Jaakko Koivula

Saying yes, and...

No, but...

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I have been part of organizing Agile Finland's Helsinki Coaching Circles since last fall. The latest session was so good it inspired me even without me actually being present there myself.

The subject was Agile and impro and the part that caught my eye was a LinkedIn post by Ulla Järvinen where she discussed working with "Yes, . . .

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February 09, 2023

Sprint goals revisited

How does it feel to have none

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For some reason, I've had a hard time keeping up with my scrumlife this week. Somehow it's just been hard to get invested in sticking to the plans I've made in the morning and after the day I didn't really remember what I accomplished or if I did anything at all.

Still, when I look at my daily scrum template, I have planned every . . .

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January 26, 2023

Estimation

To estimate or not to estimate?

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Estimating things, can't live with it, can't live without it.

I waded into an interesting LinkedIn discussion (in Finnish) about story points and estimating things and that got me thinking about estimates again. I have so much sympathy for the #NoEstimates movement but it just seems way too radical to stop estimating things . . .

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January 09, 2023

Work that's hiding

Transparent life

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Scrum likes things transparent. You do something, observe the results and decide the next thing you are going to do based on the results. 

But what if you don't know what you did? Hidden work makes things less transparent. You thought you did something and base your next steps on that, but actually there was stuff that was . . .

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October 27, 2022

Scrum and easy projects

Complex vs. complicated

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Can you use Scrum even if you are buying something well defined with a fixed price and fixed scope?

The answer is pretty simple: if you can predict the cost and the scope, you are not doing anything complex. If you aren't doing something complex, you don't have a reason to use Scrum.

Even if you like the Scrum cadence or the . . .

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September 28, 2022

Getting Stale

and why you should get over it.

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When doing anything new, things start to get a bit stale at some point. You've done the thing multiple times now and it's not as shiny as it used to be but it's not yet a habit that's been completely etched into your soul either.

Scrum is like that too. You've got your first breakthroughs, velocity has gone up, the features make . . .

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September 22, 2022

Sustainability

Nosce te Ipsum

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I've been thinking about what sustainable pace means. This post will be more personal and less directly related to Scrum, but it's also an example of a type of questions that get asked and answered inside the Scrum process. Maybe that way it's representative of the type of problems that Scrum tends to surface and force you to face, . . .

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September 14, 2022

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