Category

In Scrum, the owner of the estimates is very clear.  Only the people who do the work, i.e., the Team, have the right to offer estimates for the Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog items.  However, like many things in Scrum, the framework leaves it up to each Team to decide on what...

Alistair Cockburn has been sharing this distillation of Scrum in a recent talk called “Returning to the Heart of Agile”.  I really like the simplicity of this description since it recalls that Scrum is a simple framework. Deliver (or demo) each Sprint, with a...

At Agile Portugal, I heard Emily Bache (@emilybache) give an inspiring keynote address on the importance of coding dojos to advance the art of programmers and testers.  Emily, much like myself, is a strong proponent of test-driven development (TDD), but recognizes that while TDD...

No…as long as the Team meets ALL of the following three preconditions listed below, a full-time ScrumMaster is most likely unnecessary. The Team is learning from their mistakes and refining their performance as they go. The Team is learning and adapting to the...

I live in the City of San Diego and we have an estimated 1.4 million people living within the city limits.  Could you ever imagine someone asking the Mayor, or the City Council, “Do we really need so many fulltime fire fighters?”  Yet, a variation of this topic comes...

“Scrum has been a big disappointment; a failed experiment that hasn’t delivered anywhere near the positive impact that management was hoping for.” Not the most uplifting quote, but Geoff Watts (@geoffcwatts) starts his book, Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great...

“The only ‘thing’ capable of dealing with complexity is human beings” This is the central thesis of Niels Pflaeging’s book, Organize For Complexity: How to Get Life Back into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization, and speaks to the...

Ever wonder why some Agile practitioners regularly butt heads with more traditionally minded managers? Have you ever spent significant one-on-one time with a Product Owner (or a Team member or a Stakeholder) to answer all their questions about why and how Scrum works and they...

Did you know that in addition to the Agile Manifesto that the authors listed their twelve principles of Agile software?  Based upon my very unscientific survey of recent CSM students, only about 20% to 30% of people who were simply aware the Agile Manifesto existed were also...

Last weekend I was reviewing the traffic on the website and here are the top ten articles that people were clicking on in 2015.  This list is really interesting, so take a moment to review the best of 2015 and enjoy!  Happy New Year! What is Teamicide? – last year I...