If people decomposed agile into little bits they probably wouldn't be doing agile anymore. The other day somebody posted a question about "how do I push back about management going to one week sprints?" My answer, which I didn't post then, was "if management really wants to go fast give up on sprints"
That is, Kanban + Continuous Integration >> Scrum by a lot. Seen from that viewpoint sprints are not something that speeds anything up (seductive name there!) but rather a bunch of phony deadlines and needless meanings (you really think people feel psychologically safe in a retrospective meeting that was scheduled just to have a meeting? is there really something worth talking about in an every two week one-on-one in your manager which isn't important enough to knock on their door and ask about right now?)
If I was evaluating a manager I'd probably get them to give me a list of practices that they say their team is following and then check to for conformance against that. I am less bothered with do they do code reviews or not but rather "did they tell me that they enforce five conventions in the code and looking at the code I find they rarely do... Lets sit in on a code review"
That is, Kanban + Continuous Integration >> Scrum by a lot. Seen from that viewpoint sprints are not something that speeds anything up (seductive name there!) but rather a bunch of phony deadlines and needless meanings (you really think people feel psychologically safe in a retrospective meeting that was scheduled just to have a meeting? is there really something worth talking about in an every two week one-on-one in your manager which isn't important enough to knock on their door and ask about right now?)
If I was evaluating a manager I'd probably get them to give me a list of practices that they say their team is following and then check to for conformance against that. I am less bothered with do they do code reviews or not but rather "did they tell me that they enforce five conventions in the code and looking at the code I find they rarely do... Lets sit in on a code review"