In this module, we're going to talk about the job of deciding, and this includes how do we prioritize and batch tasks? How long should our iterations be, and what should we include in them? What stories are high priority and should be included in a given iteration? And then on a day to day basis we do these daily stand ups where everybody comes and says yesterday I did this, today I'm going to shoot to do this. And these are the things that are impeding my progress. Well, how do we make that work and how do we overall achieve that pinnacle of practice of Agile. Where the team is self organizing, their helping each other get things done, they're doing the right things to help the team overall achieve a valuable outcome for the iteration. How we manage work in progresses? So, how do we make sure that we don't deluge a whole bunch of stuff for instance, to testing at the very last minute where they're struggling. And then, idle in the beginning part and instead have a more continuous flow of things moving across the implementation and all the different steps that we define for ourselves that get us to working software. How do we batch up our releases? We've talked about how at the end of an iteration, you have a potentially shippable feature. Meaning that we could ship this, it's working the way that we want, we would be ready to ship it if we wanted to. But that, you might for instance, do two week iterations. And then, releases every 60 days. So, you package up roughly, something like four iterations worth of content, into a given release. And that's, that's relatively normal. Or you may release a lot. It's, everything else being equal, it's better to release more. But, anyway, this job is about figuring out what you're going to put in the release and how often you're going to do it. Success here looks like there is a minimum of hedging and blaming. So, the high functioning team is decisive. And yet they understand that they will never make the perfect decision but they'll make smart decisions that overall allow them to get through good outcome. There are relatively few interruptions and surprises. So in the middle of an iteration, the team has the confidence that they're safe, they know what they're supposed to be focused on and now the job of deciding at least the bigger picture of what they're going to do in that iteration is done. They can focus on their job, how do they build good software, how do they test it. The team's productivity is balanced, so this kind of has to do with the work in progress job here and this other job of sharing and batching out tasks. So, we don't just have one superstar charging through doing a great job. We're able to do things in a way where the whole team performs better and gets better overtime. And we have a fast turn around from idea to execution. So when we have ideas we know how prioritize them, batch them up and get out there to the market, so we can see if this new idea about what's going to be valuable to customer is right. Because as we discussed at the very begging of the learning module, the most productive, most profitable product teams are out there absorbing the customer. They know that the product, every solution is temporary and they need to constantly learn how to make things better for the user. And then we're maximizing RVA time and if you remember that stands for real value added time. So deciding in the overhead of figuring out what you're going to work on and creating system inputs or documentation to figure that out that's all BVA time. Business Value Added time, things you've gotta do to manage that business but they don't directly pay off to things that are going to benefit the customer. We'd acknowledge that this BVA time is going to exist but we try to minimize it. And we try to eliminate non-value added time. So, this is for instance time where the testers have absolutely nothing to test and their idle and then all of a sudden they're super busy. And there's a whole bunch of kerfuffle and back and forth where there's misunderstandings and waste generated. That's just one example but NVA time is time wasted due to faulty processes, mistakes, things like that. Eliminating NVA time to zero isn't realistic, but you want to drive. You want to make it your goal to eliminate it in a high functioning team. So those are the jobs of deciding, at least as we're defining them here for the course, and those are the things that you're going to learn how to do better using Agile over the rest of the videos here.
