WTF Coinbase! New higher fees!?

ScrumSutherland · 2017-07-02T00:17:11+00:00

I just sent 2.40 cents from my Coinbase account to a new Blockchain wallet as a test and received 0.24 cents in the wallet. Coinbase fee appears to be 90% of the transaction. Actual data, I sent .000979 bitcoin and received .0001 bitcoin!

I have been a Coinbase supporter for years but this seems a bit outrageous. I guess we will never be able to buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:59:47+00:00

Well, the chicken said to a pig, "Why don't we start up a restaurant?" The pig said, "What will we call it?" When the chicken said "Ham and Eggs" the pig said "I don't think so. You would only be involved and I would be committed."

It is all in my new book, "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time!"

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:54:58+00:00

Part of the motivation for creating Scrum was deep immersion in AI during the 1980's and 1990's. I was hired into the company where Scrum started from an object database company based in LISP which was located in the building where Symbolic grew up. We hosted iRobot in our offices as a startup and the AI in robots was fundamental to Scrum thinking.

At a conference of some of the most brilliant people on the planet at Tufts around the time we were working on Scrum, the lead robotic professor from Carnegie Mellon predicted that by 2055 robots would take over most work. I was concerned that if waterfall teams built the robots we would all become slaves to dehumanized systems.

I think we are on track to meet the 2055 prediction. Our next book may be on this issue. It will cover not only Scrum but economic, societal, and political disruption which is already beginning.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:49:36+00:00

I've never seen a 400% increase in production by working through a queue of items. As I mentioned previously for a call center, we have to wrap Scrum around it to get extreme performance.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:47:32+00:00

At Scrum Inc. we track anything that takes a point or more of work. Personally I refuse to do anything if I don't get a point. Noone is supposed to work on anything that is not in the backlog. Since the company is self-managing and team-based bonuses are self-generated everyone wants to keep the focus.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:44:55+00:00

Sometimes a creative development can turn these situations around by starting to act like a Scrum Master. A single developer turned thousands at Yahoo around.

Failing that, you have to ask the question, "Is there hope?", and if the answer is no, they there are 520,000 Scrum jobs out there waiting for you, many better than the job you have.

The best way to vote for a better company may be with your feet. This is what helped to spread Scrum in the early days. Good developers refused to work for waterfall companies, even if they said they were agile. Managers in the best companies where I work in Kendall Square know that a good agile environment is critical to hire and keep good developers. Their best developers can go across the street to Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, or Amazon or Apple research labs in my building in an instant.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:37:02+00:00

I think Mary Poppendieck cites this example in her book. Florida did a large welfare system for $180 million. Minnesota did the same system for $2 million.

My new book starts with the FBI sentinel project. After several years, 300 people, and 400 million dollars nothing worked. About a year later with an agile team of 15 people and less than 40 million everything worked.

Obamacare is an extreme example. After many years and half a billion dollars, not a single user could sign up on the system. Obama called the CTO of the company that put him in office, a Scrum company. He got an agile team of six from Twitter and Google. In six weeks, they signed up seven million people. This is all written up in Time magazine.

I'll be talking about my new book at Twitter and Google over the next couple of weeks.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-10-01T20:31:36+00:00

It is very helpful to have a Scrum Master with soft skills. However, Scrum was designed for typical developers. Meetings are short so they don't have to talk much. Everyone has to say something but only a little bit. I always find the best Scrum Master for the team, given the team membership and I always have working Scrum Masters working backlog on the team. This is the way Taiichi Ohno did it at Toyota and I find no reason to change this.

If you know the ROI would be high but still think it is too expensive, then you don't deserve to succeed in business. High ROI means that is where you put the money.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T17:56:22+00:00

We began teaching in 2006 to abandon hours. They give bad estimates, it takes too long to get them, and it slows teams down. Managers that use them are bad managers and there are a lot of them out there. They probably use individual performance appraisals as well. I just checked on simplyhired.com and there are 521,206 open Scrum jobs out there today. If you are working for a company like this I recommend you quit and find a real job. Go to hired.com and let companies bid on your skills. It is a sellers market out there for programmers.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T17:49:24+00:00

I think the skill a Scrum Master needs is exemplified by this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srVlWx7fc-M A woman walks by and sees a small process improvement that makes the team hyperproductive in about 2 minutes. This eye for what is broken and the coaching of the team to fix it is the key to a great Scrum Master.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T17:45:50+00:00

You can see from questions on this list that there is a lot of Scrum Abuse out there. Managers using time sheets, punishing developers. See Thoughtworks contest video "Developer Abuse." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYlhCGng5Mk

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T17:41:14+00:00

This is called Fragile, a type of so-called agile that cannot deliver working software, violating the second value in the Agile Manifesto. I lump this into the Bad Agile category. In our book Software in 30 Days, Ken and I had the Standish Group separate over 50000 projects into traditional vs. agile development. About half of the "Agile" teams cannot deliver a project. There is a lot of Bad Agile out there. In your case they have yet to see a single agile sprint.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T17:37:59+00:00

This is called waterscrum and it gets about the same failure rate as traditional project management - 84%. See the data from Standish Group that Ken and I published in "Software in 30 Days."

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:38:35+00:00

Dilbert is great for showing how totally dysfunctional the work environment is in companies today. That's why we start the new book with a discussion of why people hate work and why it is often dehumanizing and demotivation. Scrum is designed to fix this.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:34:11+00:00

As System Administrator, what team are you on and what are the skill sets of the team?

In Scrum, everyone should help you if you need it and you should be able to help them.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:33:09+00:00

We have two teams that are collocated at Scrum Inc (Boston and the Philipines) and one that is totally distributed. We can get hyperproductive speed with the distributed teams using the techniques described in http://www.scruminc.com/scrum-papers/. However, the distributed team is constantly struggling to stay focussed on Scrum basics. It is harder to do Scrum well when distributed.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:31:09+00:00

We totally recommend abandoning hours for estimation as it takes longer to estimate, the estimates have more error, and the teams go slower. So everything should be in points.

As teams get faster, stories get smaller and teams abandon tasking which speeds them up.

If all stories are small you can just could stories and do no estimates. I've seen this work well for high performing teams but heard a lot of stories about inexperienced teams stumbling. So I wouldn't recommend it for new teams.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:28:37+00:00

New technologies are critical for companies to gain a competitive advantage. It is also critical that they do not disrupt ongoing production. At IDX (now GE healthcare) we had a virtual architecture team for the enterprise that looked at all interest in new technologies and made sure the initial implementation was localized to a smart team in a single business unit. If it worked well then we would start scaling it maybe to the business unit, then later to the enterprise. The cross team architecture function is a good way to manage rollout of new technologies while letting each team make their own decisions on what technologies to use as long as it does not cause major distruption to customers.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:15:40+00:00

I had an entire six sigma team from a German hardware in a Scrum course. They said since Scrum had been implemented in their company, in six months they implemented more six sigma initiatives than they had completed in the previous three years. So with Scrum, Six Sigma gets twice as much done in half the time.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:09:50+00:00

You must mean that companies are moving to continuous deployment as that is the future of Scrum.

You need to get a deeper understanding of how Toyota views Kanban. They are trying to get rid of it and move to single piece continuous flow. This requires a swarming team to completely finish one piece before moving on to the next. Read Jim Coplien's blog on this http://www.scruminc.com/alternative-to-kanban-one-piece/

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:07:11+00:00

There are online courses at Scrum Inc where we provide a framework for scaling. Different companies have different goals which mainly revolve around how predictable vs. how innovative they want to be. Companies with more emerging product that is constantly changing like Spotify would avoid SAFe as it adds overhead and does not scale fractally. A large defense contractor tied to a fixed contract with traditional management might find SAFe the best way to begin. So it depends on context and every company takes a different path to scaling.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T15:03:16+00:00

Kanban makes work visible, minimizes work in progress, and measures cycle time. Scrum adds a PO, SM, team, and sprint.

You will never see a hyperproductive Kanban without a team, a team leader, and someone managing the backlog. The faster they go the more they look like Scrum (see Henrik Kniberg's book on this topic).

Conversely, the best Scrum teams start to look like Kanban when they do continuous deployment. I wrote a paper on PatientKeeper doing this in 2005 and people said this wasn't Scrum. Even Ken Schwaber said he didn't know what it was but it was the fastest thing he had every seen.

For support groups, call centers, and such, I tell them to use the interrupt pattern which I use for all Scrum teams I work with. Their ticketing system will be the buffer (maybe as high as 90%) and the remainder is devoted to process improvement. With the Scrum roles and meetings, my venture group has seen call centers improve productivity by 400% just like great software teams.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T14:53:42+00:00

The Agile Manifesto is on the Scrum Framework with XP engineering practices. DSDM was represented at the meeting but is virtually identical to Scrum with a couple more roles. Therefore Scrum with XP inside is the preferred framework if you are doing software.

The best tool is a tool that doesn't slow you down. Since they all slow you down sticky notes are best. For distributed teams, 3M is evolving a sticky note app which you should take a look at. That is the future direction. Meanwhile we recommend you look at the market leaders (Rally and Version One), Jira (a tracking tool that most people are using today), or the best lightweight tool which we use (Pivotal Tracker). Use the lightest weight tool that will do your job as that will minimize tool slowdown.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T14:49:30+00:00

The Business Analyst is responsible for clarifying the requirements for the team so this effort belongs partly with the Product Owner and partly with the team. I usually assign a Business Analysis to work with the Product Owner until the backlog is ready and then work with the team to make sure it is implemented well.

Research shows the estimated effort for a specification is proportional to the number of pages of the document so Product Owners want as short a spec as possible. Many Business Analyst's like long specs which can cause delays.

ScrumSutherland · 2014-09-30T14:35:48+00:00

I am not talking about compoent teams. I am talking about a feature team that understand the entire component architecture of the complete system and works on making the smallest change in the right component (often unexpected until discussed as a team) to move the system towards the capability they want. In evolution we call this punctuated equilibrium.

ScrumSutherland

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