Yogurt for Agile & Lean Culture

By Yilmaz Guleryuz

Most of my arguments are based on my own adaptation of Musashi style:
“Agile & Lean practices must be understood as though the practitioner himself had discovered them from his own mind. Learn about all of them, but never become fond of any.”

My purpose is to make you aware of the many facets of Agile & Lean practices. With that attitude you may analyse any situation, and decide on the best procedures to adapt and apply accordingly. What I hope to do is help you think about workplace culture with more practical and natural ways.

Why authorship?
Because knowledge is more valuable when you share it. Because learn-teach-share is good for the soul, and it leads to growth altogether, but mainly because... Sharing is Caring!

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This book contains 4 (four) chapters with subsections related to Toolbox, Compass, Storyline, and Experiential. While each chapter can be regarded and read as self-contained notebook, still they are all interconnected.

Contents:
> Chapter.1 : A Primer on Agile Mindset
>> 1.1 Finding the Direction
>> 1.2 Overview and Terminology
>> 1.3 Caveats: Beware of the Downsides
> Chapter.2 : Set of Techniques for the Foundation
>> 2.1 Fibonacci Pairing: Learning through Collaboration
>> 2.2 Common Language as a Contextual Medium
>> 2.3 Slicing, Timeboxing, and matters of Sharpness
>> 2.4 Forming Teams as Organisms
>> 2.5 The importance of ‘Naming’
>> 2.6 Presence and Ownership
> Chapter.3 : COMPASS for Continuous Delivery
>> 3.1 The Foundational Aspects
>> 3.2 The Five C’s in Action
> Chapter.4 Experiential Learnings : once upon a time
>> 4.1 A Practical Storyline in Action
>> 4.2 About Remote Teams
If this book inspires you, how delightful would that make the humble author myself.
Please read with patience, and remember to share your feedback.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yilmaz Guleryuz
• Release date: May 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311004802

Yilmaz Guleryuz

Antifragile, Entrepreneur, Pagan

Book preview

YOGURT for Agile & Lean Culture

YOGURT for Agile & Lean Culture

Discovered thru Practice, Inspired by Nature

Yılmaz Güleryüz

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/agile-lean-culture

This version was published on 2016-05-05

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

This book has been self-published by the author Yılmaz Güleryüz.

Opinions expressed in this book are solely his own, thus it does not contain any formal relation with any company or corporation.

You are allowed to reuse any section you like. Attribution is appreciated, but not required. Your opinion matters, please share your feedback.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Gratitude

Preface

A Primer on Agile Mindset

Finding the Direction

Overview and Terminology

Caveats: Beware of the Downsides

Set of Techniques for the Foundation

Fibonacci Pairing: Learning through Collaboration

Common Language as a Contextual Medium

Slicing, Timeboxing, and Sharpness

Forming Teams as Organisms

The importance of ‘Naming’

Presence and Ownership

COMPASS for Continuous Delivery

The Foundational Aspects

The Five C’s in Action

Experiential Learnings

A Practical Storyline in Action

About Remote Teams

Last But Not Least

YOGURT for Agile & Lean Culture

Yılmaz Güleryüz

@guleryuz

About the Author

Think lightly of yourself, and deeply of the world.

Do nothing which is of no use!

~ Miyamoto Musashi

Yılmaz Güleryüz¹ is the author of two books so far, that’s the second Yogurt!

With 15+ years of hands-on experience in diverse range of businesses and activities; adapting, extending, and enriching Agile practices by nurturing Yogurt culture, constituting Lean techniques into workplaces.

Herding pet/cat projects for continuous learning by doing. While being an author of books, crafting and sharing to evangelise better workplace culture.

Trivia: ‘Güleryüz’ means ‘Smiling Face’ in Turkish language. This surname was given to his grandfather, at early ages (1930s) of Republic of Turkey, as he was always smiling. ↩

Gratitude

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues,

but the parent of all others.

~ Cicero

I’m constantly inspired by practitioners who shares their experiences without slipping into the theory of things. I deliberately seek for, and sometimes discover, works of experienced people from variety of areas (mostly from other disciplines, not from the IT world!).

My book contains several citations (implicitly or explicitly) particularly from Antifragile, and some also from Dan Ariely’s works about Irrationality. All adaptations are done with good intentions, and based on my own experiential learnings.

I would like to express my gratitude explicitly to three practitioners from our times, for they had a profound influence on my self-development in the recent years. Nassim Taleb for crafting such a monumental work (Antifragile!), and leading a mission of naturalistic simplicity. Dan Ariely for devoting his life into understanding our irrationality, and for openly sharing his learnings. And Kent Beck for patiently sharing his practical perspective, and for the inspiring conversations every other week.

You are allowed to reuse, recreate, share any section you like. Attribution is appreciated, but not required. Your opinion matters, please share your feedback.

Preface

No one writes anything worth writing,

unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Many practitioners become so involved in the tools and the processes, they tend to forget about the foundational aspects. There is much more to Agile and Lean practices than just using Scrum or Kanban boards correctly, or generating burn-down charts, or doing things by book, or or or. It’s better to focus on the practical aspects as part of a common culture and a way for people to develop themselves.

As the very first step, learn to understand your audience (teams, customers, users). Place yourself in their position. Be truly objective in judging a new method or idea. Try it. If it works, if it is acceptable, and the audience comprehends and enjoys it, then use it. If it simply confuses, teases or even distracts the audience then discard it.

Experiment; be bold; do it in an unconventional fashion. Some say think out of the box, but I say think as if there’s no box!.

Most of my arguments are based on my own adaptation of Musashi style:

Agile & Lean practices must be understood as though the practitioner himself had discovered them from his own mind. Learn about all of them, but never become fond of any.

The better approach is to choose (like cherry-picking) what’s good for you from each methodology, and make it yours by adapting it to your environment. Experiment, learn, adapt, try again, … until it feels natural and becomes part of your own style.

The definitions, principles and recommendations in this book are not meant to be absolute. Most of these have gradually developed through experience, and have become routine procedures of daily work. I have also invented some names — such as Fibonacci Pairing, Compass Framework — for easier definition and explanation of the techniques that I’ve discovered on the way.

My purpose is to make you aware of the many facets of Agile & Lean practices. With that attitude you may analyze any situation, and decide on the best procedures to adapt and apply accordingly. What I hope to do is help you think about workplace management with more practical and natural ways.

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My first book, Yogurt for Agile Development, has been floating inside the vast ocean of the virtual world. More than two years have passed since its first publication, though it still feels like yesterday! The feedback I got so far, and with many new experiences accumulated on, delightfully pulled me into writing regularly. These efforts have eventually led to the realisation of this new book, which I’m delighted to share with you.

To hurry things is a poisonous attitude of our century, thereby I’ve tried not to. Instead, I’ve worked to get at it slowly, carefully and thoroughly, always by maintaining a close connection and an intimate touch with the experiences.

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Disclaimer!

This book is not a Shakespearian play, Homeric poetry, nor a fiction book written by using English language masterfully…

I’m aware of the fact that I may have done some grammar mistakes here and there, and I have no excuse other than expressing that I’m constantly practising to develop also my writing skills.

Nevertheless, I kindly ask your understanding and direct your attention on the techniques and methodologies presented in this book instead of focusing on the grammar mistakes.

Post-editing has been done many times already, but mainly based on feedback of reviewers and readers. I acknowledge that this style of editing is not sufficient for delivering a professional book, but I intend to stick to my humble style of aim for quality by maintaining an amateur spirit.

This book is intended to help you in bettering your workplace. Hence, content and applicability of the methods are the main focal point.

Why authorship?

Because knowledge is more valuable when you share it. Because learn-teach-share is good for the soul, and it leads to growth altogether, but mainly because… Sharing is Caring!

If this book inspires you, how delightful would that make the humble author myself. Please read with patience, and remember to share your feedback.

All things yet to be told, let’s set sail right away, we shall get better on the way.

A Primer on Agile Mindset

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the old masters,

seek instead what these masters sought.

~ Matsu Basho

Learning by experimenting is the essential driving force in developing mastery. Practically, it’s impossible to learn new things without accepting the fact that you might also fail. Failing is allowed but as long as we learn from it, gain knowledge to improve, and not to repeat the same mistake again.

Whenever we work on implementing a new practice, or methodology, we should expect to fail more often than we try. Look out for the failure of not daring to try new ways by maintaining the status-quo. We tend to rationalise such attitude with things like; This is the way it’s done here., We tried it before, nothing changes, etc. It’s easy to speculate on the theory of things, but the practical action is what counts.

First; we design workplaces where failure is not allowed. Hence the individuals and teams are constantly afraid of trying new things, and deliberately hiding errors/failures when it happens. This is caused mainly by the