes to see improvements in this area.

And then…we called it a night.