Special thanks to Arash for facilitating this meeting 🙂 The goal is to continue to have people in the group share in the presenting, so please always feel free to share your ideas to make this is team effort!

Here are the notes from the Open Source Meetup on Monday, Sept. 26th.

Topic #1: How do you bring Agile concepts into other departments of business/ non software areas
1. Add a retro to get meaningful feedback and then use it to create action items and make things better/ maximize what is going well.
2. Daily Stand Up – determine the best way to do it for your team/business.
3. Take goals and break them into milestones/ smaller pieces so that they can more easily fit into sprints.
4. Use Kanban – take your list of things and put them into a Kanban board to show the status –
not started, ready, in progress, done.
5. Look for bottlenecks in the process and remove them.
6. Take a goal and break it down in planning so that it can be done.

Topic #2: How long should Backlog Grooming/ Planning Meeting be?
1. Think refinement to help narrow the scope of the goal of the meeting – complexity, details, scope – work with Product Owner and team.
2. Observe the team during meeting and cut it off when they appear close to pulling the F#$@ It Switch.
3. Estimate in buckets of size rather than a set number, think range – it might not be a 13 but if it won’t fit in the 8 bucket without overflowing then go with 13.
4. Scrum Master may need to be liaison between technical and non-technical.
5. Scrum Master may need to do coaching with Product Owner, team, and management.

Stay tuned for a survey and update on the October Meetup.