Today we discussed:
- Enterprise Kanban – this was a conversation on how you flatten an organization structure as it grows (or is it even possible). It reminded me of Mike Cottmeyer’s post from a few years ago on “What do you value?”
- BA-QA big picture – We discussed the interaction between business analyst (BA) and quality assurance (QA) and how you must keep the product vision (“the big picture”) within both roles to deliver the product the customer wanted. We even discussed how some of the folks around the table have seen this “big picture BA/QA role” as one single role. I particularly liked the label of “Functional Product Specialist”. Some might just call them a Product Owner.
- How to involve Formal QA – How do you get a formal QA group involved when there are regulatory issues? We discussed different strategies such as getting some QA team members on the agile team while setting up others to audit the process (chinese firewall) so there is no conflict of interest. We almost touched on the topic of “is it a regulation or a policy?”.
- Agile2013 update – 2 of us had attended (and spoke) at Agile2013. So we spent 7 minutes giving an update on the conference. So much more can be said there. I decided to write a blog post of my own on Agile2013