Category

Yesterday’s Weather is an Extreme Programming planning technique used to estimate the capacity of a Team based on their past performance. Yesterday’s Weather is a guide to help Teams neither under commit nor overcommit to a set of Product Backlog items during Sprint...

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...

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...

“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...

Quick quiz for all you Scrum experts out there.  Which of these common scenarios for Scrum Team are blockers and which would be classified as impediments? The build is broken. The process to interview and onboard a new Team member takes at least six weeks. Team members do not...

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...

Today at Agile Open Northwest, I had the opportunity to learn more about FAST Agile, a new, lightweight approach to scaling Agile teams from Ron Quartel (@agileAgitator).  You might remember Ron from my articles on twenty-eight way to stop wasting time at work (part 1 and part 2)...

Back in 2005, I had just finished working on my last XP team and about ready to begin work for a large defense contractor in San Diego (HUGE mistake!!).  I had some free time between jobs and noticed that Ken Schwaber would be in San Diego to teach one of the very early Certified...

One of the greatest challenges to trust, collaboration and self-organization in the workplace is visibility.  This is because most of software development is intellectual work without physical representation.  We take complex ideas on what a software product should do and express...