An impediment is anything that is slowing down or blocking a team from delivering quality Increments of value.  Impediments could be related to technology, process, or people. Removing impediments helps improve workflow and can result in higher quality and easier delivery of enhancements in the long-term.

The Team is not empowered

When a team cannot make decisions about how they do their work, their ability to improve is limited.  Their ability to adapt to change is limited. This means they must manage and improve upon their processes, tools, and interactions to be more effective in delivery. A Scrum Master can be the one to show courage first in “taking power” if the team does not yet feel their own empowerment.  A Scrum Master should be prepared to protect the team when they do exercise empowerment.

Constraints and Assumptions

A team who worked with regulators to influence policies or process becomes constraints. Assumptions are quickly made during refinements or planning.

Understand the impediments

• Many impediments are not stopping us from working but rather slowing us down and preventing us from delivering the most value. 
• Make it visible
• Team flexibility to address the impediments with open mindset
• People happiness and collaboration, very important fact of removing the impediments

Action to be avoided

• Planning without complete understanding
• Creating deadline and fixing sprint goal
• No visibility and an input during Sprint planning
• Product Owner not on board

Management / leadership support

The Scrum Master and Agile Manager should be working closely together on the impediments that will require organizational involvement and support.

Problem Statement → Root cause →  Analysis → Solutions

Don’t be afraid to talk about some impediments (Daily Standup / Sprint Review)

An epic is one big piece of product functionality. Usually, it is too big to be completed in one sprint and should be split up into smaller bodies of work. For instance, an epic may be “Grouping would enable users to merge people or organizations adding flexibility to their analysis“

Epic should contain (Hypothesis statement)

Step 2: During IP Sprint

Step 2: Refine the epic with Team / Leads  (If its done via program incremental (PI) session, that will be ideal to have all members – Future Goal). 

Step 2.1: Break down the epic into small (business) epics if its large during epic refinement

Step 2.2: Identify the enabler epics during epic refinement

Step 2.3: Create story card during epic refinement

Step 2.4: Identify all the stacks and its epic or story card

Step 2.5: Identify the dependency within each stack

Step 2.6: Identify the dependency from external teams

Step 2.6.1: Create stories for external teams

Step 2.7: Agree upon which epics priority, since by end of refinement there could have been n number of small business and enabler epics.

Step 3: High level design

With step 2:  consider 1 to 3 prioritized epics for design discussion

Tips: Make sure all stack members including external team tech member are available to start the designing session

         Try to plan for one session (1-3 hrs / 1 days) locked together to brainstorm with different stack to identify the challenges and risk

Step 3.1: Update or Create story card (1 or 2 sentence with high-level acceptance criteria’s)

Step 3.2: Prioritize the story card, lineup with dependency 

Tips: Don’t plan for stack and resource availability at this point, (eg) then Champ will be complete, even though there is high dependency on new API

Step 3.3: Provide High-level story points

Step 3:4: Group the story cards for Sprints (n, n+1, n+2..)

Step 3.5: Create all stories for n+1 and n+2 Sprints

Step 4: Sprint Refinement

Refine only well written stories (Business and Enabler) which are already group during Epic refinements of Design meetings

Tips: Make sure all Engineers (Dev & QA) including external team are actively participating during the sprint refinements.

         Avoid additional design session, its better to clarify all details within sprint refinement. If additional design needed by engineers – no hard rule but make sure to account the capacity during sprint planning day

Step 5: Sprint Planning

Completely refined stories are consider for planning day

Step 5.1: Engineer should have confident to do planning poker, for story pointing.

An Epic is a container for a significant solution (business ask) development initiative that captures the more substantial investments that occur within a portfolio. Due to their considerable scope and impact, epics require the definition of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Epics are typically cross-cutting, typically spanning multiple value streams and Program Increments (PIs).

There are two types of epics, each of which may occur at different levels of the Framework. Business epics directly deliver business value, while enabler epics are used to advance the Architectural Runway to support upcoming business or technical needs.

An MVP is an early and minimal version of a new product or business solution that is used to prove or disprove the epic hypothesis. As opposed to story boards, prototypes, mockups, wire frames and other exploratory techniques, the MVP is an actual product that can be used by real customers to generate validated learning.

Forecasting an epic’s duration

1. An epic’s estimated size in story points , which can be estimated using the T-shirt estimation technique
2. The historical velocity of the Squad
3. The percent (%) capacity allocation that can be dedicated to working on the epic as negotiated between Product and Management

• A system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity. Methodology is a systematic way of doing something. Method and ology and as we know any word ends with “ology” means a subject of study or; a branch of knowledge

Is Agile a process, methodology or Software lifecycle?

Agile is a product development approach (it is not a methodology) and there is no single “Agile”. It is a collection of values and principles about software development. Most importantly, it is a huge mistake to call it or think of it as a project management framework.

Agile is a process by which a team can manage a project by breaking it up into several stages and involving constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement and iteration at every stage.

The overall goal of each Agile method is to adapt to change and deliver working software as quickly as possible. As an example, the full Agile software development lifecycle includes the concept, inception, construction, release, production, and retirement phases.

The four core values of Agile software development as stated by the Agile Manifesto are:

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
• working software over comprehensive documentation;
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and.
• responding to change over following a plan.

The following 12 Principles are based on the Agile Manifesto

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

What is Framework?

• A basic structure underlying a system or concept
• Framework provides us with a guideline or frame that we can work under.

What is Process?

• Process is a step-by-step structure, with milestones and stages
• A series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.

Agile teams may feel more susceptible to burnout because they have to produce high-quality deliverables on a consistent basis.

Celebrate small successes often

It’s an early morning as you step into the office, & in 15 minutes, a Standup meeting will occur. Your teammates discuss unsolvable bugs, after which they assign them to you. An additional meeting to discuss tech details happens. Everyone agrees upon a solution by lunch time. You look back to your scrum board and continue working on yesterday’s task(s). A refinement session happens in the afternoon to discuss additional details for n+1 sprint stories, as they need to be completed. Teammates ask you to review their code(s) that will be pushed into today’s QA while a QA member raises a query on your ticket. Your manager asks for a report.

You are stressed out, frustrated, & exhausted. 

Yes, Agile can be stressful really anytime you embrace change and it happens all the time. Within the scrum board,

• Changes happen due to incorrect estimate(s).
• Rise and dependencies are not identified during refinement sessions.
• Engineers sometimes don’t have complete knowledge about the story, so they start assuming what the task is, and then start working while fixing changes as they go.
• The QA holds the discussion until the development is complete, because the design wasn’t clear.
• All these factors and more are prone to making you feel stressed.

Retrospective :Understand that retrospective meetings aren’t the only time to discuss ways to improve your team.Speak out loud when you have issues & even when you are just stressed out and frustrated. Deal with it right away. Even if you don’t know how you’ll overcome the stress, talk about your problems openly. After all, as Confucius said, “The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”

Points to keep in mind:

• Keeping a running list of which members of the team are facing stress can help identify the source(s) of the pressure.
• Plan the velocity of the work you will assign to them to be within the team’s capacity, or else you yourself might be the source of their stress. Remember: The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying pebbles.
• Make sure you have a clean plan at the beginning of the sprint.
• Do incremental deliveries; don’t bundle everything all together.

Be a self-organizing team : A self-organizing team is one that does not depend on or wait for a manager to assign work. Instead, these teams find their own work and manage the associated responsibilities and timelines themselves.

Agile refers to a set of “methods and practices based on the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto,” which includes things like collaboration, self-organization, and cross functionality of teams.

Scrum is a framework that is used to implement Agile development.